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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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.

Logo

Other / 05.12.2016

Yesterday on my walk, I introduced myself to the new owner of the property whose garage has for many years been my main location for filming and photographing moths. To my great delight he told me that he had replaced the bulb in one of the lamps which for ages had been out of action and shunned by insects. Today, I saw a splendid yellow and brown longicorn beetle which had been attracted by the newly re-lit lamp and photographed two moths.

Logo

Other / 22.11.2016

This afternoon I shot the last footage of my last tape in a garden which has yielded an abundance of material. This evening I handed it over to Steve for capture and generating a time-coded DVD. Meanwhile, I am using an early tape which was dedicated to logging changes to open space on the mountain and the skylines of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. I only shot half of it. Part of the balance was used to record bird sounds and traffic which Steve transferred to his hard drive this evening. I have about 34 minutes of footage left. There is still no release date for the new Panasonic camera.

Logo

Other / 16.11.2016

The migration of plague like proportions of Caper White butterflies from west of the Great Dividing Range to south east Queensland in search of food, has boosted an already much stronger than usual late Spring butterfly presence. The migration is due to exceptional Winter rain allowing the Caper White’s host plant, the caper bush, to thrive, and strong westerly winds. There have also been plenty of Australian Painted Lady and Meadow Argus butterflies, Cabbage Whites and Monarchs. I have uploaded photos I took this morning of a Painted Lady and a Meadow Argus butterfly to my ‘Other Fauna’ album, having unsuccessfully attempted to photograph these species on several previous morning walks.

Logo

Other / 02.11.2016

Steve and I have uploaded another five videos. With the last tape in the camera I am running out of new subjects. This batch is worth mentioning because one of the videos contains rare real time footage of a female Satin Bowerbird at the bower with the male trying to win her over with dancing and a gift in its beak. She was present for 4 mins and 26 secs before flying off.

Logo

Film Diary / 26.10.2016

On checking out Jaap’s sighting of a pair of Whip Birds near the pond in the Land Care Depot the other day, I caught sight of a peewee, as the Magpie Lark is known in Queensland, feeding on the ground. I have never filmed this bird, though I have seen it over the years when I didn’t have my camera with me. I returned a day later, but found it too difficult to film the bird. Yesterday, I made a start, with some distant shots and improved the record this morning. However, on returning this afternoon I noticed a nest in a gum tree which the adult birds had frequented. There were two almost fully fledged chicks in the nest, which the adults visited regularly; the visits lasting from a few seconds to half a minute or more.

Logo

Other / 19.10.2016

Steve and I uploaded new videos for the first time in four months. Three were filmed at night. Among the subjects was Mark tickling the trip lines of the Northern Tree Funnel Web, the planet’s deadliest spider. It duly obliged with two strikes. Blink and you would miss them. Another video was of Tamborine Mountain Zieria in full flower. The shrub is up to 3 m high and is listed as vulnerable. It only grows on the mountain and nowhere else in the world.