Jewel Beetle Excursion 
Kevin Bonham 
L ast year the club was involved in the first ever finds 
of the Miena Jewel Beetle (Castiarina insculpta) in 
good numbers. This species, once presumed extinct, was 
rediscovered in 2004, but had been rarely seen until our 
trips in February 2013 (see the 2013 Tasmanian 
Naturalist for more). The weather a day short of the 
anniversary of last year's jewel beetle flurry was a 
scorcher on the Plateau so a small group of us organised 
at short notice to go and see how the beetle was getting 
on. 
We quickly found that the species' host plant 
(Ozothamnus hookeri) was not fully in flower, and were 
unable to find the beetle at all at Liawenee, Lake Ada 
and a couple of points along the Lake Augusta road. It 
was a strange experience to search bushes that had 
swarmed with the species only a year ago and yet not 
see it. We did however find the poorly known Castiarina 
rudis (also seen on the outing two years back) - at least 
From the President 
Kevin Bonham 
G reetings Field Nats. Your new President for this year 
is also one of your old Presidents - I was last in this 
role from 1997-1999. When I finished the previous run, I 
did intend I could be up for another stint in the far-off 
future, say when I was forty-something .. and it's come 
around again so quickly. 
This will be an exciting and busy year for the Club. We've 
already had the launch of Genevieve and David's 
milestone publication Fungi of Tasmania and will soon 
be embarking on our Easter Camp to the Fingal Valley, 
an area surprisingly little visited by many naturalists. Our 
biggest event comes in late October with the Australian 
Naturalists Network meeting at the Lea. This will be a 
great opportunity for us to showcase our state's flora, 
fauna and landforms and also the great body of 
knowledge within our club's ranks. Please consider 
helping with caretaking or acting as guide on the buses; 
the more people pitch in, the easier it is for a club the 
size of ours to run a successful event. 
Alongside all that we will have our normal program of 
monthly talks and outings and I can't say enough of the 
great work done by Amanda in arranging this program, 
which is really the backbone of the club's activities. 
My immediate predecessor Greg Fleap was only 
President for the one year but in that time was an 
entertaining chairman who brought a great innovation 
to the way club meetings are presented, in the form of 
the Power Point and photo backdrops to meetings. I will 
be trying to continue this but please be aware I'm a 
two female specimens, with at least one probable male 
sighted, at Lake Ada. (A few days later Abbey and I also 
saw what was probably this species at Lake Dobson, Mt 
Field). 
Other searches for C. insculpta by various hunters also 
had little success, with a general impression that the 
host plant flowered late and not so well as in other 
seasons. Karen Richards and Chris Spencer managed to 
find the only confirmed living specimen known to me for 
the season, while Simon Grove was involved in an 
unconfirmed sighting (specimen seen flying only). For 
whatever reason this was not a good season for the 
beetle, increasing the likelihood that what happened in 
2013 occurs either unreliably or perhaps even very 
rarely. 
Roll on the 2015 search! 
Thanks to all who attended this one. 
relative technical duffer who still uses Office 2000, and 
very busy outside FieldNats hours; I will need a lot of 
help from other committee members to gather photos 
and so on for use as illustrations. (If you've taken a good 
photo to use as backdrop, please email it to 
president(a>tasfieldnats.org.au )■ 
I'm very pleased to welcome new committee members 
Kristi Ellingsen (Vice-President) and Deirdre Brown 
(Bulletin Editor). I thank Beth Heap (outgoing Bulletin 
Editor) and Simon Grove (formerly Naturalist Editor and 
more recently general committee member) for their 
great contributions to the committee. Also our thanks to 
Qug McKendrick-King who handed over the position of 
Librarian to Elizabeth Bicevskis after many years in the 
role. And to those committee members who have 
volunteered their time and signed up for another year. 
By way of brief bio for those who don't know me so well, 
I've been in the club since my mid-teens in the 1980s. 
I'm an expert on land snails, and have interests in many 
other areas of natural history (especially orchids, 
millipedes and beetles). I work as a casual invertebrate 
research contractor, increasingly also as an election 
analyst, and travel to strange parts of the world in my 
role as a national chess administrator. As befits a 
President, I'm far too good at talking, but I have rather 
poor and patchy hearing, especially around the range of 
the background whirr in our lecture theatre. So if you 
see me cupping my ears or acting vague while you are 
talking at a meeting, be not afraid, it isn't you; it's me! 
Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club 
Page 5 
BULLETIN 354 April 2014 
