John Caddy emailed me the link to the new Kingdom Fungi pages on his website Morning Earth which includes four of my frames. A couple are on the first page. Keep on scrolling down till you get to the ‘Anemone Stinkhorn’ frames.
Four months ago I asked Dallas Wallace, a local IT expert, if he could scrape the website gallery to create an XML file for the Encyclopaedia of Life to complete the process of The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain becoming a Content Partner. After a succession of missed self-imposed deadlines by Dallas, I today sent the file to Katja Schulz at the EOL.
Tonight we filmed in Witches Falls National Park for the first time. It takes longer to get to the rainforest proper, but we felt we should at last try our luck there. The first creature I filmed was a Giant Barred Frog, regarded as endangered. Not surprisingly, I had never seen the frog before. Later we saw a Rough-scaled Snake, one of a handful of the Mountain’s dangerous snakes. It obligingly stayed still in the vegetation close to the path. Unfortunately Jaap’s spotlight was playing up so I only had a limited opportunity to film it.
For the first time since I started using my HDV camera, I was able to film an intriguing event in the form of a host of yellow butterflies attracted to the yellow flowers of a native tree on which they apparently breed. I had never seen so many of the butterflies. In the last few years I only ever saw four or so, but now there were a score or more.
After dark we went to the Knoll National Park, with a storm rolling towards the Mountain from the west. We reckoned we had an hour before the storm arrived and so it proved. Numbers of Great Barred Frogs rested on the path as if in anticipation of the rain. We were lucky to encounter a Brown Tree Snake taking its time to negotiate the path. On our way back to the entrance I was able to film a Giant Panda Snail eating a fungus.
Late in the afternoon I stopped to talk with a couple of ladies who have guided me to some excellent subjects for filming, when I noticed a pair of White-headed Pigeons perched on a power line. These birds are not that common. It was years since I had filmed one, high up in a tree, and partly obscured. A man who lived in the street explained that the birds were attracted to the birdfeeder of a nearby house. I decided to go and get my camera only to find that the birds had gone. However, within moments of my arrival one of them returned to the power line in front of the house. I started to set up, but the bird flew out of sight onto the house’s verandah, only to reappear on the top rail of the balustrade, allowing me an excellent shot. This is a large bird as are a number of Australia’s other pigeons.
Received the Greenscreen Festival 2010 call for entries. The festival is in Eckernfoerde, Germany, in September and entries must be in by April 16. I entered last year’s festival with my DVD The Beauty of Overlooked Things.
In a further attempt to make my work more accessible, on the basis of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, I today sent an email to 40 recipients asking them to be a fan of my new Facebook page: ‘One small place on earth . . .’, which has just been set up with the help of the daughter of a good friend of mine. Apart from its interactivity, the good thing about the page is the fact that the nine albums are grouped according to subject, unlike the website gallery which reflects the generally random way in which the archive is compiled.
Simon Smith emailed confirming the arrival at the NFSA of the corrected Supplement 3 MOV file together with the three DVD set of Supplements 1 – 3.
I posted the replacement MOV file to Simon Smith together with the DVDs of Supplements 1-3, so we can claim that they have now been officially published, complete with slick and their own species list. The supplements are each on a single DVD in the one case and the set costs $150.