Eclipse 2012 - Day 3 - The Daintree

The Daintree Forest is the largest block of tropical rainforest in Australia, and is one of the few places in the world where reef meets rainforest.  But it's also the oldest intact lowland tropical rainforest in the world (110-200 million years old).

After breakfast we headed out in the rain (which cleared to sunny not long after) north towards Mossman.  We decided to give the Mossman Gorge a miss - will need to come back and do that later - and headed up towards Cape Tribulation, stopping along the way to book a boat ride on the Daintree river.  It turned out to be an awesome stop because I saw my first Yellow Bellied Suneater!

I was totally blown away and excited!  You can only see these in north Qld and they're pretty common but not to someone who lives down south.  Here are a few more birds I managed to snap over the day:

 Eastern Great Egret and Cattle Egret

 Metallic starling nests and a Juvenile Metallic Starling

 Orange footed scrub hen and White breasted Woodswallows

 An osprey - gosh this was a hard picture to get!  Hubby got close and scared it away

Took a few pictures at Cape Tribulation of the beach (Osprey and Orange footed scrub hen) and then we made our way slowly back.

We had to take a car ferry back and forth across the Daintree river to get there - that's where I snapped a female Sunbird as well as the woodswallows above.

We caught the last river cruise of the day hoping we'd see more birds, but I wasn't very lucky in that department.  However, we saw lots of saltwater crocodiles!  We saw young ones who were just over a month old as well as some 1 year old juveniles and we also saw the mother, named Elizabeth.  My shots of her were all blurry, but here are pics of the young crocodiles.

And saw nests of more metallic starlings, but here are pics of a mangrove honeyeater nest and a sunbird nest.

One of the other river boats checking out the Daintree river

 We were getting pretty tired so we went straight to Dinner at Zinc in Port Douglas.  The entrees were good but the mains were not as good, though they look very appetising.  The portions are huge!

Beef Carpaccio

Pork Belly Confit

Cajun dusted Atlantic Salmon

Pan-seared honey and seeded mustard coated Pork Loin Chop

Mandarin-glazed twice cooked duck leg

Everyone turned in for an early night because we have a very early start tomorrow.  Weather forecasts were initially dismal but Google weather is saying sunny at 6am so fingers crossed for fantastic weather for the eclipse tomorrow!  I'm too excited to sleep!