Queensland

 

A cassowary forages along a road edge in Queensland's Mission Beach. Meet one of Australia's strangest animals in a land full of strange animals. This is a four-foot-tall menace, a fruit-eating velociraptor that has the ability to disembowel you if you get too close. Australia is home to a menagerie of weird and wonderful animals found nowhere else on Earth.

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Queensland in northeast Australia butts up against the Coral Sea. It is covered in tropical rainforest but has a wealth of habitats from beaches to maritime forests to rocky grasslands and mountain woodlands.

My goal on this trip was to track down animals I had always wanted to see. So I scouted the best places to find cassowaries, koalas, fruit bats and platypus. My trip took me from the Daintree Rainforest, home to the feared saltwater crocodile, down the Pacific Coast of northeast Australia to beautiful Magnetic Island and inland into the hilly Atherton Tablelands.

I spent two days hiking in the rainforest in search of cassowaries before I lucked into one while photographing wallabies grazing in a farm field at the edge of a rainforest. The cassowary has a hollow casque on its head that helps it regulate temperature. They have a red dewlap like a turkey and beautiful jet-black feathers. I briefly glimpsed a second bird the next morning while leaving but couldn't get my lens on it, making this sighting especially lucky.

My photo trip started in Sydney, New South Wales, where I spent time with these sleepy flying foxes. These enormous fruit bats are gentle and fun, but never stop quarreling when they're awake.

Two rainy overcast days proved to be useful for photographing animals that spend all day high in the trees. The tropical sun in Australia is powerful, so the rain was welcome, even if the washed-out skies weren't. I spent the night in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney, so I could photograph the gray-headed flying foxes at Parramatta Park.

These spectacled flying foxes were equally hard to photograph in the high treetops of Yungaburra.

Rainbow lorikeets were one of the few birds that were cooperative photo subjects. I saw them everywhere I went in New South Wales and Queensland. Crayon bird!

Koalas are in trouble in most places they are found. But there is a healthy population on Magnetic Island, where I found this big male snoozing. 

Upon hearing a distant male roar, he roused just long enough to crane his head skyward and roar back. Then it was back to sleep!

A baby gremlin wakes up after sleeping away most of the day. The mom and baby sleep 22 of every 24 hours. 

Australia, I want my money back. I didn't see a single red or gray kangaroo. But I did spy this rare tree kangaroo. And true to its name it was 70 feet high in the branches in the Atherton Tablelands. 

The beautiful kangaroo ventured to the ground where I was able to get a few pics before it wandered off in search of other trees. Traffic is a huge danger for these arboreal specialists.

Hearing the trill of a kookaburra was a little surreal. This bird provided the soundtrack of every low-budget jungle movie I ever watched growing up. And they're just here. In trees. Like normal birds!

After days of looking, I failed to find any platypus and I left the Atherton Tablelands defeated. But before catching my plane, I made one last try, heading back into the hills and finally had success!

While I didn't see any gray or red kangaroos, I saw lots of their smaller cousins, wallabies. They were regular fixtures of lawns and gardens in the evenings in Queensland.

Cave wallaby? No, this little rock wallaby is taking a nap in the cool shade of a jumble of boulders on Magnetic Island.

The little rock wallabies were super fun to watch. They are little garden gnomes standing just two feet tall.

A little joey peeks out from its pouch while its mom wakes up for an evening of foraging.

Here be dragons.

The Daintree rainforest was a bit of a dud, so I headed back to the river ferry and got on a boat to look for friendly saltwater crocodiles. 

Saltwater crocodiles are aggressive and dangerous, killing people in Queensland almost every year.

The Creek episode of Bluey is a favorite for my niece and me so it was great fun to find this little pademelon on a creek trail while looking for platypus. Pademelons are among the smaller wallabies, the size of a cat. Bluey's right. The creek is beautiful!