Daintree River Area 10/12-10/14--30 Life Birds, 3 Year Birds

PAPUAN FROGMOUTH, on nest, Daintree River

We drove up the Captain Cook Highway from Cairns with the Coral Sea on our right, getting one year bird--Black Kite--and one life bird--AUSTRALIAN KESTREL at 100 kph.

Coral Sea panorama

Daintree Village

BAR-SHOULDERED DOVES

We arrived in Daintree Village in the late afternoon, where are first life bird was seen on the road coming in, a pair of very pretty BAR-SHOULDERED DOVES. We had just enough time to check into our rooms, overlooking the Daintree River, before we were scheduled to go on the first of our boat trips up and down the river. The rainy season, according to Alex, our guide/boatman, was just about to begin, which would mean massive flooding of the river. We had to descend a long driveway to get to the boat launch which was about 20 feet below the car park. He said that at times, during the rainy season, he had been able to launch the boat from the car park! That's a flood.

Some of the highlights of our rather meandering trip along the waterway was our first AUSTRALASIAN DARTER (akin to our Anhinga), the lucky for us to find it WHITE-BROWED CRAKE, and the even hard to find PAPUAN FROGMOUTH (see photo above). There are a lot of beautiful birds in Australia. The Papuan Frogmouth is not one of them.

AUSTRALASIAN DARTER

WHITE-BROWED CRAKE

As we proceeded, Alex saw that I was keeping an eBird list (it is ever thus) of the birds we'd seen. He asked me how many Cattle Egrets I'd noted. Only the one with all the cattle along the river bank, I told him.  He smiled. A few minutes later he came around a bend in the river and asked me now how many Cattle Egrets I was going to count:

The photo shows only a small section of the huge roost that the egrets were flying to as the sun set. Dozens at a time were coming down the river. It reminded me of our time on the Caroni Swamp in Trinidad when the Scarlet Ibises came into their roost, except that Cattle Egrets are not nearly as spectacular looking. But the Cattle Egrets in Australia look very different from the Cattle Egrets in the Western Hemisphere, having much more buff color on their faces and necks than the ones we see in Florida, the Caribbean, and even Africa. Right now they are a sub-species. I'm hoping for a split. 

The next morning we took another ride on the river; this time our boatman was Sauce, the original owner of the boat and probably the only Australian I had a hard time understanding, his accent so thick. He was not the only Australian I had a hard time hearing. That was all of them. Despite a reputation for being loud and hardy souls, my experience was that Australians never raise their voices above sotto voce. If I hadn't been around 5 other Americans, I would have thought I was losing my hearing. 

Of course "Sauce" is not his real name and when we inquired as to its origin he told us that, well, his last name was Worcester so inevitably he was called "Sauce." Inevitably. 

We saw plenty of birds with Sauce, but nothing new, and right after the trip Alex joined us for a jaunt across the river (via a car ferry pulled by a cable) to the pessimistically named Cape Tribulation to look for CASSOWARIES...which we did not find despite "looking here and there, looking everywhere." But we did add BROWN CUCKOO-DOVE, PACIFIC EMERALD DOVE, PACIFIC HERON, PACIFIC REEF-HERON & YELLOW-SPOTTED HONEYEATER to our lists, but since we were birding primarily from a car (which I dislike) no photos were obtained. Here is a photo of a Pacific Heron (also know as White-necked Heron) that we saw later the next day (photo also taken from the car)

Hard to believe that we could miss a bird that stands as tall as a man, but we had, so the next morning, before we left for the Tablelands south and west of Daintree, we tried again, and after another hour or so of driving the now familiar roads of Cape Tribulation, Lon suddenly called out, "There it is!" and we saw a magnificent Cassowary trot across the road. Unfortunately, big as it was, it disappeared into the thick brush when we pulled up to the spot where it had left the road. Still, we all had great, if brief views of this very early species in the taxonomic order. 

Before we left our hotel in Daintree Village, Kim called us over to the little office area. There one of the workers was holding in her hand a moth. I'm not particularly interested in moths, butterflies, or any insects--I leave that to my brother--but this moth was special, being huge, making the Polyphemus Moth that sometimes flits around here look like a midget.

It is called a HERCULES MOTH and, according to my brother, is considered the largest moth in the world.

On our way south we made several stops without finding much, but at the intersection of Wonga Beach Road & Mossman Daintree Rd, Mike spotted a group of white herons that weren't Cattle Egrets. Instead they turned out to be one of the species we most wanted to see on the trip, ROYAL SPOONBILLS. As Kim pointed out, it pays to really look at the birds instead of just blowing them off as common species. Or as Yogi Berra said: You can observe a lot by watching.