Daintree River Cruise - wildlife and birds

We'd rung up the previous day to arrange this, having noticed in a brochure that special wildlife cruises were available on request. Getting out of bed at 5.30am for a 6.30am start was painful -- and the trip would have started even earlier if we hadn't had to catch the ferry which started running at 6am. Fortunately they provided coffee before we set off!

Our guide was Lee, a soft-spoken Texan who'd been in Australia for 34 years, and there was one other couple, English bird-watchers from Kent. There were apparently fewer birds around than usual, but we saw maybe fifteen species of birds and heard a few more, most of them new to us. Highlights were a pair of jabiru storks, a couple of azure kingfishers, a little kingfisher, a pair of sunbirds and their nest, and an osprey. We also saw three amethystine pythons curled up in trees hanging over the water, and a crocodile that slid away too far off for me to see.

Lee really knew his stuff -- he talked about the latest research on everything from mangroves to crocodiles -- and it was great to be on a small boat without screaming children.