The naturalist's year

The Sunshine Coast has seasons, but not the four you were taught at school. Up here they answer less to the calendar than to the weather, and you read them off the country itself: where the flowers are, what is calling after dark, what is passing offshore. Learn them and you can time the coast as well as read it. If it is September the wallum will be alight with flower, near enough. If the nights have turned warm and wet, the frogs will be deafening.

Underneath it all, two things do most of the work. Temperature climbs into the summer wet and bottoms out in the cool of the winter dry; rainfall crowds into summer, storm-fed and warm from about December to March, then eases into a drier winter. Almost every living event hangs on one or the other, and a handful run against the grain. Think of the result as four jobs the country works through in turn.

In spring the sand country does the thing it is most famous for. The low heath erupts into the richest flowering it offers all year, peas and boronias and wattles and ground orchids at once, worked over by honeyeaters. Out on the flats the migratory shorebirds return from the northern hemisphere, and the last humpbacks head south past the headlands, often with calves alongside.

In summer the rain arrives, and on the first warm, wet nights the swamps go up in a frog chorus you can hear across a paddock, the acid-water specialists among them that breed nowhere else. The same rain does quieter work: it refills the freshwater sponge buried in the sand, the sand-mass aquifer that the whole of the following dry season will draw on to keep the blackwater flowing (Dyring and colleagues have mapped just how much of Cooloola’s living country leans on that hidden store).

In autumn the wet eases and the country fruits. The rainforest hangs at its lushest and heaviest, figs and laurels drawing in the fruit-doves by day and the flying-foxes by night; the she-oaks flush rusty with pollen; and the first cool-season nectar trees crack their buds. Then comes winter, the cold, dry, clear-skied season that is the best walking of the year, when the humpbacks stream north past the headlands on their way to the tropics to breed — a population hunted to a few hundred animals and now recovered to tens of thousands. On land, the ironbarks and swamp mahogany and coast banksia carry blossom right through the cold, feeding the birds at the leanest time of the year.

None of it keeps an appointment. This country runs on weather, not dates. A late or failed wet holds the frogs silent; a dry spring makes for a thin flowering; a fire through the heath one year fills a hillside with flowering grass-trees the next. So a seasonal wheel, or the calendar in these pages, is a guide to what to expect and roughly when. Watch for the cues.

Reading the season is reading the country, turned from place to time. You gather several signs, check them against one another, and let them tell you where in the year the coast has got to. Do it for a year or two and you stop visiting the coast and start keeping time with it.