Having alerted Jackie, I was puzzled by a text she sent me, but checking the website I was relieved to see that it was in full working order. However, when I got home, I found that the admin site Gallery was unrecognisable. The layout was alien, the text was superimposed on the enlargement and lacked the scientific name, and I could not find a means of adding an image.
A year since the images-enlargement error was fixed, a new one has arisen. While googling my website at a family gathering, I was dumbfounded to be shown a dark screen with the legend, ‘not a valid template’, instead of the bird for which I was searching.
This afternoon, Steve came to my place to show me the contents he has copied to the SSD and supervise copying items which I have compiled. Although the species videos have Steve’s abbreviated titles, they sufficiently convey the subject matter. Regardless, the best way to find out what the video contains, is to play it. By the time Steve left, the SSD was complete.
I took a photo, of a large Funnel ant mound on the corner of a grass verge. It was the first time, since I initially videoed the mounds in 2001, that I have actually seen ants on them. The mound appeared after a weekend of thunder storms but not a lot of rain. There are eight Australian species in the genus out of a worldwide total of 200. I noticed winged individuals, which are male and female reproductive ants, entering the mound. You have to look carefully to see the three ants in the photo. They are only about 5 mm long.
This year, the fresh green leaves of Spring appeared some two weeks later than usual on the deciduous trees lining Southport Avenue, thanks to a cold Winter. The English oak, which I photographed, is native to most of Europe and western Asia. There are no native oaks in Australia. This is a particularly remarkable tree. Despite being half dead, it retains a vigorous growth of new leaves. Deciduous native trees grow in the northern parts of Australia and shed their leaves to conserve water supply to the tree. Deciduous trees in the northern hemisphere lose their leaves as protection against cold weather.
Today I compiled the index for the contents on the Legacy Solid State Drive. The first item is the link to my WEBSITE in The National Library of Australia. It is followed by VIDEOS – Species Videos, The Rainforest at Night, Driscoll Lane, The Beauty of Overlooked Things and Looking out for the Overlooked. Next is KUTTNER IMAGE LIBRARY – Photos and Video Frames, then WRITING – My Book, the Brisbane Line and Other Essays and My Travels, concluding with KUTTNER ART – Videos, Slides, Artworks and Documents.
This morning, Steve and I went to Office Works in Burleigh to buy a two terabyte Solid-State Drive (SSD) to house all the data from my project which I wish to keep for posterity. Steve retired from Bond University last May and we are in the process of putting our more than twenty years of collaboration to bed. The website, unedited and edited footage are all officially curated, which is most pleasing. My digital legacy is of data that I have selected with Steve’s help. It will be the sole repository of my Image Library with its thousands of video frames and photos. Only edited video footage, primarily of hundreds of short species videos plus some longer videos will be stored. One or two of the latter may, or may not be available elsewhere. I am including all my essays, which also appear on the website. Some were published elsewhere online. I have added a brief text to these, to place them in their proper context. Steve is going through the many hard drives he has used over the years, to see what of value they contain. I will leave the SSD to Simon.
I noticed a small dark patch on the dark grey door of the garage in Central Ave, which could only have been a moth, as a closer inspection revealed. I was on my morning walk, and had to return with my camera and a step ladder. Peter Hendry confirmed it as a new species for my Moths album, which is an increasingly rare and all the more exciting occurrence. It occurs in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Wingspan is about 3.5 cm.
This afternoon, I dropped in to the High School with my Canon video camera, which I bought in 2016, seeking to donate it to their Media Arts Department. Unlike my previous cameras which required mini-tapes, the Cannon uses memory cards. I made an appointment to see one of the Film and TV teachers, which gave me time to go home and collect the camera battery charger. The teacher was thrilled to receive the donation, so I returned with the tripod which has been kept in a succession of my cars since 1998. Hopefully, the camera will still be in working order, given that I last filmed with it in December 2021. As with the clear garage space, I delight in the gap in my bedroom occupied by the camera case for as long as the tripod was kept in my car. I couldn’t be without my point and shoot at close range, stills camera, which I make frequent good use of.
Today, Steve and I assembled and uploaded two new videos to Vimeo, bringing the total to 581. It is a few days over two years since we last added videos. One video is of two white-faced herons preening on the roof of a house which has since been transported over the border to New South Wales. They were filmed in 2000, but I only realised that there was no video of them last year, and the video was not assembled and uploaded until today. The other is of one of the most commonly planted ornamental eucalypts which attracted plenty of ants and native and European honeybees, which I filmed nearly four years ago.
