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.

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Film Diary / 04.06.2014

After being without my camera for 3 months during our Summer, I wanted to find out if a Gopro camera might provide suitable back-up equipment. Having borrowed a Gopro Hero 2 camera from a friend at the weekend, I dashed down to the highway the next day, bought a 16GB card and started to trial the camera in Driscoll Lane. I filmed insects on railings and tiny white flowers in a hedge, holding the camera a couple of inches or less away from my subject, then a bit further away, all the while unable to see what I was filming.  Then I went to MacDonald National Park where I filmed some fungi, a strange dragonfly close to the ground, an ant and several walkthroughs, particularly featuring 2 huge adjacent Strangler Figs. The following day I filmed a couple of moths at the garage in Central Avenue and bought a cable so that I could view the clips on my computer. Gopros are ingenious miniature wide angle video cameras designed for people who want to film the world around them while they are on the move, on land, in the air or on and in water. I quickly discovered that… Read Complete Text

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Website / 30.05.2014

Today I sent out a newsletter informing subscribers of 9 new videos, which brings the total on vimeo to 223, with more in the pipeline. A recent video of a female Wood Duck nestling 10 ducklings for the night drew more comments from vimeo members than any other video of mine. My presence on vimeo is resulting in frequent emails, including one from a production house in West Australia offering credit for footage, but no payment.

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Other / 28.05.2014

In thanking Leigh Winsor for confirming the identity of a Flatworm, footage of which comprises a forthcoming video, I made the point that whenever I film a lone individual of a species I have not seen before, I tend to think that there is bound to be another specimen somewhere, but where is that somewhere, I wonder. Which leads me to thinking about what the mountain’s population of a given species might be. How many Rainbow Lorikeets, which are plentiful, for instance, or Great-barred Frogs, of which we see many at night. The mean range across Australia of Short-beaked Echidnas is 40-60 ha. The one I filmed in the Knoll National Park could have been one of a pair or three, given the park’s roughly 127 ha area. The White-banded Noctuid Moth was the first spectacular moth I filmed. I did not see another for several years. Then I started to see them regularly and once filmed a group of 4 on the Central Avenue garage.

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Film Diary / 15.05.2014

Our 100th night shoot was put back by a day because of rain. As it is close to the end of the season, I didn’t want to have to wait until September to bring up the century. I managed to assemble an ad hoc team for our visit to Palm Grove National Park. It was full moon. There was hardly any insect noise compared with the strong background chirping we heard 8 days ago in MacDonald National Park. We saw plenty of Giant Panda Snails and a couple of Pademelons, plus native cockroaches and various species of ant. The highlights were filming a semi-slug which may be the third species we have seen (confirmation awaits expert opinion in due course) and a Tawny Frogmouth sitting on a branch close to the path. I also filmed a leggy fly which did not look like a Crane Fly. The rain, which cut our walk short, relented just as we came upon the Frogmouth. We will keep the season going as long as there are creatures to film.

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Website / 08.05.2014

One of the main reasons for expanding the website and enabling me to upload content was to boost the species data I supply to the EOL. Prior to the relaunch I entered 120 or so new species on the admin site. Andrew Nagy had to make them fit for purpose and head off a potential problem by reconciling the original XML files with the new ones. We duly sent the combined list to EOL who in return provided the link to my EOL gallery pages. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that most of the original files were missing. EOL pointed out an error which I carefully checked out and found that it only referred to two files. I discovered other errors on our part, but most of the files seemed to be correct. I selected 12 of them and asked EOL to tell me if the news concerning them was good or bad.  There was also a problem regarding missing videos. This was due to a mistake I made, which I have since corrected. An email from EOL arrived today confirming that the 12 files were OK and that the videos should be harvested within 2-3 days. We’ll… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 07.05.2014

We are one short of 100 night shoots. Not surprisingly, I find that I am not shooting as much footage as I used to because fewer new subjects present themselves. A recent shoot did yield a beetle, Saw Fly larvae, a large black millipede, a Brown Lacewing eating a Crane Fly and a pair of mating Crane Flies. However the two most recent shoots each provided a unique gem. On 23 April I filmed a katydid eating a fungus perhaps 10 -12 cm high growing out of the rainforest floor.This evening, near the start of the circuit in MacDonald National Park I filmed a small snail. With a low battery in the camera and a fully charged battery left in the car, I was tempting fate to provide a highlight which I might not have been able to film. As luck would have it, we were on our way out of the park when we saw a cricket burrowing into the earth, something we had not seen before and I filmed it for several minutes until the battery ran out.