My February 8 post was about walking past a cycad growing next to the footpath for years and years after I first filmed it and not noticing the white beech tree that had all but smothered it. Jaap alerted Land Care who liaised with Council to do the work. On today’s walk I was overjoyed to see the cycad unencumbered once again. The tree stumps remain as a reminder of the intruder. Removing them may endanger the cycad.
Our 132nd night filming walk was at The Knoll. Fortunately it has been easier to muster a crew in 2016, thanks to Robyn and Jaap and the reliability of two recent recruits, Michael and Lumart. Although we are approaching the end of the season, the weather was mild, resulting in a rich haul of subjects, some not previously encountered. I filmed a native cockroach whose appearance reminded me of an over-sized wood louse. Next was a spider tending her egg sac. Thereafter a moth I don’t think I have previously filmed or photographed and the partly emerged chrysalis of a Swift Moth protruding from the compacted earth of the path, near its edge, a subject I had never even previously seen. Apparently disturbed by being filmed and photographed, the chrysalis withdrew into the ground with only its tip protruding and an antennae twitching.This season we have seen a more than doubling of our roosting bird record to tonight’s eight. As long as the weather stays mild, we shall endeavour to keep filming at night.
Following an earlier email to Dave Allen, the IT guru at the State Library, about Steve and I supplying data files for an additional 20 tapes of unedited footage as per the Deed of Gift, my follow-up email elcited an immediate response. Dave still has the hard drive onto which Steve copies the files and he has emailed us about dropping the hard drive off so that Steve can get to work on them.
I renewed my domain names for two years today. I started to renew online until I saw the price which was more than double the cost two years ago. So I phoned Melbourne IT and renewed at the old price which is probably extortionate.
The official receipt from the NFSA for the 215 species videos arrived today. A week ago I received a scary email from the curator who thought we had only sent 146 movies until she double-checked the USBs and confirmed that there were 73 movies on one USB and 142 movies on the other.
This post is an anomaly because it is about a sequence of photographs, rather than about video footage. The subject was one of the most amazing I have encountered during the nearly 18 years I have devoted to my artwork. On my morning walk an intriguing structure on a picket fence caught my eye. It was beautifully formed of twigs, tapered from an irregular base and approximately 10 millimetres high. I asked a couple of women passers by what they thought it might be. One of them removed it from the picket to reveal a tiny caterpillar ensconced in a silk-lined bag, which I immediately recognised as a case moth larva. She placed it on a nearby fence post. I consequently took photos of the structure tilted back by my thumb with the caterpillar partly emerged from its hiding place. When I got home I googled case moth images and found one which was appropriately titled Log Cabin Case Moth. It resembled the one I had photographed without matching its structure. I returned to the fence post in the afternoon and took many more photos of the ‘log cabin’. Two of the photos are on the last page of… Read Complete Text
Steve received a quote from the camera repair man he contacted who had indicated that we would need a new lens assembly which would cost a little less than $1400, an amount well on the way towards the cost of a new camera. I will soldier on with the Sony and use my remaining four tapes. The filmic blemishes are more evident than I would like, but the new frames and species videos are more or less up to the job.
Today I posted 2 USB sticks containing 215 HD Species Videos plus an excel folder with taxonomic and descriptive information plus the year each video was uploaded to Vimeo, to the National Film and Sound Archive in Sydney. The videos had to be retitled to include species and family names. a process we began in May 2015.
Today I handed over the latest instalment of the image library to Michelle Ryan of the Queensland Museum. She is drafting a new agreement based on the one I entered into with the State Library. There are 367 new video frames and 131 new photos. For the statiscally-minded, this is my 400th post.
Today Steve and I uploaded six new videos, after we had to abandon work because of the major systems failure which came to light on March 1. The videos are based on recent tapes, whereas the inaccessible data includes older tapes and whatever comes to light as we start from scratch, retitling the SD videos for the NFSA.