Dan and I checked Joalah for bats during the past year or two, Dan as recently as a few months ago.  The camp had moved on, until Dan saw bats returning to roost at about 3 am during our midnight walk. Today I returned to Joalah to check the situation. In the past one could smell the bats from quite a distance. This time I saw them almost as soon as I smelt them. They were nearer the bridge over the creek than previously, still hanging from the tops of palms some 50 to 60 feet above the ground. Until I check the footage I won’t know if I have better close ups than first time round. Still, it is good to know the bats (Grey-headed Flying Foxes) are back.

For over 2 years I wanted to begin a night filming walk at midnight to see if there was any noticable change in the line-up of creatures we saw. Realistically one walk could not be conclusive. Dan and his partner Amanda had agreed to participate which effectively meant scheduling the walk during school holidays. The year before last they were travelling which limited their availability. Last year I was without my camera for the duration of the holidays and beyond. Postponed from January 12 due to rain, our first and probably only midnight walk after 110 walks starting at 7.30 pm, occurred today. We chose Joalah because that is where the sequence of filming the rainforest at night began. It was appropriate that Jaap joined us because he was on the very first walk. The night was hot and sticky. After good recent rain and current warm temperatures, distressed rainforest was a receding memory. The midnight start in a way meant recommencing the record. Accordingly I decided to  film creatures of which I already have sufficient footage, such as a Spiny Rainforest Katydid, a Brown Huntsman Spider, a Leaf-tailed Gecko, Giant Water Spiders, a Long-finned Eel and a Net-Casting Spider…. Read Complete Text

Last week, with Mark back spotlighting because it is school holiday time, I copped the first leech of the current season, where else but in Palm Grove. I filmed an Eastern Small-eyed Snake on the move, a female scale insect, larger than the one I filmed in 2010 and round not elongated, plus a new lacewing. Tonight we returned to Joalah with an outsize party of nine consisting of 7 crew members and two guests of Jaap’s. For the same reason that Mark was spotlighting, Dan was back carrying the tripod and using his young eyes and his zoological  training to great effect. The night was hot and humid and after yet more rain the ground was soft. Jaap spotted another of the round scale insects, smaller than last week’s. We saw so many creatures – eels, a catfish, Giant Water Spiders, snails, millipedes, a large caterpillar, glow worms, a snake, beetles, a stick insect nymph, a Short-eared Possum. But the highlight for me was filming a Powerful Spiny Crayfish, a creature I had never seen, which Dan discovered walking along the path near Curtis Falls. With its 15 cm body length and menacing claws, it is appropriately named…. Read Complete Text

We suspended night filming on 5 November because of increasing lack of fauna due to the distressed state of the rainforest through lack of rain. This evening was our 107^th foray. We were in the Knoll and for the first time in nearly two years Jaap was with us, spotlighting. The night was warm and sticky. Though it was dry under foot, the amount of rain we received in the past week or two was sufficient to liven things up, (last Wednesday evening was fine, but alas, I couldn’t raise a crew). Thus we saw any number of Great Barred Frogs, two Leaf-tailed Geckos, an echidna foraging off the track, two Pink-tongued Lizards, lots of orb and trapdoor spiders and much else.

I spoke to Chris Burwell this morning. He has just returned to work after a holiday. He wanted another shot of the dragonfly to pin point the attribution and having looked at it he phoned to confirm that the dragonfly is an Australian Emerald. (See FILM DIARY 1 November 2014).

Thirteen days after I filmed the dragonfly, I saw it in the very same spot on my morning walk. Wondrous. Or so I prefer to think because it could have been another individual of the same species. This strikes me as less likely than it being the original one because I have not noticed a dragonfly of any kind at this location between these two sightings. I have filmed dragonflies repeatedly reoccupying a particular position after an interval and lingering there up to minutes at a time, but never  this – a return visit a day short of a fortnight later to the very twig on which it had rested for between a mind-boggling 45 minutes and an hour.

If I hadn’t stopped to ask a friend how much rain had fallen during the night I would never have caught sight of a paper wasp nest attached to a cereus cactus some 4 m high just outside the back gate. The nest is very different to the one I filmed hanging from a metal railing. The wasp is much smaller, only 10mm long. It belongs to a different genus. At most there were no more than 6 wasps attending the nest. Its position was ideal for the camera.

I was delighted to find a lone new lacewing on the garage in Central Avenue. It is more brightly coloured than the mantispid lacewing which has been present on several occasions during the past month or two. Checking images of Queensland lacewings on google, I discovered that this is the  ‘Diamond-banded Lacewing’  which occurs in Queensland and NSW.

Today something utterly wonderful happened. I was on my walk in Driscoll Lane when a beautiful turquoise and gold dragonfly whizzed by and entered a hedge a short distance in front of me. Much to my delight I discovered it resting on a twig in full view. I opened up my PANCAM, took several photos and a 30sec video of the dragonfly, unconvinced that they amounted to anything regardless of the fact that the sun was  interfering with my view of the monitor. I continued on my walk and bought a couple of items at the post office, determined to return with my Sony on the off chance, in order to do the subject justice. In less than 15 minutes I was back and to my immense relief the dragonfly was where I had left it. I filmed 30 seconds of hand-held footage purely to get the dragonfly on tape before resorting to my tripod. In all, I changed the camera position five times, shooting many minutes of tape. I didn’t check the time of my return, but I would have been filming for between 20 minutes and half an hour, possibly longer. I was setting up my last… Read Complete Text

Broadband service was restored this morning, meaning the outage lasted 6 days. I’m waiting for the settings for the 5 newest videos which I posted on vimeo today, to appear on my website so that I can send out a newsletter to subscribers. The site trawls through vimeo once a day. Consequently the completed videos should show up tomorrow.