Down the River

Our guide down the River daintree turned out to be from Watford, though he knew his stuff about the river here and had his own opinions about crocodiles and the people charged with protecting them.

"Steve Irwin and all that, Crocodile Hunter, Crocodile Dundee, it's a load of bollocks" he offered. "You see these crocodiles here, the saltwater ones, they're cold-blooded. They need to stay warm otherwise they can't digest any food so they have to live up here in the warm parts of Australia. Now it's a struggle to stay warm, believe it or not, so they have to save energy, they can't afford to go using all their heat up chasing after their next meal, which is lucky because they don't need to eat very often in order to survive.

So they lie about on the river banks sunbathing and waiting for something to walk right past them, which means they only eat about once a week, which suits them fine. They're the laziest bastards around.

And that's why I say it's all bollocks because Steve Irwin said he was out to save wildlife and then he adds to the perception that these fellas will snap you in half soon as look at you. Now the public are scared, and that's bad for the crocodile.

This dominant male here, Fat Albert, he'll chase away any adolescent males that come up the river because it's his patch. They're much smaller, perhaps three feet long, but after Albert chases them away they've nowhere else to go so they swim into the sea and then end up washed onto the beaches in places like Port Douglas. Left to their own devices they'd stay there until they were big enough to come back and challenge him but, of course, the tourists are terrified and they alert the authorities, the people who are supposed to be in charge of protecting the crocodile.

So the authorities go down to Port Douglas and remove the croc from the beach but they don't return him to the river, they sell him to crocodile farms. So they're removing all the male crocodiles from the river and that disturbs the natural course of things, that's not wildlife conservation, it disturbs natural breeding patterns".

I see his point, it's pretty clear, though I can't say I'd be happy sunbathing next to any of Fat Albert's crew either so I'm not sure how you solve it, as with many of the ecological concerns in Australia, the damage is already done.

Anyway, this is Mount Thornton, the wettest point in Australia, constantly wet and cloaked in cloud 75-80% of the year. London gets 58cm of rain every year; the wet tropics here get about six metres of the stuff, more at the top of the mountain and most of it falls in the three months between February and April.