Morning Birding on the Daintree River

We decided to get our Cairns holiday up in gear by going in hard! An early morning 2 hours of birdwatching from Chris Dahlberg's little boat on the Daintree River seemed an excellent way to get the day off to a cracking start!

6.30am and the rain was pouring down, but with a couple of strategically well placed umbrellas Gemma was able to keep herself and my camera gear semi dry. Luckily it was by far the worst in the first 15-20 minuets or so after which the rain turned into a mere drizzle.

I once again had to convince myself that the camera is just a tool and built for use - if it cannot be used it has no value ... actually I do not know how clever an approach that is, but I am happy to inform the readers that there is still value left in the light-loving-box.

Chris Dahlberg's dawn birding cruise on the Daintree River is quite famous for being some of the most exciting birdwatching you can do and despite of the weather being less than mediocre it was absolutely fantastic stuff! The Great Billed Heron above being one of the highlights.

As I have mentioned before, we had pushed our luck by placing our Cairns trip very close to the rainy season and the cruise we attended was indeed the first of the season, so no one had a clue of what we would see. Once again - having a knowledgeable local guide is golden when you want to get full value of a new habitat! Chris did an absolutely fantastic job taking us around on the river, pointing out rare and wonderful birds and telling anecdotes about water, trees and wildlife.


We did not see the Papuan Frogmouth and we did not see the Little Kingfisher, but otherwise we saw more or less everything else worth seeing :-D Chris keeps a record of the wildlife seen during his trips, which can be found here. I have to admit that I am once again badly late with these blog posts - more than a month in fact, we participated on the tour 2nd of April - there is a direct link to our sightings here.

As I already mentioned, we were quite happy to see the Great-billed Heron, one of the birds I did not see when I was in Kakadu, Gemma did her little ticking dance after spotting a Black Bittern and we were both happy with Gould's Bronze-Cuckoo (now lumped with Little B-C) and Double-eyed Fig-Parrot plus all the rest.

Daintree Village And The First Encounter With The River

It kept raining all the way north! Good news though, there was absolutely no trouble finding accommodation for the night - guess no other tourists were crazy enough to drive out of Cairns ;-) Having a few hours of daylight left and 50% of the party battling Jet-lag it was clear that we had to do something.

Crocodile Express definitely had a name that suggested it could keep little G. awake :-D so within 10 min of entering Daintree Village, we had sorted out where to sleep and gotten ourselves Daintree River cruise tickets that would allow us to cruise all week if we wanted.

Sailing up and down the Daintree River was a great choice, doing the same in a boat with a roof was priceless! Finally being able to shoot the camera without having to expose it the the wrath of the elements was a joy.

Being out of your usual habitat, you realize how important it is to have a good guide - your vision is just not tuned into the type of wildlife you can find along a tropical river bank unless you are used to it. We were alright in finding the birds, but if it was not for our excellent local guide, we would probably not have seen the two Green Tree Snakes.

Next was the sales argument of the trip: You cannot really call your cruise "Crocodile Express" without delivering a few "salties". Once again, our guide delivered in the most impressive way possible .. obviously he knew where the croc had been seen earlier during the day, but still he spotted a croc so hidden, that it took 3-4 passes with the boat before some of us tourists got it and after that, he had to pull out the laser pointer and put a green dot directly on the creature to give everyone a view.

My pictures are not great, but conditions were such that it was warmer for the saltwater crocodile to stay in the water than to crawl onto land, hence exposing very little skin above water .. my companion had brought her underwater camera, but vigorously refused to help by doing her part of the photography and the opportunity of getting a couple of "different" croc close-ups. :-D

We spent an enjoyable 1h45m on the river before getting back to land. Accommodation was less than 200 meters from the jetty. While checking in we also managed to book tickets for the early morning birdwatching cruise with Chris Dahlberg. One of the events we had been looking forward to and which would prove to be one of the highlights of the trip. :-)

Fantastic feeling to get into a dry cabin and to put on some dry clothes! We had a great supply of tasty camping food, that could equally well be cooked in the cabin kitchen. While cooking we could enjoy the views down over the paddock where the Cattle Egrets had teamed up with the cows .. not all of us where 100% alert at this point and as it got dark and the Cane Toads started jumping around the cabin, only yours truly made it out of bed to immortalize the event.

Fantastic day and with a little luck it would not rain the next day ...???

Carins Esplanade - A Wader-watching Paradise

We did not have optimal weather! The panorama above should be proof of that, however, it did not matter much, since I cannot imagine it harmed the number of waders along the Cairns Esplanade. As usual the best way to see new birds is to change habitat! .. and since I have not done much around tropical mudflats in the past it proved very rewarding taking a stroll down the boardwalk in center of Cairns.

