Category: Western Australia

 

Long before Europeans reached Australia, what is now “Perth’s Pelican Point” was already a place of considerable significance to both humans and birds.

Given its inner urban location – as a bird flies, a couple of minutes or less from the CBD of a metropolis – it is no small achievement that the bipeds who effectively “own” Pelican Point’s actual point are avian, not human.

In the featured image: white-headed stilts, black swans, and a little pied cormorant.

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As you can see, on 18 April 2023, Perth and its big estuary – the Swan River – were bathed in bright sunlight.

It was a perfect day to enjoy good things which are not so readily available  – all, within just part of a single day – to most urban humans.

Where else would convenient, uncommonly cheap public transport (free, to “seniors”, outside “rush” hours) deliver you to one of Australia’s better pub lunches, after which the nearby riverside presents you with kilometres of glorious, publicly-accessible, uncrowded foreshore?

Even if you simply zip down to-fro the nearby jetty, you will enjoy a splendid vista and – almost certainly – a close encounter of the pelican kind.

And if you bother to walk along the foreshore….

 

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The birds pictured above were formerly known as “pied stilts”, and considered an Australasian subspecies of Himantopus himantopus, “yesterday’s heroes” – see #10 in this series.

This post’s heroes are now generally considered members of their own species, Himantopus leucocephalus.

Their “preferred” common name: white-headed stilts.

Each of these three individuals has the full complement of two legs.

Stilts, however, often prefer to stand on one leg, with the other one neatly folded and  tucked into their lower feathers.

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