It’s like staying in the middle of a Planet Earth photo shoot.  Not the sterile, edited version that finally receives the Attenborough voice-over though.  It feels more like the raw, uncut footage waiting for someone to put some order to it.  There are so many competing stories at work here.  At this time of year, hundreds of thousands of nesting birds await the turtle hatch.  Not quietly, though.  This many birds make quite a racket.  And they are not shy.  Birds constantly dart from here to there, just overhead.  Very disconcerting when you consider the white-washing of the path you are following and the trees that line it.  White-capped noddies are everywhere, making their nests in the pisonia trees that fill the interior of the island.  Egrets wait near our dry rinse basin for the fresh water they know will fill it eventually. The general cacophony becomes an almost relaxing soundtrack, a constant reminder that Heron is not like any other island resort we have visited.  Here, the birds are not a nuisance but an important part of the appeal of the island.  Most of the birds, anyway.  The seagulls can be quite annoying.  Early in the morning, gulls will march up on to our deck, stand at our closed door and yell at us.  They are probably used to food offerings, just to make them go away.

Wildlife is what Heron Island is all about.  It sits on the southern end of the Great Barrier right at the Tropic of Capricorn, far enough south to avoid the coral bleaching that has been plaguing most of the reef.  Sharks and rays are common, but it is the turtles that have made Heron famous.  Thousands of loggerhead and green sea turtles return here every year to lay their eggs.  We were fortunate to have loggerhead turtles at least three feet in diameter digging nests right in front of our beach house. In a couple of months, the eggs will hatch, and countless baby turtles will run the formidable gauntlet posed by the hungry birds anxiously awaiting the hatch.  With so many natural spectacles on offer, it is not surprising that the island is also home to a permanent research center affiliated with the University of Queensland.