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.
I have received emails from Melbourne IT reminding me to renew my domain names, starting 3 months out from the 17 May expiry date. I tried to renew them on line today, only to discover that the charge for each domain was $146, $6 more than I paid for both last time. I resorted to phoning and the upshot was that I renewed the domain names for $140 until 17 May 2016.
Today I sent out a newsletter announcing a new album called AERIAL 2001, the first since the launch of my revised website. I am an aerial photo freak. I just love the vantage point. The initial images are photos by Hugh Alexander. I intend to add Hugh’s video frames in due course. I advise using the Album in conjunction with the maps on the Tamborine Mountain Page.
An email arrived from EOL with the link to my species data contributions in the form of video frames and videos. On the 24th Andrew sent corrections to a few of the now nearly 240 XML species files to EOL. Thanks to the relaunched website this is more than double the number we originally submitted.
Our visit to Joalah National Park was the first night filming since November 27 last year. In the last week or so, after a dry Summer, the weather has become wetter, though nothing like the flooding rains of recent years. The night was perfect. The insects and frogs, enlivened by the recent rain, were in full voice. We saw plenty of Great Barred Frogs, many spiders, some snails, possums, a bedraggled butterfly, a lone male harvestman, but no Leaf-tailed Geckos or semi-slugs. What saved the night was filming two Swift Ghost Moths, an exquisite species I first filmed on February 21 last year. Somehow a third specimen materialised much higher up the path on our way back. The moth has no proboscis, therefore cannot feed and may only last a day.
Today, I collected my camera from the repairer, having dropped it off on 19 December last year, and filmed with it for the first time since 15 December. My subject was 2 Cyana meiricki moth larvae in their cages before the cocoon stage. The larvae make the cages out of their own long hairs. The cages were made within the last two days.
