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 17^th, 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.

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.