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 / 14.03.2017

Today I completed the paper edit of the first videos recorded on memory card. The initial seven are footage from the demo camera. The rest are from the camera I bought in January. Once again, after a long interval, there are garage moth videos as opposed to the videos of moths filmed intermittently at night. I have 25 videos in the pipeline and over two hours of material from the second memory card for Steve to download, which should yield several more.

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Film Diary / 07.03.2017

I returned to Eagles Nest this morning to really get to grips with a magical subject I chanced upon yesterday afternoon, when I popped in to see the owners who are good friends of mine. I noticed that an abandoned potter wasp nest showed signs of being refurbished, so I went to get my camera and filmed the new work. The wasp duly appeared and eventually entered the nest, remaining there for a long time before emerging. I thought I noticed a second wasp.

Carefully positioning the camera to avoid the flight path, while getting a good view of the building site, I was rewarded by repeated visits of indeed two wasps. One continued to spend time in the nest. The other wasp flew in to work on the nest, but was chased away by the wasp which had been inside. For a reason not apparent, rubbing their abdomens with their hind legs was one of the wasps’ activities at the nest.

The glory of this event is that I first filmed the live nest in March 2010, attended by a single wasp. In October 2014 I filmed the decayed nest, revealing numbers of exposed cells. Two… Read Complete Text

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Other / 02.03.2017

Today I posted the USBs with the 123 SD and 48 HD species videos to the NFSA. On Tuesday Steve and I put the finishing touches to the videos. Steve had to find the three missing SD videos, which he did. I discovered a taxonomic error in an old SD video which we had to re-title and render. Five HD videos were missing from Steve’s excel sheet and had to be found, which they were, and the last video required the taxonomic information to be added to the opening title. Then Steve had to copy the videos and excel sheets onto the USBs, which was done overnight so that I could collect them on Wednesday.

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Other / 23.02.2017

Steve emailed me an excel for the remaining HD videos which we will include with the SD videos. When completed, we will be able to provide the NFSA with a fully up to date collection of species videos, including four we uploaded in January. We will produce the next videos from material on a memory card from the new camera. Based on the vimeo record, I discovered that three videos were missing from Steve’s SD excel list, bringing the total to 123.

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Film Diary / 22.02.2017

This evening we concluded our night filming walk in The Knoll National Park, begun last week, when there were so many interesting subjects (two moths, two spiders, a butterfly and a beetle) that we barely got past the second bend in the path.

The big attraction at The Knoll is Hadronyche formidabilis, which resides in a tree next to the creek close to the furthest point of our walk. This spider has the most potent arachnid venom on the planet.  By tickling the trip lines with a twig, Mark causes the spider to leave its web thinking it is about to pounce on prey instead of the end of vegetable matter. This was the fourth occasion I have filmed the spider and this time I set myself up to get frame-filling close ups. The spider gave a bravura performance, leaving its web several times and hanging on to the twig in full view. On one take, its grip was so powerful that when it retreated into its web carrying the twig with it, Mark had to wait quite a while before it let go. For the record, this is post 450.

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Other / 14.02.2017

This evening Steve gave me the Excel document for the SD Species Videos we will be sending to the NFSA (National Sound & Film Archive). It is about a year ago since we sent them the HD videos. Once I get into the swing of things it should be plain sailing. There are 120 videos for which I need to provide taxonomic and descriptive information. Among them are some of my earliest videos on Vimeo uploaded six years ago.