The first night filming jaunt since May. We chose the Knoll National Park and our first encounter was the rare sighting of an Echidna which hid before I could set up to film it. We filmed another semi-snail. The first one we saw was in MacDonald National Park (entry for 6 January 2009) which can be seen on Night Life 2 on my YouTube and Vimeo channels. They are remarkable in that they have a hump which is covered by a soft membrane instead of having a hard shell. Unfortunately Jaap’s battery was playing up, which curtailed our filming.

The Scrub Turkey mound has become much bigger thanks to yesterday’s rain. The turkey was very active on and around his mound. Previous dry weather made it hard for him to achieve the correct mound temperature for eggs to be incubated, so he went walkabout and the only scratching he did was for food. Scrub Turkeys seem to alternate between being indefatigable and indolent.

The start of a new season of filming moths on the garage I belatedly discovered as a good location for this purpose (see my entry for March 26 2009).

Have embarked on filming a Scrub Turkey, mound gathering and mound building in the Wild Garden. The work is undertaken by the male. He uses his very powerful feet to scratch leaf litter from the ground within a radius of 25 metres from the mound site, by repeatedly retracing his steps and ultimately leaving bare ground behind him. Nothing appears to stop him. He will scrape his material over rocks and the roots of large trees, ending up with a mound which may contain up to four tons of material – earth, leaves and sticks.

On a day I was checking out various parts of the Mountain for recording good birdsong (which we can always do with, for our Supplements and YouTube clips), I happened upon three alpacas grazing the lush grass of a paddock near the golf course. I regard them in the same light as the Asian Water Buffaloes, which were the first creatures I filmed with my new camera in April 2007 – as welcome exotics.

For the past fortnight I have been filming Wompoo Pidgeons in a Moreton Bay fig tree adjacent to the house on whose lawn and drive I have filmed the pademelons. The tree merges into the rainforest of Palm Grove National Park. Wompoo Pigeons are typical of the breed in Australia, visually striking and of an imposing size, particularly this species which has a pale grey head and neck, green wings with a yellow band, a purple breast and yellow abdomen.  The tree is as much a favourite place of the pigeons as the lawn is of the small marsupials; there must be twenty or so birds in its canopy. They are elusive to film and always stay a long way from the camera.

I spoke to Lenore Thiele the other day to find out if she had made any progress identifying a most unusual fungus I filmed in the rainforest and she mentioned that she had seen pademelons (the smallest kangaroo-like marsupials) grazing on the lawn of a house next to Palm Grove National Park. Sure enough, when I had a look yesterday some pademelons were there. Today I had my camera with me and filmed pademelons on the lawn and in the bush land adjoining the house. The people renting the house told me that they had counted as many as 17 pademelons on the property at one time. Although you can frequently hear pademelons in the park, you have to be very lucky to film any (see Film Diary 11 February), so I’ll make a point of returning to the house.

(PS 5 July)

I have now accumulated about 90 minutes of pademelon footage, including some of a young joey poking its head out of its mother’s pouch.

I set up my camera to film the usual birdbath in the Wild Garden this afternoon. Activity was intermittent, but during the last flurry, a Rose Robin appeared frame left and after splashing about for maybe 20 seconds or so, (I haven’t seen the footage yet) flew off frame right. This was another new species for the archive.

After meagre spoils night filming in Joalah National Park, usually the most reliable source of subjects, Jaap and I agreed to resume filming in early October. Other than the ever-abundant birds, little is stirring among the Mountain’s fauna in late Autumn and Winter. Indeed our previous foray a fortnight ago in MacDonald National Park was unique in that for the first time in over 18 months I found nothing worth filming. However, I was still able to film a moth on the garage in Central Avenue today.

For over a year I had been after Lenore Thiele, a retired ecologist, to let me film her digging up a fungus, to reveal more about its constituent parts. Naturally she was reluctant to dig in the National Parks, but today she told me about a suitable specimen near her house. When I called round ready to film, she showed me some fungi in her garden and I told her that they would make good subjects, so she dug and I filmed. It was just as well that we took the opportunity, because the fungus she had in mind, a far bigger specimen, had been damaged and it was located under a hedge, which would have made filming far more difficult if not impossible.