During my cousin Sue’s visit to the mountain, I mentioned the size of poinsettias here compared with those in the UK where she comes from. There, poinsettias are a favourite Christmas pot plant, whereas here, they are shrubs and trees. Today, I determined to tour the mountain in search of flowering poinsettias to make my point. I drove from east to west and north to south on the plateau but did not add to the two plants close to home which I photographed at the beginning of my quest. One was a shrub, perhaps 2.5 metre tall, and the other, a 4-5 m tall tree, its branches cascading over a garden fence. Poinsettias are endemic from Mexico to southern Guatemala. What look like flowers are in fact bracts, most often red, grouped around the flower in the centre, but they can also be cream, pink, apricot, pale green or white.
What is remarkable about the photos I took this morning is that the flowers on the ivory curl or buckinghamia tree in front of the letterboxes of my unit block, were out in Winter, in June 2025, whereas flowering normally takes place in late Summer and early Autumn. The tree was planted more than thirty years ago and has been at its present size for a long time. It is endemic to the tropical rainforest of north-eastern Queensland, at altitudes from 200 to 1,000 m, where It can grow to thirty metres tall, although the tree outside my front door is about fifteen metres high. Part of the tree was broken off by cyclonic weather in 2023 and earlier this year. It flowers abundantly in due season, exuding a sweet, heady aroma. The ivory curl tree has become a popular planting in parks, streets and private gardens in regions far beyond its natural range. It grows well even as far south as Sydney and Melbourne, but only reaches some seven to eight metres tall.
As remarkable as the Winter flowering is the fact that I have not videoed or photographed the tree until now, so that the only… Read Complete Text
This morning I photographed some funnel ant mounds, intrigued by their existence in gaps in the footpath in Driscoll Lane. Such mounds are a typical and frequent sight on lawns and road verges on the mountain after sufficient rain. But these were in the tiniest of gaps, where a concrete footpath joined a concrete curb beneath the picket fence. The ants had pushed the earth through the gaps, which begs the question of why they did so in a location covered by a hard surface, and the size of any prey which might fall down the funnel. Biodiversity will not be denied, I have seen plants pushing through just such a gap between hard surfaces, morels pushing through a gravel drive and in Holland, hollyhocks surging to their full height in the gap between the edge of the pavement and the front of a house.
I can’t recall when I last photographed two subjects on my morning walk. The first was a fragrant flowering Autumn, evergreen plant at the entrance to a drive. It is native to the Himalayas and grows to a height of three metres. A minute spider was lurking in the folds of a petal of one of the flowers. At the picket fence in Driscoll Lane, my gaze was directed to a caterpillar resting in the shadow of one of the pickets. I emailed two photos to Don Herbison-Evans on May 28. He identified the species the following day. The season suited the plant, but I felt that encountering the caterpillar was a bonus.
On April 30, I took my cousin Sue from the UK, on a walk in Palm Grove. The last time I was in the rainforest (other than visits to Sky Walk) was nearly four years ago. I have avoided going there because the ground has never really dried out after high rainfall and I didn’t want to be leeched, whereas on our night walks I was willing to take the leeches for the party if someone else took the spider webs. We had the good fortune of seeing several pademelons inside the entrance, on our way in and out. A combination of the Christmas 2023 tornado and Cyclone Alfred has severely thinned out the upper slopes next to the path where we began our descent to the shelf land, and the spot occupied by the mighty Moreton Bay fig tree which had been uprooted by ex-cyclone Oswald in 2013, blocking the path. Once the trunk had been cut, the weight of the root ball lifted the base of the trunk towards its original position, while the remainder stretched for tens of metres across the soil. In 2017 I filmed the unblemished base of the trunk, which, when the root… Read Complete Text
I was thrilled to find a pair of tawny frogmouths perched on my balcony when I opened my curtain, luxuriating in the morning sun. I have been fortunate to receive regular visits during winter. This year’s was midway through autumn, but on the coldest night of the year so far. Frogmouths are an attractive subject both because of their striking appearance and their quirky behaviour, such as sitting in the middle of the road at night. Although they look like owls and are nocturnal, frogmouths are not raptors. They lack talons and a beak capable of ripping flesh. Instead, they catch their insect prey on the wing. They are found throughout mainland Australia and Tasmania. When I closed the curtain in the evening, the birds were gone.
On my walk this morning I passed a tree stump which had come to life with a great variety of fungi, spurred on by a burst of sunshine after a period of rainy weather. When I returned a few hours later, some of the fungi had shrunk, but the others remained as I first saw them, except that now I found additional fungi tucked away between roots or low down close to the grass. I have kept nineteen of the twenty eight shots I took, featuring perhaps up to eight different species of fungi, though were an expert to scrutinize them, the number is likely to be fewer. PS I emailed Nigel Fechner six images on 7.4.25. He identified the species of two fungi, one of which confirmed my identification from specimens in my album, and the genus of three more. I only sent him images of fungi which were not degraded.
Looking out of my spare bedroom window, I was drawn to a sinuous shape on next door’s roof. I realised it was a snake sunning itself and grabbed my camera. The snake lifted its head and cast around to better acquaint itself with its location. I steadied my arm on the window ledge and held my hand to the glass as I zoomed in on the snake, from a distance of some eight metres. The shots revealed a green tree snake. It was quite a large specimen, perhaps 1m 80cm long. After a while it withdrew under the roof where it may have taken refuge to get out of the way of the wind and rain of the cyclone.
On the 17th, I photographed a Yuuca which I had previously seen on my walk. I took up to ten shots, but when I tried to upload them to my laptop, a ‘no data’ message repeatedly appeared on my camera monitor. Somehow, I was able to upload two of the shots, but either the data card or the camera needed replacing. Yesterday I bought a new card and this morning, on my walk, I photographed the plant. In the intervening days it had lost most of its flowers. Crucially all the photos were uploaded to my laptop and I could view them as I took them, which was impossible with the fault. You can imagine how relieved I was not to have to buy a new camera. I kept four of the nine shots I took today. This is the first plant I have added to the ‘Other Flora’ album in nearly two years. I sent the trailer of the archive to a prominent botanist who criticized my project because the flora content was not confined to native species. However, my remit on the mountain’s biodiversity is to include everything that freely grows or moves.
Robyn Law reminded me of a pair of brown gerygone nests she had seen, hanging from a shrub next to a footbridge over a tributary of Plunkett Creek. I drove there this morning to photograph them. The branch was below the walk way, which restricted the angle to an overhead shot. I could not get a photo showing both nests, but had to settle for a picture of each separately. I also had to wait for the breeze which caused the nests to sway incessantly, to die down sufficiently to allow a decent shot. I only saved five out of seventeen photos.