With wildlife found nowhere else on the planet and more ancient families of flowering plants than the Amazon jungle, Australia’s Daintree Rainforest is an ecological wonder. But it’s under threat. Here’s how the team at Rainforest Rescue are working to rescue and restore the world’s oldest living tropical rainforest.
I once dated a wildlife cinematographer who spent nine months stowed away in the thickest pockets of the Daintree Rainforest, sweating it out in camouflaged hides, trying to capture footage of the elusive cassowary bird.
And while the romantic relationship didn’t last, my affection and fascination with the cassowary—in particular the southern cassowary, endemic to Australia’s northeastern Wet Tropics—has endured.
In broad strokes, the solitary southern cassowary is like an emu, but bigger. An adult female can weigh up to 180 pounds (85 kilograms), and can stand upwards of six feet tall. The cassowary is basically a dinosaur, and is, in fact, a descendant from the Cretaceous period, when the T-rex still stomped its way through North America.
The evolutionary beauty of this bird is in the detail though: The white casque, grown like a keratinous helmet, is used as a weapon in dominance disputes, protects the cassowary’s head from the forest underbrush, and is even believed to amplify deep sound—their ‘boom’ is the lowest-frequency bird call on record. Then there’s the five-inch dagger-like claws, the porcupine-esque quills, and the legs that can propel the flightless bird up to seven feet in the air on a single jump.
And yet despite being able to claw, jump and swim, the southern cassowary is endangered, at risk of extinction.
“Cassowaries are remarkable birds, and they’re ancient,” Branden Barber, CEO of non-profit Rainforest Rescue tells me. “But the two biggest threats to cassowaries, other than habitat loss, are cars and dogs. And that’s because people insist on putting roads everywhere and insist on letting their dogs run free, even in a national park.”
“There’s a really interesting difference between walking in the Amazon [jungle] and the Daintree,” says Barber, a lifelong environmentalist, originally from California. “When I was in the Amazon, I always felt like I had to watch my back—it feels like a teenager, there’s a lot of chaos. But the Daintree feels like an elder, there’s a lot of tranquility here.”
When you consider that this is the world’s oldest continuously living tropical rainforest, the elder status makes sense. “It has that sense of embodiment,” says Barber.
“But the short story,” he continues, “is that land has been cleared without really considering nature’s requirements forever. Because capital is more important than nature; because capital is the one wielding the dozer blades. The Daintree isn’t being destroyed like other rainforests, but the threats we face are still real, whether it’s from development or traffic.”
There was the protection of Lot 8 Idriess Close, which is now conserving almost 12 hectares of precious habitat for creatures like the Bennet’s tree-kangaroo and, yep, the cassowary. 110 Cape Tribulation Road is 30 hectares of former sugarcane farming land, five hectares of naturally regenerated habitat and 25 hectares that can be restored, which Rainforest Rescue plan on reviving one seedling at a time.
Then there’s Kurranji Bubu, formerly known as Lot 46.
“In Yalanji language, ‘kurranji’ means ‘cassowary’ and ‘bubu’ means ‘land’, so this is cassowary land,” says Barber. “This was the first property we engaged in restoration on… it was 27 hectares, located in the World Heritage Area and used to be a palm tree plantation. We had to remove dozens of trucks of garbage. It was a mess, but through a lot of hard work and years of time, energy and money, we cleaned it up and turned it into a beautiful rainforest again.”