Category: Nature photography

My nature photography, mainly insects and mainly from Townsville

Daintree River views

Driving north from Mossman one encounters a sign pointing right to the famous Daintree ferry and Cape Trib, or left to Daintree Village on the river a few kilometres upstream.

The Village isn’t very big – a pub, a few shops and houses, some tourist accommodation and a jetty for the boaties. We stayed there overnight so that we could take an evening wildlife-spotting cruise with Daintree River Wild Watch, which was so good that we repeated it early next morning.

Daintree Village motel
Daintree Village Lodge

I came home with so many bird photos that they need a separate post, but here are some river views for context.

Daintree River Views

Dawn and dusk are the best times for birds and for atmospheric landscape photos, and I really loved the morning mists.

Daintree Village view
Misty dawn on the Daintree

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The Town Common in September

The Town Common Conservation Park, to give it its full name, is a valuable wetland year-round but changes with the seasons. Now, in mid-September, it is drying out. Grasses and small shrubs are dying off except where they are in or near the remaining open water. Water birds are returning to the Common as other resources dry out even more, but insects and other birds are not so numerous.

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Ross Dam and the Borrow Pits

We visited Ross Dam recently with members of Wildlife Queensland’s Townsville Branch for a morning of birdwatching and botanising.  We wandered along the dam wall, back to the park at its foot, and then down to the Borrow Pits nearby.

The dam was much lower than on my last visits, in March and May of last year, but the Borrow Pit made me a liar by being emptier than when I saw it in December 2013. Perhaps we had had more rain before that visit than we have had in the last few months?

Views from the dam wall

Ross Dam
Looking along the dam wall

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Panoramas from Mount Stuart

Three months ago I spent a morning on Mt Stuart and came home with new perspectives on familiar Townsville locations. Last weekend I spent a very enjoyable afternoon with friends on a slightly different part of the mountain, and came home with another set of views.

We were hanging round on cliffs which look towards Cape Cleveland and Magnetic Island. For much of the time we were on a ledge only a couple of metres wide, with cliffs above us (on the right of my first photo) and beneath us.

mountain view
The view towards Mt Elliott

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