Just when I thought I’d seen it all. No stilts today at the lake, no whitefaced heron spotted or sandpipers seen, everything now gone as the last small pools dry, leaving only the swamphen and moorhen and the wind in the weeds and grasses, passing by. So I pick up my feet and walk the southern end towards the figs that, because of shothole borers and chainsaw remedies, are likely marked to die. And there at the southernmost tip of the remaining watery bits I spy the slow movements of the whitefaced heron, his grey feathers almost as dark as the drying and cracking of the lake. It’s more his shifting face that gives him away, right at the water’s edge, large and moving, finding another spot to again pause and wait. Okay, I think, wayan the heron is still here, but the sandpipers have followed the dotterels and swans and ducks and every other water bird and wader and moved on. But then I spot the tiny moving tail and needle like beak of the sandpiper, its white belly clearly moving in the shallows, its grey back completely dissolving into the greyness of the drying lake. Okay, one heron and one sandpiper, and that is all, time to go. Though just before leaving the jetty where I stand, I follow the heron all the way to the closest pool and notice nearby, right there, just at hand, though larger because closer, another sandpiper clearly moving at the edge of the constantly contracting shoreline. I look back over towards its mate—I’ve lost it again—but then see a line of white belly moving, before it turns, and there is left only a kind of sliding, slow relocation of grey on grey.