Today I received two emails requesting a species identification from mountain residents.More often than not, I refer the enquirer to the Queensland Museum. Today I identified both the creatures, a moth and a spider. Also, this evening, I was asked permission for an early piece of mine about an orange-eyed treefrog in the Tamborine Mountain News to be used in a summary about an excellent recent series of seminars on Resilience.
Jack Hasenpusch emailed me a pdf of a chapter on camouflage and natural history, he and Paul Brock wrote for the book Camouflage Cultures, Beyond the Art of Disappearance. This was in response to a number of questions I asked him about spiny leaf insects, also known as giant prickly stick insects, Extatosoma tiaratum. The females can take a leaf-mimicking or lichen-mimicking shape. I had heard that the lichen-mimicking insects were instars which lost their lichen pattern and reverted to an overall light colour as adults. The pdf confirmed that the lichen pattern can be retained by adult females on rare occasions. The shape of the leaf-mimicking form is so different from the lichen-mimicking form that it is hard to believe they are the same species. I have filmed brown and green leaf-mimicking adult females on the mountain as well as an adult male and late and early lichen-mimicking instars.
On my morning walk I happened to glance towards the garden with the cotton shrubs and noticed the bolls dotting the vegetation with their white fluff. I crossed the road to take a closer look and was regaled with a profusion of harlequin bugs clustering on leaves, on unopened bolls, crawling on stems, which totally eclipsed anything I saw and filmed last year. The bugs were early to late instars, with countless males replacing the lone specimens on the shrubs I saw previously. There may have been a greater number of adult females than before, but because of the profusion of instars it was difficult to tell.
Today I renewed the domain name for this website for another two years until May 17 2020. The cost increased by over 200% which led me not to renew a matching domain name which I thought might have some commercial value. A Chinese company once contacted me wanting to use it, but without making an offer, so I didn’t reply.
This year’s stay with Simon & Nicole, brief as it was, had everything – inter alia, being licked and nuzzled by their cattle dog Pepper; a convivial gathering for Simon’s birthday dinner at the Wellshot hotel in Ilfracombe (a standout being the brilliant birthday cake featuring Shaun the sheep, a present from a professional baker friend of theirs); seeing the Qantas Founders Museum’s Super Constellation being restored, thanks to Nicole (the four impressive engines, lined up on pallets, looked brand new in their shiny grey cowlings, but are not airworthy); attending Pepper’s dog training class, which was a hoot and going on walks with her and swarming flies; binging on minced beef (a keema curry and spaghetti bolognese cooked by Simon) and watching the new 65” telly which was just brilliant. The weather was cloudy, with warm day and night temperatures. I couldn’t have envisaged a more enjoyable time.
The highlight was a grand day out organised by Nicole, touring Noonbah, a working cattle station 160 km south west of Longreach, the final 60 km on well-graded dirt roads. Even before we arrived, I was thrilled to see two wedge-tailed eagles at a road kill. The station is… Read Complete Text
This evening we filmed in a new location, 696 Main Western Road. In addition to Mark, Lumart and Jaap, the party included Karen, a skilled photographer and the owners of the property, Cobie and Kate. They have planted extensive areas of native vegetation to compliment some of the splendid, mature trees which adorn the 3 ½ acre grounds. Mark found several moths for me to film, a juvenile red triangle slug (among several fully grown specimens) and the pièce de résistance, a Robust Velvet Gecko. This is a beautiful creature with a broad, dark grey stripe from its eyes to the tip of its tail, covered in whitish, lichen crypsis (mimicking) patches. It was attached to the outside of a window at a good angle for filming. The gecko is nearly as big as its leaf-tailed namesake. It is aptly named with its plump body, limbs and tail.
Peter Hendry and his wife left on a 3 ½ month overseas trip 6 weeks ago. This means that I have to upload new moth images to my album with a record of their file number, so that in due course I can attach them to emails to send to Peter. This is by way of a back story for today’s moths at the garage. Moths enjoy vegetation, so the removal of a large tree and various shrubs from one side of the drive a year or more ago has affected their numbers at the garage. Moths enjoy rain even more, which they did last night, resulting in a greater number than I have seen for months. I photographed three of them; one was a species new to me, but I won’t find out what it is until July, alas.
Working my way through the blog archive, has resulted in me redirecting 40 posts, dating from 2005 to 2017, to the ‘Website’ category.
This is the first post written since the creation of a ‘Website’ category for my blog. It is one of the changes to the site since its restoration at the end of February after it was closed down in October 2017. I now look forward to checking some of the early posts for inclusion in the new category.
I have completed writing up the 949 video frames and photographs for 2017 which will be added to my image library in the collection of the Queensland Museum. The next thing is to put the images and the descriptive lists onto a USB for delivery to the Museum.