Excursion Report – Cassowary Coast long excursion, held 22nd to 25th August 2025
This excursion planned to visit two coastal areas in the tropics of northeastern Queensland; the Cassowary Coast from 10th to 21st August and Cape Hillsborough from22nd to 25th August.
The Cassowary Coast segment was based in ‘Bali Hai’ Holiday Park in Wongaling Beach, where we used one of their buildings as a headquarters as members were camping or lodging at several places in the area. We also had the services of the Community for Coastal and Cassowary Conservation – known as C4 – which is a local community group, which has premises in Mission Beach.
Their president, Peter Rowles, provided a lot of assistance and time to help make our stay a very enjoyable and profitable one. On two occasions in their C4 hall we had talks by three of their members. Helen Larsen told us about some of her work on the gobies (fish) of the area. Jeff Larsen spoke about his special interest in the local Southern Cassowary, and on another occasion Deb Pergolotti told us the sad news of the environmental damage being experienced by north-eastern Queensland frogs.
Club members Gabrielle (Gabz) Henderson-Scott and Todd Knight are the owners of the ‘Ant Plant East’ Nature Refuge which is between the coast and Tully and several members camped there. We had several day and night visits to this property to see if we could record some of the species that live in its dense vegetation which ranges from Melaleuca Wetlands to Complex Mesophyll Closed Forests with Lawyer Canes and Ferns. C4 have a former banana property called ‘Gurrbum’, which is just west of the Bruce Highway. This site is a strategic one between two National Parks so that it is able to complete a wildlife corridor to the coast. We saw some of the very successful revegetation work that they are doing using plants from their very extensive plant nursery in Mission Beach.
On one occasion several members were able to conduct some entomological investigations. Visits were also made to other locations including the Licuala and Lacey’s Tracks and the Hull River. On two days we took advantage of the low tides to visit two marine habitats. The first was to King Reef off Kurrimine which involved some wading to gain access to this very interesting reef which is so close to the beach. The other site was to rocks near the start of the Kennedy Track in South Mission Beach.
The weather was fine but there were two wet days which is to be expected when one is in the Wet Tropics. On the two full days at Cape Hillsborough, visits were made to two rocky marine sites where it was interesting to compare them to the Club’s earlier Long Excursion there. The low tides were favourable for us to visit these sites by night and by day so that we could observe both nocturnal and diurnal activities. Other sites of forests and mangroves were included in this short extension of the 2024 Long Excursion. A full report on this excursion will be presented at the November 2024 meeting of QNC. The iNaturalist observations for the trip can be found here: iNaturalist Cassowary Coast