Even on the (rare) occasions when not a single bird is within sight, day’s end in Mandurah’s Creery Wetlands Nature Reserve is a superb combination of time and particular place.
Comments closedCategory: Western Australia
S/he may have deserved another.
However, the pictured tern was alone…as far as we could see, at least.
Comments closed
Now considered by some demographers as part of “greater Perth”, Mandurah was once an “unspoilt”, sleepy little town on a very big inlet.
It is now Western Australia’s second largest city, with circa 100,000 permanent residents.
Famous/infamous for its “canal developments”, Mandurah still has a surprisingly rich array of natural attractions that are well-protected, but easy-to-access
One of them is an internationally significant bird sanctuary.
To reach it, some migratory birds travel considerably longer distances than do the English-born humans for whom Mandurah is also a “magnet”.
Comments closed
This post’s “much closer view” was also taken from the western side of Perth’s Elizabeth Quay, not many footsteps from where ferries depart for South Perth, or return from there.
For “9A” in this series I had looked east, across the Quay’s artificial inlet.
For “9B”, I turned around 180 degrees.
Comments closed
The featured image looks east, across Perth’s Elizabeth Quay, at 2. 49 pm on 24 April 2024.
Its official name – bestowed in 2012 by then WA Premier Colin Barnett – honoured the then British monarch.
The name came after the monumentally-expensive development’s first sod had been turned.
More than a few Perth residents prefer to call it “Betty’s Jetty.”
Comments closed
Most Australian humans live in substantial cities.
Until late in the 20th century, ibis were not a “regular part of the urban scene”; urban humans who had seen ibis had usually seen them only when said humans “got out of town”.
Mid-20th century humans did not refer to Australian white ibis as “bin chickens – Threskiornis molucca was yet to “invade” our cities.
Back then, the ibis most familiar to Australians was Threskiornis spinicollis – the straw-necked ibis, aka “the farmer’s friend”.
All ibis pictured in this post are of the farmer-friendly kind, but photographed well within a metropolis.
Many (most, I suspect) city-resident humans who encounter these ibis wrongly assume that they are yet more “bin chickens”.
Comments closed
This little series concludes a few minutes after sundown, looking at some “premium real estate” on the western side of inner-urban Perth’s Lake Monger.
I think the new overnight-roosters have supplanted the immediately-preceding “tenants”: respectively, ibis and corellas.
Comments closed
This post’s photo was taken only a few seconds after the previous post’s.
As you can see, the “bin chickens” were not the only birds then coming in to roost at Lake Monger.
In recent months corellas have absolutely ravaged previously well-grassed parts of the Lake’s southern shoreline.
Comments closed
This post’s photo was taken just after sunset, less than two minutes after the previous post’s.
If I had pointed my camera at the pictured branches a few minutes earlier, they would have been “empty”, and most of the pictured birds would not yet even have flown into our field of view.
Comments closed
There is a deal of grace here, too!
Ibis are among more than a few birds which appear “awkward” when on terra firma – or on slushier ground, or enjoying the local tip, sitting atop your roof, or “dealing with” a rubbish bin – but are decidedly elegant, aloft.
Comments closed