Some might wonder about our obsession with seeing a cassowary in the wild. It all started last year when we visited the Daintree for our friends’ Cara and Andy’s wedding. “You’ll definitely see a cassowary in the Daintree” people said. Not true. Although it seemed that everybody else at that wedding had seen a cassowary at some point during their holiday.

So during our trip this year, we tried every area where cassowaries are known to be commonly sighted. Starting from the southern end of their distribution, we drove along the “Cassowary trail” in the Mission beach area and even walked along a rainforest trail that has a “Cassowary garden” full of trees bearing their favourite fruits. One would expect to see a cassowary on a cassowary trail, but we did not. We had been forewarned however not to get our hopes up at Mission beach, as cyclone Yasi had greatly effected the cassowary population in this area and numbers had definitely decreased.

We traveled further north to Etty Bay. A cassowary and his chick (yes, males rear the chicks while mum just lays the egg then runs), are known to frequent this beach EVERY SINGLE DAY. We arrived in the afternoon to find that there was no room in the inn (or caravan park) for us. So on we went.

“Never fear”, our advisors would say, “the best place to see them is in the Daintree!” Do I really need to remind you about our lack of cassowary sightings in the Daintree last year?

We were losing hope. We had started to believe that the cassowary was a mythical creature. People were just putting up those silly “recent cassowary crossing here” signs just to annoy us. We made a deal that we would not leave the Daintree until we saw one.

We walked along the Jindalba boardwalk keeping our eyes peeled for cassowaries, and instead we found all kinds of new birds that we had never seen before. We sat on a little a bird-watching deck and found Wompoo (pictured), rufous fantails and many honeyeaters. Suddenly there was a loud noise behind us…and there he was…Mr Cassowary and his chick had found us!

We had a wonderful 30 seconds of watching him and his little chick scratching around in the earth when a loud helicopter flew over and frightened them away. At least we now know that they are real.