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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Other / 27.12.2016

I have just uploaded the 300th image to my Moths Album, following an excellent run of new species at the garage, since the new owner of the property replaced the bulb in one of the two lamps three weeks ago. The moth is yet to be identified. It has strange antennae which have tiny serrations on both edges and a black and white-banded tip.

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Other / 19.12.2016

This evening I picked up a Canon XA 35 demo camera from Steve. It came on the market a year ago. It shoots in HD, but not in 4K. Steve has entered the basic settings. We shot some trial footage and checked out some of the features. The instruction manual has 188  pages. The camera is much smaller than the Sony and lighter. It will be a relief to have a fully functioning camera once more.

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Film Diary / 14.12.2016

Mark has retired from teaching and joined Lumart and me on the 138th night filming walk. We paid a return visit to MacDonald National Park, having failed to complete the circuit in mid-November. There was plenty to see, for instance skinks, a variety of snails, spiders and cockroaches, fungi, Giant Stinging Trees, and some beautiful ascending and descending vines. Even after so many walks I always find compelling subjects to film; this time an Orchard Swallowtail Butterfly, a katydid instar, a moth, a Greengrocer Cicada completing its moult and a Short-beaked Echidna up against a tree before it slowly waddled off into the black.

PS  I photographed a second moth on the 11th which I recognised as probably the same species as one I had filmed a few years ago. Only my expert had got the species wrong and had to consult a colleague who specialises in the Lymantriidae family. An email awaited me after tonight’s walk which contained the specialist’s verdict.

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Film Diary / 11.12.2016

One of the moths I photographed on December 5, was new to me. The following day I got the best close up of a moth I first filmed with my SD camera and later, at night in rainforest in HD. On December 7 I saw and phtographed for the first time, a moth described as one of the most common in Australia. And today, I photographed another new moth. What a difference a fully lit garage has made in such a brief time.

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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.

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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.