Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 

 

A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 

The ‘Film Diary’ entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I am filming. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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Other / 01.07.2019

Jeff Wray emailed me confirming the safe arrival of the USBs  with the latest batch of 125 species videos for the NFSA, bringing the total in their collection to 511 videos.

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Other / 24.06.2019

Today, I sent Jeff Wray – senior curatorial officer, film, at the National Film & Sound Archive in Canberra – 3 USBs by registered post, filled with my third selection of HD species videos. It is two years since the previous offering.  The latest batch contains 125 videos to add to the NFSA’s  collection of my footage, which includes all 123 SD species videos. I need to send corrected footage of Supplement 4 of the Archive and the remaining 23 HD species videos on file, once Jeff returns the USBs.

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Film Diary, Other / 21.06.2019

On my morning walk on the 17th, I photographed an unfamiliar spider enjoying the sun on a timber fence in Driscoll Lane. It turned out to be the smallest species of huntsman spider I have seen. Today, I photographed an obliging fly on a metal rail next to the fence. It was confirmed by an expert as a genus new to my album. Flies seem to like the rail, judging by the number I have photographed there.

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Film Diary, Other / 19.06.2019

I wanted to film a giant vine in The Knoll National Park, which was hitching a ride to the canopy on an immense strangler fig tree, located near the bridge over Sandy Creek. I had measured the vine’s girth just above its base at 113 cm. Alas, both my batteries were flat, so I took my stills camera which made the going far easier, though I picked up a tiny grass tick, which lodged in my waste. I charged the batteries today and still plan to film the vine.

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Film Diary, Other / 02.06.2019

I photographed two new moth species on the second day of Winter, at the garage. I had to go back and fetch my camera because I don’t expect to see moths at this time of year, let alone ones I have never previously encountered.

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Film Diary / 15.05.2019

The entry refers to a moth, Maxates centrophylla, I photographed this morning. I thought that It is the first full-on new green moth I have encountered in years, but I had forgotten about one I photographed at the same location at the end of October 2018, Clytophylla artia. It was a richer green, shaped more like a plant hopper than a moth and was very small. Today’s moth is pale green, with spread wings. Its shape and markings looked subtly different, which prompted me to photograph it. Going through my Moths album, I counted 28 green or predominantly green moths. I haven’t filmed anything since the end of February, being otherwise engaged.