Mary Cairncross Rainforest

Thursday 24 March 2011

The team presented to the Maleny Rotary Club at Tranquil Park.  The restaurant facility was on a small mountain overlooking the Glasshouse Mountains.  These are about five or six huge mountains that jut up right out of the valley and looked like they were almost dropped there.  The view has been one of the finest since our arrival!  They are called the Glasshouse  Mountains because when Captain Cook first saw them, they reminded him of the ‘glass houses’ in England.  A glass house is a furnace that glass makers use, not a green house as I first thought!

We also toured the Mary Cairncross Reserve, which is a patch of preserved tropical rainforest.  The park is 140 acres of subtropical rainforest.  The Maleny Rotary Club has played a very large role in providing walkways through the reserve so that the public could enjoy the forest.  Everything that you may have heard about the ‘lushness’ of a tropical rain forest was evident in the reserve.  We learned that there are giant earthworms (some reaching nearly 20 inches) that come out of the ground and scoop up debris around their burrow entrance.  They then eat the leaf litter, leaving most of the surrounding ground bare.  We also heard the whip bird and the cat bird – two very ‘rainforest sounding’ birds.  Some people think the catbird sounds like a cat, but we all thought it sounded like a small baby crying.  We then had morning tea to end out stay at Mary Cairncross Reserve.  Lovely day! 

-Quenton