The Golden Orbs are just going crazy at the moment. We have some as big as our hands and they are spinning up a storm everywhere making it imperative to carry a web wand with you wherever you go!  Some of the strands are so strong you almost bounce off them!

Despite the grey skies above the water visibility has been amazing.  We could see right to the bottom all the way from Cow Bay to Shipwreck Bay and even around Black Rock.  This morning's kayakers couldn't believe it could be so clear!

Daintree Magic is very family friendly, providing a DVD player, books, games and a spa bath for the kids to splash around in.

Our guests always comment on how much they love the complimentary bottle of wine and cheese plate on arrival, so we will be keeping it on for another year.

We will be promoting a New Year Special which means if you stay before March 31st you get $100 off a three night booking.

We have recently added a third bedroom onto Daintree Magic, so we can sleep up to eight now.

We recently had a large male Cassawarry walk right up to our back door at Daintree Magic, he wasn't scared of us at all, and scratched around in the bush there for about ten minutes!

As you are probably aware, it is stinger season so make sure you wear a suit when going in the water. Daintree Magic provides a range of sizes of stinger suits for you to use.

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On November 14, 2012 (Cairns time) a solar eclipse will be visible in Northern Australia and the Pacific Islands. Very few people have the opportunity to view a total solar eclipse as the shadow only covers a very small area of the Earth and you must be in a limited zone to see the moon cover the entire face of the sun.

Seeing a total eclipse is perhaps one of the most spectacular astronomical phenomenons that you will ever see. Being in the right spot is essential on November 14, 2012.

Port Douglas will be the best viewing for the 2012 Solar Eclipse.

Sun Palm Transport are taking all bookings for airport transfers, luxury sedans, stretch limousines and private transfers.

Make sure you make your booking soon to secure your transport.

Even seeing this amazing spider with its newly hatched brood is an achievement, but its identification is yet another challenge for Cooper Creek Wilderness and Daintree Rainforest.

Neil, with his finely-tuned vision, detected a shading on a leaf of the small-leaved fire vine Tetracera nordtiana, almost like a silhouette.  He discovered the green camouflaged female spider and young blending in beautifully with its green surrounds.

Have a look at the enlarged image:  http://www.ccwild.com/blog/?p=4272#more-4272

We don't like to be nuisances, so we try to identify as much as we can from the web.  An excellent web site  www.findaspider.org.au has images of many spiders found in South-east Queensland and has helped us a great deal in the past.

This elegant specimen was not there.  Next step is to appeal to the author of this site, Arachnologist Ron Atkins, who has obligingly helped us to identify many species over the years.

Ron's response goes into details about the possibilities, "No, this is not a spider I recognize. Its leg arrangement is suggestive of a huntsman (Family Sparassidae) and some of the Australian Neosparassus species are green. However, the eye pattern does not look like that of a typical huntsman and I have never previously seen a sparassid with what looks like a sharply narrowed end to its abdomen. Unfortunately, the photos don't show enough anatomical details for me to make a guess as to which other family this spider might belong to. This specimen illustrates the fact that there are so many North Queensland spider species still waiting to be discovered and named."

You can extend this observation to many other critters in the Daintree Rainforest, a treasure trove of biodiversity and antiquity!

Snapper Island delivered a real adventure to our last lot of kayakers as the tropical heavens opened overhead providing spectactular images of the rainforest and horizon as they past along the Daintree Coastline.  All captured by Steve to create great memories for all.

January showers have really brightened up the rainforest with all our jungle looking that lovely shiny green green you only get in the wet season.  Hundreds of new leaves and baby trees sprouting each day too!

These large, attractive fungi were photographed on the high bank of the Daintree Rainforest’s Tassel-Fern Creek, decomposing rotten timber brought down from the canopy by Cyclone Olga (Feb. 2010).  The fruiting bodies are supported by a yellow-footed stem and have thin, funnel-shaped caps that are concentrically zoned in various shades of brown.

The underside of the cap is white with numerous tiny pores that conform with the genus name Microporus, whilst the species name xanthopus is derived from two Greek words for ‘yellow foot’.

The largest of the caps is about 150 mm in diametre.  The fungi have continued to grow for over a year, with the benefits of an extraordinarily wet year attracting 7.24 metres of rainfall.  This year has been considerably drier and cooler than normal, slowing the growth-rate to a standstill, but on those infrequent occasions when rain does fall, the inverted cups capture water and produce vivid colours.

