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.

 


 

The Film Diary includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

 

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 


 

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.

 


 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

 


 

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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.

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Other / 08.05.2019

Today, I completed the settings on the latest videos Steve and I have put together, bringing the total to 550, a figure we reached 9 ½ months after posting the 500th. The 550th. video is of lichens on the trunk of a palm tree emitting light in an ultra violet beam. The tree had fallen across a rainforest path. I have shot-selected another 7 videos without reaching the end of the latest footage.

 

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Other / 27.04.2019

There was a good attendance at the Progress Association’s monthly afternoon event at the Zamia Theatre for a double bill of my presentation of night footage and a video and talk by a local wildlife carer who looks after distressed bats. I began with a general introduction about my project and night filming and introduced 10 of the 14 videos. The audience was particularly responsive during the showing of a video of the world’s most deadly spider, the northern tree funnel web. The presentation was enthusiastically received and plenty of questions were asked, which was most pleasing. The carer had brought some young bats to exhibit. We felt that they seemed to respond to the sound of water in one of my videos. The bats I had filmed on the mountain are regarded as vulnerable, although they may camp in their thousands. Apart from twice drying up, I greatly enjoyed the occasion.

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Other / 18.04.2019

Today I renewed  ‘Biodiversity Images’, my business name, for three more years. While not as vital to my project as the domain name, it is still a valuable asset.

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Other / 13.04.2019

Steve and I started compiling Stills 24 with the latest 167 video frame captures, on 9 April. I have already sent several email requests for species IDs and received answers to all but one. To date I have added 19 images to the Night Life Album, two to Fungi and four to Rainforest Flora.

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My Travels / 31.03.2019

Have just got back from my annual visit to Longreach, staying with Simon and Nicole who are flourishing. For the entire flight, the ground was obliterated by clouds. Light rain was falling when I arrived. I have never experienced wet weather in 32 years of travelling to the town. The next day Nicole recorded 28 mm of rain and we heard two claps of thunder. We were all thrilled. I started the day going to the cattle sale, the second in a week after years of inactivity at the yard. We slopped through mire generated by hundreds of bovine hooves and had to beat a hasty retreat, ahead of a mob of steers on their way to being weighed, before we could get anywhere near the action. I counted myself lucky that my shoes hadn’t stuck fast in the mud.  

Poor Pepper, Simon and Nicole’s adorable cattle dog, had a dewclaw removed on the day of my arrival and stayed in the house overnight, while I was there. Yesterday the rain had gone elsewhere to be replaced by a dust storm blown in from New South Wales. The bird feeder in the back yard attracted numerous crested… Read Complete Text