An email arrived from the Queensland Museum entomologist who has identified numerous species over the years. He was unable to offer a firm verdict on any of the four images of insects I sent him three weeks ago. But he confirmed that the leg being pulled up a large rainforest tree at night by a lone ant we uploaded on vimeo 8 years ago, was not that of a cricket, but of a spider. I have corrected the video settings and the website.
Having just completed our 150th walk I thought it might be interesting to delve into the history of the walks and tally how many we did per season (broadly, October to May). In doing so I discovered I was one walk short in the total to this season’s end. We have actually completed 153. The 150th occurred a week earlier than the ‘official’ date. I didn’t start numbering the walks until a few seasons had passed. And then, I didn’t number every walk. The tally per season is: ’07 –’08 = 5 ’08 – ’09 = 10 ’09 – ’10 = 13 ’10 –’11 = 26 ’11 – ’12 = 19 ’12 –’13 = 16 ’13 – ’14 = 13 ’14 –’15 = 16 ’15 – ’16 = 16 ’16 – ’17 = 19. You will notice that in the second season we doubled the number of walks of season one and in the fourth, we doubled the number of walks in season three.
I next tallied how many walks we had done in each of the national parks. Joalah topped the list with 47, followed by The Knoll with 43, MacDonald with 31, Palm Grove 25, Witches… Read Complete Text
An email from Showrunner Productions in Perth arrived this evening – the third time they have contacted me. They are interested in using footage from my videos of assassin bugs for their latest series which focuses on Latin American animals. Typically, the email mentioned an urgent deadline while requesting high resolution files. I replied immediately refusing permission because the assassin bugs in my videos are Australian species.
This evening I received an email identifying a roosting bird I had recently filmed at night in rainforest. It was a new species for the archive. This, I had not expected. Finding a new species of bird to film is increasingly rare. Whereas the opposite appears to be true with moths. Encountering a juvenile Pacific Heron a few weeks ago, having long before filmed an adult, was exciting. But a new species beats that.
The American production house wanted me to sign away my peace of mind in exchange for not being able to guarantee that I would be mentioned in the credits. Discovery Channel Canada submitted a similar release form. I refused to sign it because it did not include a credit for my footage. Today I received a new form with a ‘Special Thanks: Peter Kuttner’ clause which I duly signed and returned.
The touch screen on my new Canon developed a fault at the end of March. Today I collected a replacement from Videopro in Brisbane and can expect to be without my camera for a minimum of three weeks. Fortunately the viewfinder and filming were not affected by the fault.
An email arrived from a producer who works on a science news program called Daily Planet on Discovery Channel, Canada. He is producing a story on animals that use nets to catch their prey. He came across my videos of net-casting spiders on vimeo and wondered if he could use my footage. Trawling through my vimeo pages I found four videos devoted to three species of spiders, all filmed at night. I am inclined to give him the go-ahead provided I’m credited as the videographer. A few years ago an American production house wanted to use my footage but the agreement they asked me to sign put me off. We’ll see what transpires with this lot.
Today I uploaded the 300th image to my ‘Other Fauna’ Album. It was of a male Spiny Leaf Insect, the first I have seen, which I photographed this morning. I have filmed females on three occasions, including once in rainforest at night. Only ‘Moths’ has more images. The males grow to 11 cm long and are not as bulky as the females, which grow to 20 cm.
This afternoon I loaded a new SD (secure digital) memory card into my point and shoot at macro range PANCAM. The old card contained at least 14.7 GB out of an available 14.8 and I didn’t want to find myself photographing a subject which couldn’t be captured because the camera had run out of capacity. I first used it on 15 June 2014. Card 1 contains some video clips and I should think about 1,500 photos.
Today I posted the USBs with the 123 SD and 48 HD species videos to the NFSA. On Tuesday Steve and I put the finishing touches to the videos. Steve had to find the three missing SD videos, which he did. I discovered a taxonomic error in an old SD video which we had to re-title and render. Five HD videos were missing from Steve’s excel sheet and had to be found, which they were, and the last video required the taxonomic information to be added to the opening title. Then Steve had to copy the videos and excel sheets onto the USBs, which was done overnight so that I could collect them on Wednesday.