Not only do fungi have decorative qualities, they assist in the breakdown and recycling of deadwood in the rainforest.  The medicinal value of various fungi have been known to the aboriginal people over thousands of years.  Passed down from generation to generation, this knowledge is an important factor in the relationships of the indigenous people with their landscapes.

The striking bright reddish-orange brackets of Pycnoporus coccineus  have been used among some tribes to treat mouth ulcers and oral thrush in babies.  Two antibiotic compounds have been found in Pycnoporus coccineus.

Oriental medicines describe another fungus Gannoderma lucidum as an interesting shelf fungus that is an important natural medicine in the far East including China, Japan and Korea.  Portrayed as a “cure-all” herbal remedy for treating conditions such as cancer, HIV, high and low blood pressure, rheumatism, heart conditions and many others it is also known as Reishi, ling chih and ling zhi.  It has antibiotic and anti-oxidant components and is used in a tea or taken daily in tablet form to promote well-being and longevity.

It’s interesting to consider that healing may be taking place within the natural environment through a variety of fungi that exist naturally in the area.  Withdrawal of people into unnatural man-made environments, polluted with exhaust fumes and other chemicals, may well contribute to a less robust species of homo sapiens!

Normally we complain about the cold for about 2 months - June and July before August when temperatures rise, birds build their nests and insects emerge.   Not this year.  It was well into September before these harbingers of warmer weather appeared.  Our night temperatures even dropped to 6 degrees Celsius, an unheard of unseasonal cold.  Was this the predicted global warming?

The unusually cold winter seemed to slow down the emergence of the insects.  By the time the stick insects Anchiale briareus, arrived most of their favourite food trees, the sour sop trees, Amazonian Custard Apple had their new leaves.  We had noted in previous years that the first sour sop tree to get its new leaves also got the stick insects en masse.  Through intensive research we discovered that this tree actually sent out a biochemical messages to inform the surrounding trees about the ravenous hordes that were chewing on the leaves. These later leafing trees were then able to change the nature of their new young leaves by adding a tannin to the composition of the leaves.  This discouraged the stick insects from spreading and rendered the first leafing trees as sacrificial trees.

The cleverness of the rainforest has never ceased to astonish us.  We are astounded at the diversity of plants, animals and insects, but these invisible catalysts, biochemicals, pheromones appear to be more diverse and prolific than we could possibly imagine.

Daintree Rainforest Pty Ltd trading as Cooper Creek Wilderness has successfullly completed its marathon application for Advanced Ecotourism Accreditation.

Our company believes that Ecotourism is the best means of providing an income that supports conservation.  Responsible travel and Ethical Travel are similar vehicles that encourage visitors to select products that actually conserve and protect the natural assets of the world.

Visitors need to feel that they can make a difference and that their payments will contribute to an ethical form of tourism.

This year we have added to our accreditation  "Climate Action Business" accreditation as further evidence to Ecotourism Australia of our commitment to the health of the Daintree Rainforest.

There is a huge battle waging between off-reserve conservation and mining.  Conservation Agreeements signed by landholders and Queensland Government have become worthless.  When sustainable tourism is as importsnt to our economy as the mining industry, then we might be able to protect our global treasures.

For a very limited time we have a special package avialable from $159 per person twin share.   The package includes:-

* One nights accommodation in a Rainforest Cabin

* Late checkout to 12noon

* Tropical Continental Breakfast

* 2 Course Dinner with a glass of sparkling wine

For more information please contact our friendly reservations staff on 07 40 98 9321.

Orange-footed Scrub Fowls (Megapodius reinwardt) have developed an innovative nesting strategy that relieves them of the need for sitting on eggs.  Residing within the same habitat as the Amethystine Python (world-champion at visualising the nocturnal infrared field), scrub fowls’ large heat-signatures would make them easy targets if they were required to sit on eggs for the full incubation period.  In an extraordinary display of adaptive genius, scrub fowls have learned to stockpile leaf-litter into giant mounds, to harness the heat generated through the de-composition of that compost, to incubate their eggs.

Yesterday afternoon Sunset paddlers saw not just one, but two dugong in Cape Tribulation Bay. It was beautiful to see them surface side by side. How lucky were they!

