Return to trip reports.Bakers Blue is on the extreme western edge of the fabulous Wet Tropics Heritage Area, near Mt Molloy. Surprising to some, it was excluded from that original gazettal. This isolated montane area (16°43'S 145°10'E) is mostly woodland and open forest but there are excellent stands of vine-thickets and, along the upper headwaters of the creeks, thick rainforest.
John Winter surveyed the area during 1989-1990, and his birdlist is the only one available. Recently, John Stanisic (Queensland Museum), Lana Little (Department of Environment), and I climbed the mountain along Black Gin Creek (17 July 1997). Following is our birdlist supplemented by John Winter's (from his 1990 unpublished report, Vertebrate fauna survey of Bakers Blue Mountain: a relict or derived fauna).
Worth thinking about, Winter concluded correctly from the vertebrate data that the Bakers Blue fauna was derived from nearby areas. However, from our recent invertebrate data on molluscs and isopods, the area is a refuge with many endemic species, some quite spectacular. These conclusions illustrate a problem of how an area can be judged important, or not so important, based upon different data sets. It also illustrates how vertebrate data may not necessarily identify refugia. As you can see from the birdlist, you probably won't be making any efforts to visit the mountain (overseas readers excluded).