Many people watched the prime time BBC nature special about the Rift Valley on Sunday night (May 15). I was astonished to see the film clips of a new species of monkey, the Highland Mangabey (Lophocebus kipunji). The best estimate of their population? A thousand individuals. There’s a suite of conservation programs already underway.

Here, in front of me, are the latest graphs about climate change, ocean acidity, loss of wildlife and human impact. They’re all trends marked out to 2050. I’m considering this data for a presentation next week. I suddenly realise that I’m considering a future world when I am, statistically speaking, likely to be dead. Something zings inside of me and I look way beyond the ink marks on the paper.

The old joke is that if you find the pace of modern life too fast, switch to geologic time. The years are counted in the millions. Trends take an epoch to come and go. Take the past ten to twelve thousand years, a post glacial epoch known as the Holocene. This title was suggested by Charles Lyell, British geologist, in 1833. Fifty two years later, the Geological Congress officially agreed. Taking this long view, what are your day to day problems? Against the slow steady pace and massive effect of glaciers, what is any of our human effort but puny and even vain?

For several months now, as the swamp wallaby decayed, I waited for this moment. Its flesh was eaten by the earth. The skin facing the sky dried in the sun. An ear and some skin remains attached to the skull. I swallow hard and sweep aside the last small beetles crawling about. Then I look into its eyes.

The night was dark and stormy. The wind was lashing the tree branches against the house roof. Rain was pouring down. A heavy thud against the floor to ceiling window startled me out of my book. There, the noise again and again.  I shone my torch at an angle through the lowest section of the glass. Facing me was a large green frog.

That’s the third species this evening, pausing at my window. Perhaps the frogs are catching a breath. This time, I grab my camera, switch on the outdoor light and step out the front door.

Who always has a soft body covered with a mantle and often, but not always, a hard exterior? With a single flat foot and a mouth full of chainsaw teeth? Who has green blood full of copper? A net of nerve cells with a row of some knotted together into clumps? Optional extras are either lungs or gills or being of one sex or another or both. Size? From microscopic to thirteen metres.

The last illness of the season caught me out and changed my weekend plans. The only roaming I did was through a new book about orangutans of Indonesia and the rescue work led by Willie Smit. Twenty years ago, the forest ecologist’s life changed when he stopped at a rubbish heap in a market and picked up a sickly infant ape left to die.

The seastar belongs to a group of some six thousand species called echinoderms. These include sea urchins, brittle stars, sea feathers and sea cucumbers. We struggle with these names, which hint of form but not of function or lifestyle. We barely comprehend their existence, extended over 550 million years. We often forget how abundant they are today. We don’t quite appreciate exactly what they are as our relatives.

The upcoming election added urgency to talk throughout the recent Byron Bay Writers Festival. I listened to writers of both nonfiction and fiction use their own works to counter the talk of political leaders and their policies. Media commentators brought in other perspectives. Between sessions, everyone around me had another story.

The line of hairy caterpillars was marching across the brickwork of the house into a dark hole in the wooden doorway. They are Ochrogaster lunifer, better known as processionary caterpillars. The name hallmarks their orderly movement, echoing a solemn religious ritual. Their European relatives are another species but, marching in the same way, they have the same common name. The southern European ones head for pine trees and the Australian ones for Acacias. From what I can see, these ones here seem to be lost.