Into Far North Queensland

 Thursday September 29

Today was mostly a travel day: a 2.5 hour flight from Brisbane to Cairns and then a 2+ hour drive from Cairns to the Cape Tribulation section of Daintree National Park.  Did you know that Melbourne is closer to Brisbane than Cairns is? The Daintree is unusual as it represents the intersection of two World Heritage regions, the Wet Tropics Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.  The Dividing Range of Mountains that run the length of Australia veer to the east and come right down to the shoreline in the Daintree. Daintree is also the oldest surviving rainforest in the world, estimated to be 180 millions years old, and it contains 13 of the 15 flowering plant species that remain from the Jurassic period. The area was not recognized for its importance until the 1970s, when a local farmer realized that a local fruit was killing his cows. Botanists were amazed that the “idiotfruit” still existed, and then discovered other ancient species in the area. The National Park was created in 1988, but as in places like the Adirondacks, there are private landholders within the park that decided to stay there rather than sell their land to the government for park inclusion.

While we will search for many species, the big target is to see a Southern Cassowary, a keystone species in the region. Cassowaries eat from 200 species of flowering and fruiting trees and disperse their seeds; for 100 of the species, passing through a cassowary is essential to the seed germinating. 

After dinner, we went on a night walk. We learned two interesting things about Orange-footed Scrubfowl, a guineafowl-like ground bird. They sleep on thin branches high above the ground so that if a snake approaches, the branch will bend and wake the bird up in time to flee. They also make enormous piles of leaf litter for nesting — they test the temperature with their beaks to be sure that they have dug a hole deep enough for their eggs. Then they cover their eggs and rely on the heat from the composting vegetation to incubate them without the fowl having to actually sit on the nest. Finally they dig dozens of other holes around the real egg hole as decoys to confuse predators. 

We also saw a number of Peppermint Stick Insects, nocturnal leaf eaters that exclusively live in a type of Pandanus palm in mangrove forests, and are named for the smell of the defensive (and corrosive) liquid they squirt. On our way out we saw a Striped Possum high in a tree peering down at us.

Pictured:  Orange-footed Scrubfowl,  Peppermint Stick Insect, Striped Possum