Winter whales and cold-season blossom

Winter is the season the Sunshine Coast calendar least prepares you for. It is dry, often cloudless, the walking at its best and safest, and on land the country holds its breath. Yet the sea is at its busiest. Stand on a headland at Point Cartwright or Noosa and give it ten patient minutes: the blows come first, then the black backs, then the great flukes, as humpback whales stream north up the coast toward their breeding grounds in the warm tropics. From about June the northbound run comes close and reliable, one of the surest wildlife spectacles the coast offers, and it asks for nothing but a clifftop and a pair of binoculars.

Know what you are watching. Within living memory this eastern population was hunted almost to oblivion. The whaling station at Tangalooma, on nearby Moreton Island, took more than six thousand animals before the whales simply ran out and it closed in 1962; the crowded highway you now see passing the headlands marks the long climb back, from a few hundred survivors into the tens of thousands. The whales run north to breed through the cold and drift south again with their calves as the year warms, so the close show is the northbound one, cool-season traffic carrying good news past in plain sight. Further out, grey nurse sharks hold year-round at Wolf Rock off Double Island Point — a reminder that the winter sea is anything but empty.

On land, meanwhile, a quieter event keeps the birds alive. Just when you would expect nothing in flower, a handful of trees blossom against the cold. On the dry ridges the grey ironbark, armoured in that hard, near-black, deeply furrowed bark, flowers into the cooler months when little else does; around the wetland margins the swamp mahogany, one of the heaviest nectar trees on the coast, does the same. Their timing is what counts. This out-of-season nectar is a lifeline, sugar at the leanest part of the year, and honeyeaters, lorikeets, gliders and flying-foxes crowd it. The lorikeets pour in by the screeching flock, the honeyeaters work the blossom from first light, the flying-foxes arrive after dark. Many of these feeders are nomads, ranging the country after whatever is in bloom, so a single tree in flower can summon animals from tens of kilometres away.

So a cold, still forest turns suddenly loud, the racket pouring down from one flowering crown high overhead. Look up when you hear it and you will nearly always find a tree in bloom.

The season the calendar writes off as quiet runs two spectacles at once, and the same dry, clear weather underwrites both. Offshore, the busiest sea of the year, where the great animals stream past a headland. Back among the ridges, the loudest tree in the forest. You need only know where to point your eyes — and when to look up.