Camera Traps – May 2026 accrued 89-cassowary sightings, 8-dingoes and 58-feral pigs. Against the cumulative monthly average, cassowary numbers dropped by 13%, dingoes decreased by 78% and feral-pig numbers also fell by 69%. Against May 2025, cassowary numbers diminished by 35%, dingoes fell by 78% and feral-pigs dropped by 51%.
Image highlights from May 2026
Keeping up with the cassowaries …
Crinkle-cut & Wobbly
Delilah, Crinkle-cut & Wobbly (shortly before the latter’s eviction into independence)
Introducing Cyan – a new female on the prowl
Luna
Cyan & Manu courting
Introducing Drury, another unfamiliar female
Tex
Counting cassowaries for conservation
Wet Tropics Management Authority (WTMA) has shared the article: Amid efforts to save Australia’s southern cassowaries, their numbers remain unknown:
The southern cassowary … once faced extinction; now, its numbers are stable, but scientists still lack an up-to-date estimate of how many remain. Shrinking habitat was a key factor in the bird’s decline, but designation of the Wet Tropics as a World Heritage Site protected both the ecosystem and the cassowaries that live there. Growing from fewer than 1,500 birds in the early 2000s to around 4,400 in the most recent national survey (conducted by CSIRO between 2012 & 2014), more frequent population monitoring has been recommended as a central component of the species’ management … but more than a decade later, that hasn’t happened.
Cassowary numbers undoubtedly declined through 115-years of disturbance and damage wrought by commercial logging, but World Heritage-Listing on 9th December 1988 did not undo the carnage of timber harvesting, it merely brought that particular degradation to a legislated conclusion. Damaged habitat remained just as damaged and whilst it may be true to infer that the remaining cassowary population was protected from further degradation of logging, it would be manifestly untrue to assert that cassowaries are well and truly protected. In fact, the only substantive variable that can be exploited for cassowary population recovery, is eradication of the invasive competitors within extant habitat; feral-pigs!
Contrary to the notion that cassowary population monitoring has not been maintained with the frequency recommended within the CSIRO study, Daintree Rainforest Foundation LTD has just sent its 77th monthly Camera Trap Report to WTMA and various invasive species organisations, reiterating that feral-pigs are increasingly degrading cassowary habitat.
Over the full-course of this long-term Daintree Rainforest Camera Trap Project, feral-pig sightings have increased by 270%. Admittedly, this study collects data from a mere 3/400ths of one-percent of the overall Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, but arguably the least damaged portion, at the biological centre of irreplaceability, which also happens to have an environmental foundation advantageously equipped with a full-time human inhabitancy, documenting and reporting the state of the environment from the most vigilantly monitored portion of the world’s oldest rainforest, conferring that such damage and degradation almost certainly extends across the broader expanse of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area.
Feral-pigs 2020 – 2025
Daintree Rainforest Foundation Ltd has been registered by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and successfully entered onto the Register of Environmental Organisations. Donations made to the Daintree Rainforest Fund support the Daintree Rainforest community custodianship and are eligible for a tax deduction under the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997.