I wrote in the previous post that the boardwalk was very cleverly designed and I really mean that. It allows the visitor to get incredibly close without interfering with the action below. You cannot get onto the mudflats (and I cannot imagine why you should want to) and the birds have realized this, so they have developed a no-interest-attitude to what is going on up above on the boardwalk. This might also be partly due to the fact that the track is lifted up to a few meters above where the birds wandering around are searching for food.

Before we could even see water, we started seeing exciting birds. The trees were humming with Metallic Starlings and Varied Honeyeaters (both new to me) and you had to be careful not to step on one of the peaceful doves running around between your legs.

The southern end of the Esplanade gave excellent views of a good collection of egrets and herons. Photographically it was a bit of a challenge, an ever changing combination of rain, clouds, shadow and light made it hard, throw in the fact that we had arrived at absolute lowest tide, allowing the birds to stand furthest away from the boardwalk and you have yourself a challenge.

One of the reasons these Cairns posts have been so badly delayed is the time it has taken to actually identify what we managed to see :-D Waders are hard! - notice that I am not saying that they are harder than small birds in the deep dark Daintree rain forest - but boy is it hard when they are changing between breeding and non-breeding plumage, throw in the sexual dimorphism and I will have to admit that my Simpson & Day was just not sufficient to ID everything we saw. The Michael Morcombe book is better for waders, but there are still pictures of birds that I am not sure about so if any of you readers out there want to chip in, I can assure you that you are very welcome.


Most of the pictures in this post should however be sorted. It took a while to recognize the two Great Knots in the picture after the Terek Sandpiper down below. Also, not being super sharp with my waders, I was quite intrigued by the little colorful bird above the whimbrel, but trawling through the pictures it looks like a Red-necked Stint with a plumage somewhere between breeding and non-breeding .. I should probably have realized that much faster, since that is a frequent guest around Sydney.


The Grey-tailed Tattler was a bit of a headache as well, until I got hold of Michael Morcombe's field guide. My own book gave very few hints to how to distinguish the grey-tailed from the wandering only providing pictures of them in non-breeding coloration. Lesser Sand Plover below was much easier - a great little bird! All in all we spend a very rewarding hour or so wandering up and down the Esplanade before we started getting nervous about where we would be sleeping for the night.


Our plan had been to cover as much of Tropical North Queensland as possible and camp as we moved around, for the first day we had planned on making our way north to the Daintree river. Considering the weather we decided against the camping, it would simply be impossible to keep things dry - or to dry wet gear - in a wet tent, however, we still liked the idea of getting to Daintree River. That unfortunately also meant that we had to plan a bit ahead and sort out accommodation for the night. So despite of having super duper birding at the Cairns Esplanade we decided to fire up the rented car and push north .. weather would probably also be better up there!..???

Cairns - Easter Escape

Cairns for Easter, how good was that! :-) Easter had proven a bit of a challenge to arrange this year, I truly enjoy the road trip-camping combination type of holidaying, but at the same time there are a few hot spot locations in Australia that are not easily reached by land-based transport out of Sydney if you are restricted by the time frame of a long weekend - even taking into account the long-distance-superiority of the Magna. Cairns is one of those places - others are; Broome, Alice Springs and Tasmania, hopefully I will be able to report from a few of these places later during the year, but for now it will be about Cairns for a while.

Being a bit creative with the use of extra holidays we managed to get the needed flight tickets without having to donate blood or organs - just! Boy is Easter expensive(?). The result being that we managed to get 5 days in the Tropical North Queensland at the cost of only one additional holiday and a few dollars. In the wisdom of hindsight it could be argued that pushing that far north early April is like playing with water .. and it was, we probably had 4.5 days of good quality rain that would make any outback farmer dance around in happiness. We did not dance, but realized that with a few changes to the plan we could easily deal with it; no camping - the tent would never dry again, and be careful with your electronic gear, including camera and lenses. I was seriously afraid of how the camera would deal with such conditions, but at the same time it is just a tool and it only has value when being used. I can now happily state that it is still alive and that modern cameras can take much(!) much(!) more water than I would ever had expected before this trip! :-D Our only casualty was a mobile phone that did not like the continuous exposure to 100% humidity. The rain may have hurt us slightly when it comes to the amount of wildlife we saw, particular bird count. However, looking at the outcome of the trip it is probably to our benefit that we were slowed down slightly, otherwise it would have been seriously stressful having to tick all those species :-D Otherwise the rain was no problem, because as they say up there "it is warm rain" and in a weird way quite pleasant.

