12.July.2016 (Day 37)

Don’t go chasing

Not much to report about today I’m afraid. It was my last full day in Cairns and I had plenty of work, packing, and data entry to do (bleh). The one plus is that I’m no longer sharing this dingy hotel room with 10 cane toads constantly trying to escape their Tupperware enclosures.

Silence truly is golden.

With only a few hours of daylight to spare I thought it best to stay local and go to a recommended water hole to search for a few rare frogs that live in and around raging waters (mist frog and waterfall frog), neither of which I was able to find.

The rainforest of far north Queensland are about 0.2% of the land in Australia. In that small area they hold:

40% of all birds

35% of all mammals (including 30% marsupials, 60% bats, and 25% of the rodents)

30% of all frogs

20% of all reptiles

60% of all butterflies

65% of all ferns

21% of all cycads

37% of all conifers

30% of all orchids

And 18% of all Australia’s vascular plants

With such incredible biodiversity it’s amazing that there aren’t animals flying, crawling, hopping, and moving all over the place. But like I said earlier, the jungle is thick, really really thick. During a day in the bush you can see an amazing diversity of animals.

Trying to find high numbers of just one species (besides cane toads that is)?

Not so much

While animals mostly eluded me on my stroll today, I was amazed by the beautiful landscape in an area just outside of Cairns proper called Crystal Cascades.

This part of the country (especially the rainforest) gets a lot of rainfall. I’m talking a lot. On average over 205cm (~80in) of rain fall in some areas.

The result?

Beautiful waterfalls!

There were small cascades (where I was hoping to find the frogs I was after)

And raging torrents too slippery for clumsy biologists wandering about on their own.

Most of them fed into large pools that the locals use to cool of in the heat when the ocean is full of stinga's (jellyfish).










Some of the water erupted from between the rocks like a busted water main. And this is during the dry season!








Tomorrow its back to the NT for me. I'll be sad to say goodbye to my temporary home in this tropical paradise but there is still plenty of work to do. I've caught all the cane toads I set out to, however I still need to catch 37 water pythons and 7 children's pythons, and start/finish all the lab work.


It feels a little daunting but I'm up to the challenge.








Plus, when this is all over, I'll be given the best reward and finally see the two people I miss most in the world...