On my walk this morning I passed a tree stump which had come to life with a great variety of fungi, spurred on by a burst of sunshine after a period of rainy weather. When I returned a few hours later, some of the fungi had shrunk, but the others remained as I first saw them, except that now I found additional fungi tucked away between roots or low down close to the grass. I have kept nineteen of the twenty eight shots I took, featuring perhaps up to eight different species of fungi, though were an expert to scrutinize them, the number is likely to be fewer. PS I emailed Nigel Fechner six images on 7.4.25. He identified the species of two fungi, one of which confirmed my identification from specimens in my album, and the genus of three more. I only sent him images of fungi which were not degraded.
Today I successfully renewed my domain name for two years from May 1 2025, having been reassured that it could be renewed, when I phoned Melbourne IT on receipt of a renewal reminder at the beginning of March. PS On April 3, I was shocked to get an email about updating my ABN (Australian Business Number) with a graphic of a sand timer glass next to the words: ‘Your Domain will Expire This Week’. I could not renew my previous domain name because I no longer had a valid ABN, and in any case, my site is no longer used for business purposes. Fortunately, a very helpful lady replied promptly to the email I sent to the support team about receiving such a dire warning. She apologised for the email which was auto-generated because I was mistakenly flagged as being ineligible to own the name. She assured me that Melbourne IT had updated the eligibility criteria on the name and that this will not happen again.
Piccabeen Bookshop emailed an order for five copies of One small place on earth … which was published in 2019. It is the first order since November 2023.
The cyclone hovered out at sea and made a slow progress to the coast, which it crossed as a category one system just north of Brisbane. The delay allowed people more time to prepare. I bought two lights and a box of six candles at the hardware store. One of the lights has a magnet. I also bought some tins of food at the supermarket behind my unit block. The wind and rain picked up on the 5th, but neither had the intensity of any of the previous tropical lows or ex-cyclones. I had fish and a steak in the fridge. As long as I had power, I opted to have lunch rather than dinner and cooked the fish on the sixth. The wind and rain were more constant, but nowhere near cyclonic. On the seventh I had steak for lunch and did a complete washing up, relieved that we still had power. Just as well that I did, because at 3.15 pm the outage began.
The cyclone was now close to crossing the coast and the weather deteriorated accordingly. On the 8th the rain was constant and lashed by increasingly ferocious wind. I made good use of… Read Complete Text
Looking out of my spare bedroom window, I was drawn to a sinuous shape on next door’s roof. I realised it was a snake sunning itself and grabbed my camera. The snake lifted its head and cast around to better acquaint itself with its location. I steadied my arm on the window ledge and held my hand to the glass as I zoomed in on the snake, from a distance of some eight metres. The shots revealed a green tree snake. It was quite a large specimen, perhaps 1m 80cm long. After a while it withdrew under the roof where it may have taken refuge to get out of the way of the wind and rain of the cyclone.
On the 17th, I photographed a Yuuca which I had previously seen on my walk. I took up to ten shots, but when I tried to upload them to my laptop, a ‘no data’ message repeatedly appeared on my camera monitor. Somehow, I was able to upload two of the shots, but either the data card or the camera needed replacing. Yesterday I bought a new card and this morning, on my walk, I photographed the plant. In the intervening days it had lost most of its flowers. Crucially all the photos were uploaded to my laptop and I could view them as I took them, which was impossible with the fault. You can imagine how relieved I was not to have to buy a new camera. I kept four of the nine shots I took today. This is the first plant I have added to the ‘Other Flora’ album in nearly two years. I sent the trailer of the archive to a prominent botanist who criticized my project because the flora content was not confined to native species. However, my remit on the mountain’s biodiversity is to include everything that freely grows or moves.
Robyn Law reminded me of a pair of brown gerygone nests she had seen, hanging from a shrub next to a footbridge over a tributary of Plunkett Creek. I drove there this morning to photograph them. The branch was below the walk way, which restricted the angle to an overhead shot. I could not get a photo showing both nests, but had to settle for a picture of each separately. I also had to wait for the breeze which caused the nests to sway incessantly, to die down sufficiently to allow a decent shot. I only saved five out of seventeen photos.
Yesterday I received an email from Melbourne IT about my domain name renewal which is due by May 1. It was the first in a series of monthly ’reminder’ emails. It emphasised that I check my eligibility to renew the name. This terrified me, because I was told the current name, unlike the one it replaced, did not require an active Australian Business Number. The first person I spoke to this morning said he would call back in an hour or two to confirm my eligibility. I phoned again in the afternoon and was told that I was eligible to renew the name. Previously I would renew the name for two years. Because of the change, I only registered the name for a year. I will revert to the two year renewal nearer the time.
The website gremlin saga was becoming a tad self-indulgent. I hadn’t heard from Jackie for a month. Her last email assured me that the matter would be fixed before Christmas. Today, after returning from the coast having driven through a cloudburst for twenty five minutes from a liquor store to a shopping centre, I uploaded a photo taken the previous day, and checking how it looked on the web page, I had to do a double take because the text accompanying the enlargement had been restored to the status quo. I emailed Jackie to let her know, saying that her actions spoke louder than the words I never heard from her and that it is demoralising when one’s website isn’t working properly. I had emailed Jackie on January 7, telling her that on the 10th I was due to pay my credit card for the plugin upgrade and that I had nothing to show for the expense. In my long experience of dealing with them, web builders are lousy communicators and do not look after their customers in the way most service providers do.
In the afternoon, I took a photo of an Australian white ibis, almost five years ago to the day since I photographed my first white ibis on the mountain, which is also on page one of the Birds album. The bird was foraging in the recently mown grass in the park across the road from my unit. It was feeding in the park the following morning. I normally encounter the species on the coastal strip. I have otherwise only seen the straw-necked ibis up here. The white ibis is widespread across much of Australia and is closely related to the sacred ibis of Africa.
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