Fuller version of “Big Spit: full Monty”

If the featured image’s swan had nested at this location a couple of decades earlier,  he/she (black swans share nesting/parenting duties) would have almost been “living next door to Alan”.

Alan Bond – criminal/America’s Cup “hero” – is no more, but “his” Victoria Avenue mansion recently sold for multiple millions, and is part of the featured image’s “millionaire’s row”.

This post is best read after first seeing the immediately preceding one.

The same swan dominates the next image.

 

 

 

Look carefully, and you can see the same individual, here:

 

 

 

 

 

The wonderfully “unlikely” presence of an unspoilt spit – so very close to some of Australia’s wealthiest suburbia, but reaching out from beautiful bushland/parkland which is “public” rather than “private” property – is perhaps best appreciated from a bird’s/plane’s/drone’s point of view.

Click here to see what I mean.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following images will take you progressively closer to Point Walter itself.

All photos copyright Doug Spencer, taken on afternoon of 06 August 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is possible that rainfall since 06 August may have moved enough sand to have closed the rare “window of opportunity” that allowed us to walk the spit’s entire length, safely, without wetting even our knees.

My hunch is that “the window” is probably still open.

At any time, however, anyone can safely walk for at least several hundred metres along the sandbar, and enjoy the remarkable experience of being in such a magnificent, wild, watery place, whilst also being well within inner suburbia!

Click here to see tide times at Point Walter.

As it happens, on this occasion we did not see dolphins there, but we many times have.

We did – again, as we often do, there – see an Osprey wheeling overhead, then settling, high in a tree.

Once, in 2015, we there had a probably “once in a lifetime”, almost unbelievably close encounter with an (uninjured, healthy, wild) Osprey.

That encounter will be the subject of its own post, eventually.

So, I will not yet share that event’s most dramatic photos.

But here is one image, plus a wee musical bonus,  as compensation for the lack of functional internet access having thwarted my attempts to provide #78 in the “a shining moment” series with that ongoing series’ usual musical component.

 

 

 

 

 

Osprey is from the  late Bert Jansch’s 1979, all-instrumental, avian-inspired album Avocet.

Bert was its guitarist-composer, Danny Thompson its double bassist, with Martin Jenkins on other instruments.

The album is still available, I think, in various versions, here.