I photographed this moth on a brick wall. At rest it looked like a fairly boring brown moth, but when it moved you could see the black and white hindwings. Compared with all the other little brown moths on the wall that night, this one looked quite attractive. The wing span is about 6cm. if anyone knows what it is, please let me know.

There has been a lot of publicity recently about the proposed cull of 500 kangaroos in Belconnen in the Australian Capital Territory. Compared with the total number of kangaroos killed each year in Australia, this is a small percentage of the total. There is a significant commercial kangaroo industry in Australia that “harvests” wild kangaroos - mainly for meat and skins. The total kangaroo quota for 2007 was about 3.6 million. There are over 50 species of kangaroos and wallabies in Australia, with the following species killed commercially:

I got an email the other day from Hans Engstrand in Sweden. Hans is breeding King Parrots and currently has 23 of them. They are hardy birds and can thrive in Sweden in temperatures down to minus 20 degrees. On his web site www.kungsparakit.com he has photos of King Parrots in the snow.

For more information on this bird, see the OzAnimals King Parrot page

Did you know that Praying Mantis eyses changed colour at night - I didn’t realise this until a couple of days ago. I photographed this Mantis at night on one of our potted fig plants, and the red eyes were very noticable.

Granny’s Cloak Moth is a large brownish grey moth. You often see them in dark buildings like in your garage, or shed or in outdoor dunnies. They look faily drab boring moths but in the light of the flash they have quite a nice pattern. Click on the pic for more info.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve added a few dozen new pages to the insect section of the site.

How do you tell the difference between sawfly larvae and moth/butterfly larvae.

From what I’ve read, one way to tell the difference between sawfly larvae and moth larvae is to count the legs. Sawfly larvae have 9 or more pairs of legs - 3 pairs of true legs at the front and 6 or more pairs of stumpy legs (called prolegs) at the back. Butterfly and moth caterpillars never have more than eight pairs of legs (3 pairs of true legs plus up to five pairs of prolegs).

To get a really decent photo of Jupiter showing the bands of the planet requires some specialist equipment including a decent telescope. However you can take a recognizable photo of Jupiter and its four main moons with much more modest equipment. With a basic SLR camera and a telephoto consumer zoom lens (e.g a 100-300mm zoom from Tamron or Sigma or your favorite camera manufacturer will do). I had a crack at it with a Samsung Schneider SA 50-200mm zoom lens (this is the same lens as the Pentax DA 50-200mm).

One of the challenges of close up work is the very limited depth of field (i.e. not much is in sharp focus). You can increase depth of field by stopping down the aperture to f11 or f16, but depending on how large your subject, you may only have a few millimeters in focus (less than a mm at high magnification).

One of the challenges when starting out with macro is to get a photo of the eye segments of a fly. There are a number of ways you can go about it - a dedicated macro lens like a Tamron SP 90mm 1:1 macro or Sigma 105mm EX DG macro (or the Canon / Nikon/ Pentax etc. equivalent) would be fantastic.