This evening I picked up a Canon XA 35 demo camera from Steve. It came on the market a year ago. It shoots in HD, but not in 4K. Steve has entered the basic settings. We shot some trial footage and checked out some of the features. The instruction manual has 188  pages. The camera is much smaller than the Sony and lighter. It will be a relief to have a fully functioning camera once more.

Yesterday on my walk, I introduced myself to the new owner of the property whose garage has for many years been my main location for filming and photographing moths. To my great delight he told me that he had replaced the bulb in one of the lamps which for ages had been out of action and shunned by insects. Today, I saw a splendid yellow and brown longicorn beetle which had been attracted by the newly re-lit lamp and photographed two moths.

This afternoon I shot the last footage of my last tape in a garden which has yielded an abundance of material. This evening I handed it over to Steve for capture and generating a time-coded DVD. Meanwhile, I am using an early tape which was dedicated to logging changes to open space on the mountain and the skylines of Brisbane and the Gold Coast. I only shot half of it. Part of the balance was used to record bird sounds and traffic which Steve transferred to his hard drive this evening. I have about 34 minutes of footage left. There is still no release date for the new Panasonic camera.

The migration of plague like proportions of Caper White butterflies from west of the Great Dividing Range to south east Queensland in search of food, has boosted an already much stronger than usual late Spring butterfly presence. The migration is due to exceptional Winter rain allowing the Caper White’s host plant, the caper bush, to thrive, and strong westerly winds. There have also been plenty of Australian Painted Lady and Meadow Argus butterflies, Cabbage Whites and Monarchs. I have uploaded photos I took this morning of a Painted Lady and a Meadow Argus butterfly to my ‘Other Fauna’ album, having unsuccessfully attempted to photograph these species on several previous morning walks.

Steve and I have uploaded another five videos. With the last tape in the camera I am running out of new subjects. This batch is worth mentioning because one of the videos contains rare real time footage of a female Satin Bowerbird at the bower with the male trying to win her over with dancing and a gift in its beak. She was present for 4 mins and 26 secs before flying off.

Steve and I uploaded new videos for the first time in four months. Three were filmed at night. Among the subjects was Mark tickling the trip lines of the Northern Tree Funnel Web, the planet’s deadliest spider. It duly obliged with two strikes. Blink and you would miss them. Another video was of Tamborine Mountain Zieria in full flower. The shrub is up to 3 m high and is listed as vulnerable. It only grows on the mountain and nowhere else in the world.

This morning I photographed the fence post on the top of which the dwelling of the Log Cabin Case Moth was placed after it had been plucked from the adjacent picket fence as per the FILM DIARY entry of 16 April this year. Just six months later the top of the post was concealed by the new growth of a shrub. I have just added a photo to the ‘Other Fauna’ album. In other words, only the three least revealing of the eighteen photos I took of one of my project’s most  fantastic subjects would have been possible, had I found the dwelling today.

Tonight I loaded what, as far as I know, is my final tape. Sony no longer produce the tapes because current cameras record onto data cards. I purchased 10 tapes in May last year to tide me over until I was in a position to buy a new camera. The tapes are still obtainable, but I am now ready to buy the camera. The pressure is on for me to source it. Steve and I have eyes on a Panasonic 4K camera which we would like to trial, but are waiting to get hold of one from Steve’s trusty supplier.

I attended the successful launch of Japp Vogel’s book of a selection of his beautiful photos of the mountain’s flora and fauna, “Green Island in the Sky”. It was at a winery on the mountain. Many of the nocturnal subjects were photographed on our night filming walks. Jaap was the original spotlighter and fulfills the role currently when Robyn is unavailable.

Years ago it was moths on a double garage I passed unseeingly on my morning walk. Today it was cotton plants growing in the front garden belonging to a lady long known to me whom I stopped to chat with, noticing a wooden box filled with cotton bolls which she and her partner had picked earlier this year from shrubs they planted four years ago. The shrubs had just been cut back, but I was told that when fruiting they grow well over a metre tall and fill out, so that it is a puzzle why I had never noticed their fluffy white presence. A bonus is that when in full leaf the shrubs are infested by jewel-like harlequin bugs. This post amounts to a timely and welcome corrective to my claim of looking out for the overlooked.