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Film Diary / 30.12.2010

Maintaining weekly night filming sessions, we returned to the Knoll National Park. I filmed some intriguing small beetles, a large hunting spider devouring its prey and one of the strangest creatures I have filmed on our night jaunts. It was a daddy long-legs with huge eye-stalks and tricky to film because there wasn’t much of substance on which to focus. It was on an earth bank. Its second pair of legs were inordinately long. We’ll have to research what species it is.

I finally filmed a large millipede.

PS  The daddy long-legs is a species of Harvestman. We are still trying to find out which. Harvestmen don’t have a segmented body or spin a web, though they do have eight legs.

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Film Diary / 13.12.2010

I filmed two moths of a species new to me on the Central Avenue garage and then did some night filming in Palm Grove National Park in mizzle. I filmed a Grey Huntsman Spider, a small moth, a white spider in its web and two large specimens of the Giant King Cricket; the antennae of the second, stirred by a fair breeze, lit up against the dark. By now the rain was piercing the canopy and I had to stop filming.

 

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My Travels / 30.11.2010

My son Simon and I travelled to Palam Vihar near Delhi to celebrate his grandfather Andy’s 90th birthday. One of Simon’s missions was to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend Nicole, which we did with help from Andy’s wife Maggie. She took us to some well-regarded jewellers shops in Delhi to which Simon and I returned the next day; Simon eventually making his purchase.

We were able to revisit some of the familiar sights such as Humayan’s Tomb, the Red Fort and the National Railway Museum (which I last visited a few months after it opened in 1977) in between watching cricket on the TV with Andy. The years have treated him and Maggie well as to appearance. We celebrated Andy’s birthday in style with lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel, another old haunt. I happened to have a bottle of vintage Veuve in my luggage which we consumed after we returned from the Taj; Andy imbibing a now for him rare drop of alcohol with evident enjoyment. I succeeded in doing all my Christmas shopping in Delhi. We got back home on December 11.

 

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Film Diary / 25.11.2010

This was our second night filming session of the season, just six days after the first. We went to the Knoll National Park and I filmed a Richmond River Snail, which has a conical shell; two eye-catching caterpillars suspended on threads; a glow worm curtain; a bush rat which miraculously clung to a bush for several minutes, even repositioning itself before moving on at an unhurried pace; a Black Spotted Semi-Slug, one of my favourite denizens of our rainforest; and a Net-Casting Spider which I had never previously encountered. It was much smaller than I had anticipated and I managed to get some footage of its net, which it appeared to consume.

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Website / 22.11.2010

I emailed Christina explaining that we need to increase the number of gallery pages on the website in order to provide EOL with more data and requesting information for Steve to be able to do this from here. In just over five years we have created 13 gallery pages totalling 156 images, whereas in less than a year I have uploaded over 300 images to my ‘One small place on earth . . .’ Facebook page. Of course I am not comparing like with like, but we do need to try and improve our productivity.

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Film Diary / 15.11.2010

I have been able to film at night on a weekly basis, which is very gratifying given that I am unable to film in the rain and we have had constant showery weather. This time we were in MacDonald National Park and I filmed snails, a fly and a pair of skinks, the female with eggs. The high point was filming two newly emerged Green Grocer Cicadas, the most common species round here.

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Film Diary / 06.11.2010

We have had a lot of rain throughout the past two years. A spring-fed creek has regularly formed a pond in a dip in a small property not far from where I live. Late in the day I filmed a pair of Wood Ducks roosting and saw that they had ducklings. Eventually the ducklings emerged and even entered the water. There were ten of them. Then they returned to their mother and I filmed them all managing to fit beneath her wings, which appeared to even exceed those of an aircraft in their ability to extend.

PS  On November 10, I filmed nine ducklings and shortly thereafter they had moved to the property to the rear.

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Website / 04.11.2010

The first I knew that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain had become an EOL Content Partner was an email I received today addressed to Content Partners about the appointment of EOL’s new Executive Director and another stating that I could now check last month’s usage of my data on EOL.

A quick visit to my EOL gallery revealed some long-standing errors and omissions. Still, it is a relief to at last be a Content Partner after 18 months of to-ing and fro-ing. The Content Partner page on which my website appears is here.

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Film Diary / 25.10.2010

This was our second night filming session of the season, just six days after the first. We went to the Knoll National Park and I filmed a Richmond River Snail, which has a conical shell; two eye-catching caterpillars suspended on threads; a glow worm curtain; a bush rat which miraculously clung to a bush for several minutes, even repositioning itself before moving on at an unhurried pace; a Black Spotted Semi-Slug, one of my favourite denizens of our rainforest; and a Net-Casting Spider which I had never previously encountered. It was much smaller than I had anticipated and I managed to get some footage of its net, which it appeared to consume.

 

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Website / 15.10.2010

On the day before I left for Europe I had emailed Katja Schulz in the hope that she could arrange for the remaining corrections to the XML data to be carried out while I was away. Alas, no such luck. On October 11 I received an email from Katja stating that she could not publish my material until she received updated information. I sent this today, in the form of a corrections document which listed every error I had found on the EOL preview site, plus one or two on my website.