Arriving in Cairns little G. immediately fell in love with the most exciting fruit and vege market I have ever seen. Initially I desperately tried to argue the case of how much more "fruitful" it would be to spend more time at the Cairns Esplanade 200 meters further down the road, but in the end I had to give in and agree that they have some seriously fantastic fruits, which gave us lots of tasty treats throughout our little holiday.

Finally we made our way down to the Cairns Esplanade! Weather was not great, but who cares when you are at this very cleverly designed boardwalk, which allow you to wander along the water having scenic views of Cairns and the mountains and rain forest surrounding it, without disturbing the life of the mudflats happening a couple of meters below.

As you might already have guessed, we concentrated more on the mudflats down below than the scenic vistas :-D It was absolutely crawling with life. The mudskippers were doing fantastic acrobatic moves to attract the opposite sex .. and to fend of rivals. Best guess is that this species is part of the Periophthalmus family. I remember reading about mudskippers many years ago when I first started being interested in aquarium fish, fantastic animals that are truly amphibious, as long as they are wet they can breath through their skin(!) allowing them to access food sources unreachable to other fish. Arriving at the Esplanade at low tide also allowed us to see armies of mud crabs roaming around feeding on the dirt, but we were probably more impressed by the Fiddler crabs sitting slightly closer to the boardwalk displaying its enormous colorful claw.

As you might have noticed, I have not included a single bird picture. I will make up for that shortly by a full blog post dedicated to the feathered wildlife of the Cairns Esplanade - see you soon.

Surfs Up in Bondi - A Good Excuse For a Photowalk

Once again I teamed up with Yiing for a photowalk around Coogee. We had not really planned where to go, but with the sun shining and a generally quite fantastic day the vote took us north along the coast .. and there was something about a surf competition at Bondi.

As we got closer to Bondi we realized that the surf competition was indeed well and truly on and a few celebrity surfers had made their way to Bondi - including Kelly Slater.

Taking surf pictures is soooo rewarding and dare I say easy(?), at least compared to the struggle I normally have when trying to frame those birds - the surfers are where the waves are - simple as that! :-D Despite arriving late we probably ended up in a near perfect position up on the wall just south of the beach, where we had great views to the action on the water and the shenanigan on the beach.


Fantastic stuff! Great seeing an event like that and fun trying to shoot a very different type of pictures. However, it had taken us close to 2 hours walking to Bondi and "yes" we could probably do the return journey faster, but still it would take a while making it back to Coogee, so we decided to leave before the price ceremony.

On our way to Bondi, we had actually "practiced" taking surf pictures of a couple of surfers at Tamarama. I have included some of the pictures here, this particular day I guess the organizers would have been better off relocating the competition a beach further south, Tamarama was sporting some super good waves and the closeness of the break made it a pure joy to take pictures there.

Barren Grounds Nature Reserve

Jarrod convinced me that we needed to go to Barren Grounds Nature Reserve for a bit of bushwalking. I was easily convinced since BGNR is a great place to walk, but more importantly it sports a unique type of habitat, hanging swamp plateau, that is home to a great selection of wildlife that is otherwise very hard to find. Some celebrity inhabitants are Ground Parrot, Eastern Bristlebird and Southern Emu-wren - I needed the GP and Jarrod, who more or less has to hold a bird in the hand before he is convinced that he actually has truly seen it, have so far managed to avoid eye contact with the SEW.

Weather was not on our side - at all! Wet and windy and a annoying fog hanging low above the scrub made it nearly impossible to spot anything further away than arms reach, however, as always there is something going on when you get you lazy arse off the couch and the humid air had the advantage that it was much easier than normal to spot the various spider webs along the path, which resulted in an encounter with what might just be the prettiest spider I have ever seen: Gasteracantha minax or Jewel Spider between friends :-)

I am terribly sorry about the poor quality of the pictures, having expected a sunny day on the highland heath I had not brought the macro lens and even if I had I would probably not have been super happy changing lenses in the middle of all the wind and wetness. So you will have to do with high ISO and pseudo macro capability in combo with the spider sitting on a very bouncy branch.

Having seen next to no birds the entire day, it was quite a bit of a surprise when the Bassian Thrush in the picture above suddenly appeared on the path in front of us. Those of you who follow the blog regularly will know that it was the only new bird I managed to (nearly) see down in Wilson's Promontory so quite nice getting another (less than medium good) look at it.

Walking in Australia is often limited by how much water you can carry, not having that problem this particular day, we decided to get some kilometers in the boots and managed to clock up 20km before we were back at the Magna - not bad going for a lazy Saturday :-)

All good, great walking and a beautiful drive down south. My trusted co-pilot had once again(?) managed to get us (more or less!) straight to our target location - with a little telephonic help from his better half at home :-D On our way home the only unforeseen happening was the timing of a few hundred cows deciding that the grass was greener on the other side - but I blame no one for that ;-)