Cooper Creek by night ...

If you've read much of this blog, you'll know that nighttime is the best time to see many animals, and this is especially true of the rain forest. When I was organizing this trip, the only night tour of the rain forest that I came across was on a private property called Cooper Creek Wilderness. They did both day and night tours, and I duly wrote off for information about availability. Prue wrote back to say that this was an unusual year in terms of tourism (where had I heard that before?), and that so far noone was booked on the days I was interested in, but to phone when I was in the area.

So here I was at the signpost at the entrance to the property. The sign said not to enter without permission, so I tried my mobile phone - which rang but then cut out - and then the courtesy phone by the entrance sign - which also didn't work. Faced with the alternative of giving up, or entering without permission, I opted for the latter. Prue was waiting for me outside the house. An indomitable woman, perhaps in her 70s, she was expecting someone as her phone had rung and then cut out. The news wasn't good: there were no other bookings for the next few days, and I didn't want to spend longer than that in the Daintree as I had other plans. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, so we agreed that I'd call back at six. I wasn't over-optimistic, but amazingly a couple had called about a night tour in the intervening time. So at eight o'clock I was back at the house, ready to leave for the forest. Ready included an umbrella as I wanted to take photos and it was starting to rain. It rained steadily all evening, but the umbrella did its job and even survived the trip. Incredibly, since six, another couple had called to book a trip for the morning, so at the eleventh hour my original plans had fallen back into place.

Our guide for the evening was Prue's son Neil, and our first stop was an orchard that was being steadily reclaimed by the rainforest. Neil showed us a large, exquisitely camouflaged spider ...

... and a praying mantis ...

... before we headed into the forest proper. We stopped and turned our torch lights out, and the black enveloped us, but as our eyes adjusted there were flashing spots of light dancing around us: fireflies! The males flash their display, and watch for females signalling back, but the constant spots of light on the forest floor weren't females, but luminescent fungi, each perhaps a couple of millimeters across. The fungi fool the males into landing on them - and so get their spores dispersed. In the photo, the forest floor is lit by the flash, but the head of the fungus is glowing white.

Once inside the forest, we didn't follow a marked trail, but followed a route that Neil had learnt through the forest. We hadn't gone much further when we came upon our first Boyd's forest dragon - or rather Neil spotted it for us - clamped to the side of a sapling, just as the signs at Mossman Gorge yesterday (was that only yesterday?) had proclaimed. He was perhaps 50 cm long, and his head spines and coloration were both subtle and splendid. Apparently, there are two reasons that the chances of seeing them at Mossman Gorge are small: the first is that in daylight they move around the tree trunk to stay on the far side from prying eyes. The second, more sadly, is that they are taken and sold to be kept as pets - and those at Mossman Gorge and other public reserves are vulnerable to such poaching. We went on to see 6-10 more (I lost count) over the course of the evening.

It was obvious that Neil was exceptional at finding animals in the forest at night: he'd decided that he wanted to become a guide, and set out to train himself - including spending three years in total with three different aborigine groups to acquire skills at finding both animals and his way in the forest.

Besides the dragons there were various frogs:

In the light of the flash, some of these look quite obvious, but they can be well camouflaged against a background:

We saw birds, too, but Neil asked us not to take photos. When roosting, they are vulnerable to snakes, which can hunt in the dark using heat sensitive organs on their face. The birds roost at the very tips of thin branches, where vibrations alert them to the approach of a snake. Neil pointed them out to us with his torch beam, but taking care to draw a circe of light around them, rather than shining it directly at them. The other animal that Neil asked us not to photograph was a giant white-tailed rat, busy foraging on the forest floor. They occur in both New Guinea and Australia, and the narrow Torres Strait that separates the two is only 12 meters deep. For much of the last 250,000 years, up to about 10,000 years ago, sea level was lower and the two islands were joined by a land bridge. The giant white-tailed rat is one of of several rodent species that walked to Australia at that time.

We still had more insects to see, including this katydid, or bush-cricket. Katydids often have extraordinarily long antennae: this one's reach almost to the top edge of the photo.

Almost our last sighting of the night was a cicada, freshly emerged from its nymphal exoskeleton. Although we're most aware of cicadas from their loud songs during the few weeks that the adults live above ground, the majority of their life cycle, including a series of nymphal stages, is lived underground, using their stylet like mouthparts to suck on the roots of plants. This subterranean phase lasts anything from two years up to 17 years, depending on the species. This adult had emerged from the now-empty exoskeleton hanging below the leaf.