Tweed Heads Information

Tweed Heads 

together with it's twin town of Coolangatta on the New South Wales / Queensland state border in Australia is a wonderful place to go birding. I started my birding in 2014 which mostly consisted of me taking photographs of birds then bringing them back to my computer to try and identify. The photographic focus of my birding has persisted even as I get better with knowing my local birds. Sometimes I head out with real birders who can identify birds by call and while a part of me is jealous of their skill there is an inner voice that mutters "photo or it didn't happen".



The Great Dividing Range runs some 4000km north-south along the east coast of Australia. To the east of the range is a narrowish coastal plain where most of the population of the country lives. While it's pretty Great in terms of length the range has been weathered to some pretty insignificant heights. Around Tweed Heads the range only gets up to a height of 1000m or so. Still it is enough to form a significant watershed keeping the east coast fertile. Around Tweed the coastal plain is only about 30km wide.

Tweed experiences a Humid Subtropical Climate with hot wet summers and mild winters. It is those mild winters that have made Tweed Heads and it's northern neighbour the Gold Coast renowned as a tourist destination. The area is still heavily vegitated with about 50% of the Tweed shire being bushland, and around 15% National park.

30km away from Tweed Heads as the crow flys is Mt Warning, the central basaltic plug of a huge sheild volcano. The rim of the volcano (around 30km in diameter) exists still as a steep sided rugged National Park with the Eastern side eroded into the coastal plain gifting it with a rich volcanic soil. The parks and reserves around Mt Warning and the Dividing Range were inaccessible enough to restrict the logging industry mostly to the coast and as a result have left us with some pristine examples of subtropical rainforest and are included in the world heritage listed Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.