I can’t recall when I last photographed two subjects on my morning walk. The first was a fragrant flowering Autumn, evergreen plant at the entrance to a drive. It is native to the Himalayas and grows to a height of three metres. A minute spider was lurking in the folds of a petal of one of the flowers. At the picket fence in Driscoll Lane, my gaze was directed to a caterpillar resting in the shadow of one of the pickets. I emailed two photos to Don Herbison-Evans on May 28. He identified the species the following day. The season suited the plant, but I felt that encountering the caterpillar was a bonus.

On April 30, I took my cousin Sue from the UK, on a walk in Palm Grove. The last time I was in the rainforest (other than visits to Sky Walk) was nearly four years ago. I have avoided going there because the ground has never really dried out after high rainfall and I didn’t want to be leeched, whereas on our night walks I was willing to take the leeches for the party if someone else took the spider webs. We had the good fortune of seeing several pademelons inside the entrance, on our way in and out. A combination of the Christmas 2023 tornado and Cyclone Alfred has severely thinned out the upper slopes next to the path where we began our descent to the shelf land, and the spot occupied by the mighty Moreton Bay fig tree which had been uprooted by ex-cyclone Oswald in 2013, blocking the path. Once the trunk had been cut, the weight of the root ball lifted  the base of the trunk towards its original position, while the remainder stretched for tens of metres across the soil. In 2017 I filmed the unblemished base of the trunk, which, when the root… Read Complete Text

I was thrilled to find a pair of tawny frogmouths perched on my balcony when I opened my curtain, luxuriating in the morning sun. I have been fortunate to receive regular visits during winter. This year’s was midway through autumn, but on the coldest night of the year so far. Frogmouths are an attractive subject both because of their striking appearance and their quirky behaviour, such as sitting in the middle of the road at night. Although they look like owls and are nocturnal, frogmouths are not raptors. They lack talons and a beak capable of ripping flesh. Instead, they catch their insect prey on the wing. They are found throughout mainland Australia and Tasmania. When I closed the curtain in the evening, the birds were gone.

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.