Today I added two photos to my albums. The first was of a red flowering gum leaf which had fallen onto the grass verge from one of the slender trees which lined the road. It caught my eye because of its shape and the subtle beauty of its colours against the vibrant setting of the hues of the grass. The species is endemic to the south-west of Western Australia and typically grows to a height of ten metres.

The second was of the huge clearing in the rainforest bordering Eagle Heights Road, which I decided to photograph a year after it was wrought by Cyclone Alfred. The cyclone made landfall a little north of Brisbane. Whenever I drove past, I sensed its scale. I took the photo a few metres in from the road. I thought that the leach I noticed crawling on the carpet between the bedrooms, had hitched a lift on my shoe, but seeing its engorged state made me look for evidence of a bite. The sock above the ankle of my right leg had a patch of blood on it. This was my first leach bite in more than five years.

I wanted to photograph the cycad for several days. It had been relocated to the edge of a block which was cleared of buildings and vegetation. It was beginning to establish itself when a fierce wind split the trunk, causing part of it to fall to the ground. The trunk can grow to a diameter of 80 cm. Its outer layer is covered by the persistent remains of leaf bases.  The cycad is an ancient, long-lived and slow-growing species, which is endemic to coastal south-eastern Queensland and north-eastern New South Wales. The cylindrical cone is among the largest of all cycad cones.

The fungi, which I photographed today, were among several growing on or near the same tree stump in Central Ave which I photographed in April 2025. I sent the mycologist three images, hopefully of different species, and I await a reply from him.

I photographed a bumper crop of Bunya pine cones in the park opposite my unit, the first since 2018, and a month earlier than then. I believe there are more cones on the ground now, but far fewer Sulphur-crested cockatoos to gorge on the feast. The cones in the photos are a fraction of the number of cones scattered around the park’s four Bunya pine trees. We are unbelievably fortunate in having two distinct kinds of subtropical rainforest in Southeast Queensland; namely the lush rainforest hereabouts and the cool subtropical rainforest of the Bunya Mountains, a three and a half hour drive away.

I took a photo, of a large Funnel ant mound on the corner of a grass verge. It was the first time, since I initially videoed the mounds in 2001, that I have actually seen ants on them. The mound appeared after a weekend of thunder storms but not a lot of rain. There are eight Australian species in the genus out of a worldwide total of 200. I noticed winged individuals, which are male and female reproductive ants, entering the mound. You have to look carefully to see the three ants in the photo. They are only about 5 mm long.

This year, the fresh green leaves of Spring appeared some two weeks later than usual on the deciduous trees lining Southport Avenue, thanks to a cold Winter. The English oak, which I photographed, is native to most of Europe and western Asia. There are no native oaks in Australia. This is a particularly remarkable tree. Despite being half dead, it retains a vigorous growth of new leaves. Deciduous native trees grow in the northern parts of Australia and shed their leaves to conserve water supply to the tree. Deciduous trees in the northern hemisphere lose their leaves as protection against cold weather.

I noticed a small dark patch on the dark grey door of the garage in Central Ave, which could only have been a moth, as a closer inspection revealed. I was on my morning walk, and had to return with my camera and a step ladder. Peter Hendry confirmed it as a new species for my Moths album, which is an increasingly rare and all the more exciting occurrence. It occurs in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Wingspan is about 3.5 cm.

Today, Steve and I assembled and uploaded two new videos to Vimeo, bringing the total to 581. It is a few days over two years since we last added videos. One video is of two white-faced herons preening on the roof of a house which has since been transported over the border to New South Wales. They were filmed in 2000, but I only realised that there was no video of them last year, and the video was not assembled and uploaded until today. The other is of one of the most commonly planted ornamental eucalypts which attracted plenty of ants and native and European honeybees, which I filmed nearly four years ago.

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