Thirty-six hours travel without much sleep is not the best preparation for birding. But birding is, I find, a great cure for jet lag: it gets me outdoors in the fresh air and sunshine, and helps me recalibrate my body clock. Even more crucially, I know I’ll be so overwhelmed with the amazing birds I see that I’ll be able to forget my exhaustion – or at least keep birding right through it.

My guides are Doug Herrington and Murray Hunt from Birdlife Northern Queensland, two acknowledged experts on the birds of this part of Australia. But when we meet in the lobby of Cairns hotel, the first thing they do is apologise, for this is not really their home patch. Understandably, they prefer to spend most of their time looking for the myriad birds to be found outside Cairns, rather than those (mostly common) species that have learned to live alongside the holidaymakers in this busy metropolis by the sea.

They needn’t have worried – having never birded in Queensland, and only once visited Australia before, at least one in three of the species we see today will be new to me. Most of the others I haven’t seen since my last trip to Oz six years ago, so I have forgotten what many of them look like.

Anyway, having spent most of my life in London I am used to urban birding. And as my old friend David Lindo – aka The Urban Birder – always says, to see birds in any city, you just need to look up! Besides, city birds are generally far tamer and easier to see than those in wilder places; a distinct advantage given my current jetlagged state.

Any misgivings I might have had swiftly disappear as my guides produce bird after amazing bird, in what are not always the most auspicious surroundings. Take our first stop – the town cemetery. Birders the world over know that the best birds are often found in the most unlikely places, with sewage farms, rubbish tips and yes, cemeteries, all more promising than you might imagine.

But we have barely entered the gates before a flash of colour shoots out of a hole in the ground between the graves as a Rainbow Bee-eater leaves the safety of its underground nest, and flies up to perch on one of the marbled monuments.

Moments later, its mate joins it, and I am able to marvel at the dazzling range of colours on this aptly named bird. Bee-eaters really do eat bees, and these two are no exception, grabbing them out of mid-air and bashing them to remove the sting before swallowing them whole – quite a performance.

But the true prize in this slightly ghoulish quest is not quite as easy to find. Then, in a shady spot beneath some trees, I catch sight of a movement. As I peer through my binoculars, a huge eye stares back at me: belonging to a Bush Stone-curlew. Stone-curlews (also known as ‘thick-knees’) are members of the wader tribe (though I have never seen a stone-curlew actually wade); and are mainly nocturnal – hence the large eyes.

These birds (at least eight altogether) are loafing quietly in a cool, shady spot as the daytime temperature reaches the thirty-degree mark; getting rather too hot for my sensitive English constitution. Their dappled brown and grey plumage fits perfectly, making it very hard to spot them until they stand up and start to move away on their long legs.

Next stop is a small lake surrounded by parkland. Any stretch of fresh water, even in a city, will produce birds, and this is no exception. A family of Raja Shelducks, the eight adolescent youngsters obediently following their parents, is the first surprise; a flock of this country’s largest flying bird, the Australian White Pelican, is next. But it is the less obvious landbirds in the trees and scrub surrounding the lake that are the real treats.

First, a dark brown bird about the size of a plump chicken dashes out on the path in front of me: an Orange-footed Scrubfowl. Then an even more bizarre looking creature heads right towards us: dark grey, but sporting a red head and what looks like a yellow scarf hanging around its neck.

Baffled, I turn to Doug and Murray, who immediately solve its identity: an Australian Brush-turkey. Both this and the scrubfowl are megapodes (which literally means ‘big feet’), whose hard-working males build a huge mound out of leaves and earth where the female lays her eggs, which are incubated by the heat provided by the rotting vegetation. She then disappears, leaving the male to do all the hard work to ensure that the eggs don’t either cook or get too cold.

Time is short, so we leave the park and head for a suburban street that wouldn’t be out of place in Neighbours. Except that Ramsay Street certainly doesn’t have a nesting pair of Papuan Frogmouths. This tropical relative of the nightjars is another bird so bizarre you couldn’t make it up: a creature of the night with huge eyes, bristles around its bill to help it detect flying insects in the darkness, and a fine line in camouflage; only when Doug uses his laser pointer to show me where it is, can I even manage to see it.

The male frogmouth – greyer and paler than his mate – is lying along a branch and incubating a clutch of eggs, while the browner female is equally well disguised nearby. Anyone walking underneath who happened to gaze up would simply mistake them for bits of wood. Without the help from my guides I would never have spotted it.

One more night bird proves even harder to find. As dusk begins to fall, we stop by a huge fig tree alongside a busy road junction. We stare upwards, and I begin to wonder if we are too late and it has already left for the night to go hunting bats. But there it is: a huge Rufous Owl, the only exclusively tropical member of its family found in Australia, chestnut above and barred buff below, staring right back down at me with lofty disdain.

Back at my hotel, before I collapse into a very welcome bed, I tot up the afternoon’s list: to my astonishment we’ve tallied over 60 species, 22 of which are ‘lifers’ – birds new for me. A taster, I hope, of the rest of my trip to this extraordinarily bird-rich part of Australia.