Solar Whisper Daintree River Wildlife Cruise is the only Daintree River cruise featuring Croc Cam. Croc Cam in essence acts as communal binculars, magbifying wildlife...we can show you the eyes, the teeth, even the texture. 

Your guide will focus the camera on animals allowing you to identify them using the onboard screen. This helps you to more easily view a wonderful array of creatures. 

Your experienced interpretive guide is accustomed to the nuances of the river and rainforest, and can spot an incredible variety of wildlife that you would not necessarily see on your own. Birds, snakes and even 4 metre crocodiles are difficult to see in their natural environment. 

A visiting paleobotanist from Dresden, Germany, was returning to his homeland after presenting a paper  to a conference in Melbourne, entitled “Molecular Evolutionary History of Early Branching Angiosperms.”  One of the points that his dissertation made is that “Angiosperms might even be older than estimated in previous studies.”

The scientist and his wife visited the Daintree to build on their research into primitive angiosperms and decided to book onto a guided interpreted nocturnal walk with Cooper Creek Wilderness.  Little did they know that they would be entering the heart of the world’s oldest rainforest!  In the blackness of the night, it would be difficult to assess the forest, but on this particular night the tour guide decided to include some of the unique vegetation in his interpretation.  Imagine the paleobotanist’s surprise when he was shown the ‘green dinosaur’.   Idiospermum australienseis our prime piece of evidence of continuity of rainforest growth over 135 million years.

Trapped in the refugial areas at the base of the eastern flank of Thornton Peak, the fruit and flowers of this primitive angiosperm were first found in 1902 by another German Botanist, Ludwig Diels, who matched it with a fossil held in the Dresden Herbarium.  Scientists who returned to the site of the discovery a year later, were dismayed to find that the rainforest had been cleared for sugarcane.  The plant was rediscovered in 1971 when some cattle belonging  to a local Daintree farmer ingested the toxic seeds and died.  The seeds were eventually matched with Dresden Herbarium records that revealed a previous reference to the species (Calycanthus australiensis) (Diels 1902), however taxonomic anomalies favoured the discovery of a new species, which became (Idiospermum australiensis).

At the time, there were only seventeen known families of primitive flowering plant on earth.  Idiospermaceae became the eighteenth and Austrobaileyaceae from the same rainforest, the nineteenth.  The re-discovery of the rainforest dinosaur stimulated intense botanical interest in the rainforests of the Daintree.  The scientific community had discovered a living museum of plants and animals of indeterminate antiquity.

Through DNA testing, Idiospermum australiense was re-classified back into the Calycanthaceae Family about 3 years ago.  This piece of information was conveyed to me by a retired dendrologist who visited Cooper Creek Wilderness about 15 years ago and returned again this year with Outback Spirit Tours.

We are now informed that our forest is somewhere between 160 and 170 million years old, 25 to 35 million years older than previously estimated!

The coincidence of Technische Universitat Dresden in this latest study and the original  discovery of Idiospermum australiense by a scientist from Dresden herbarium forges links from the other side of the world to the Daintree Rainforest and with the advantages of modern computers, scientific research unites findings from around the world to seek a universal truth.

As inhabitants of this prestigious rainforest we have become recipients of information that we can include in our interpretation.   Conservation of Daintree Rainforest is supported by travellers from around the world who are looking for exceptional natural experiences.  The web of knowledge expands beyond the scientific world to the cultural world of the traditional owners, the Yalanji people who tell me the plant is poisonous and cannot be eaten, and the early European  settlers who found the tree provided a fine cabinet timber called “ribbonwood.”

Spectacular orange floral fungus enhances the beauty of the rainforest, with its bright colour attracting the appropriate insects to traffic spores in a general absence of wind. The yellow version is called  "witches butter" because it can unexpectedly appear first thing in the morning and it is gives a warning!

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November has been warm and moist providing perfect conditions for a multitude of fungi, mushrooms and toadstools to emerge.  As we struggle to identify each of these fungi, we are humbled by the complexity of these important members of our rainforest. 

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Despite the grey skies and showers our Snapper Island kayakers had amazing visibility on the reefs surroundind the island this week.  The coral looked amazing, so much so Steve ran out of camera battery on the first day!!

November has seen the flowers come out to brighten up the rainforest at Crocodylus.  We had a flower carpet from the buds falling from one of our large trees.  These blossoms also produced an amazing perfumes that floated through the air for days!