Winter whales and cold-season blossom

Winter on the Sunshine Coast is the season the calendar least prepares you for. It is dry, it is often cloudless, the walking is at its best and safest, and the country on land seems to be holding its breath — and yet it is the season with the most going on out at sea. From about June, if you stand on one of the headlands and give it ten patient minutes, you will see them: the blows first, then the black backs and the great flukes, as humpback whales stream north up the coast toward their tropical breeding grounds. Off Point Cartwright and the Noosa headlands the northward run is close and reliable, one of the surest wildlife spectacles the coast offers, and it needs nothing but a clifftop and a pair of binoculars.

It is worth knowing what you are watching. This eastern-Australian population was very nearly wiped out — hunted down to a few hundred animals by mid-century, the whaling station at Tangalooma on Moreton Island taking thousands before it closed in 1962 — and the crowded highway you now see passing the headlands each winter is the long recovery from that, a population climbed back to tens of thousands. The whales come north to breed through winter and drift south again with their calves through spring, so the reliable close-in show swings from northbound in the cold months to southbound, calves in tow, as the year warms. Further out, off Double Island Point, the grey nurse sharks that gather year-round at Wolf Rock hold through the season too — a reminder that the winter sea is anything but empty.

On land, meanwhile, a quieter winter event keeps the birds alive. Just when you would expect nothing to be flowering, a run of trees comes into blossom against the cold: the ironbarks and spotted gum on the dry ridges, the swamp mahogany around the wetland margins, the coast banksia on the back dunes and headlands. This out-of-season nectar is a genuine lifeline — honeyeaters, lorikeets, gliders and flying-foxes crowd it through the leanest weeks of the year — and it is why a cold, still winter forest can suddenly be loud with birds high in a flowering crown. Look up when you hear the racket, and you will usually find a tree in flower doing the coast a great service in the cold.