After many hours over many days, I completed the Excels of my species videos update for the National Film & Sound Archive. In all we are submitting 124 videos, comprising a few from 2016 through to nine from 2019, once Steve has assembled the data files. One video needs to be added to the list and I need Steve to clarify the references on four files.
I have just completed listing all the images with locations, plus species identification for most of them, generated in 2018 for my Image Library at the Queensland Museum. There are 443 video frames and 291 photos, a total of 834 images. Once I download all the images and lists onto a USB and deliver it to the Museum, the library will contain 7,135 images.
I met Hilary Furlong over coffee today. She organises a monthly programme of afternoon events at the Zamia Theatre on behalf of the Tamborine Mountain Progress Association. She had asked me to show some of my videos when I attended one of last year’s events and we wanted to fix a date for my presentation. We settled on Saturday April 27.
Exactly twenty years ago, I wrote the first entry in my Film Diary. It was about filming the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean. The project’s duration didn’t figure in my thoughts at the time. One thing I could not have predicted was that the 20th anniversary coincided with a scheduled night walk. Before we set out, we – Hugh, Jaap, Mark, Robyn, Lumart, Karen and me – raised a glass of Veuve Clicquot to the health of the project, which I want to keep going as long as I can, and exchanged heartfelt words and thoughts.
At Lumart’s suggestion, after a long absence and two weather delays, we were at Witches Falls National Park. Paradoxically, recent walks have been both shorter and longer than ever. Shorter in distance covered, longer in time filming. This may have been the shortest yet. The track into the park comprises a level path which extends more than a kilometre before the descent to the shelf land which is its core. It was 10 o’clock when we turned back towards the car park and we were a fair distance from the first steps downhill. Even then, we found two frogs I had never… Read Complete Text
I have just uploaded the first gallery page since April this year. Jess has up-sized the enlargements for new and newly created images, which makes a tremendous difference. Steve and I did a number of fresh frame captures from old footage, some of which I have uploaded, and the enlargements all benefit from the up-sizing.
Eureka Productions from Sydney, got in touch about a wildlife series they are making for Animal Planet, with a request to use some of my possum video which they saw on youtube. I agreed, as long as I received payment for providing high resolution footage. Today, an email arrived stating that payment had been approved. The footage is needed to compare an Australian with an American possum. Both are marsupials, but they look quite different. I duly signed the licensing agreement this evening at Steve’s, and will email it and the footage to Eureka tomorrow or the day after.
PS The fee was paid into my account on 19 September.
Last year, I filmed and photographed a cotton shrub growing in a front garden, starting with the flowers in January, then the pods and the first cotton boll in March and finally a cotton harlequin bug in early April, followed by a female tending her newly laid eggs two weeks later. I photographed the nymphs on the 3rd of June, within a day of their hatching. The female never left her eggs for an incredible six weeks. At most, I counted ten bugs scattered throughout the shrubs at any one time, plus eventually, the hatchlings.
Noticing bolls on the shrub in early May this year, I crossed the road to take a look and was greeted by swarms of nymphs in various stages of development and plenty of adults, on leaf after leaf and crawling on stems, which I avidly photographed and filmed, returning for more photographs on succeeding days. Today I took another look and photographed a late instar female. There were more bugs than ever. I knocked on the door and spoke to one of the owners who admitted that he had never seen so many in the five years since he planted the shrubs.
Today I received two emails requesting a species identification from mountain residents.More often than not, I refer the enquirer to the Queensland Museum. Today I identified both the creatures, a moth and a spider. Also, this evening, I was asked permission for an early piece of mine about an orange-eyed treefrog in the Tamborine Mountain News to be used in a summary about an excellent recent series of seminars on Resilience.