In the last couple of weeks it’s been the same band of usual suspects as the lake inhales its last dirty puddles. Kwirlam the swamphen, the resident lake shoreline bird, here even when the lake is all but cracked earth and grass. Nolyang the dusky moorhen, smaller than kwirlam, still patrolling some of the shallow pools. The black-winged stilt in twos or fours, still stretching their pencil legs within the water. Wayan the whitefaced heron, larger, patrolling, lurking the expanding plains of the dryer mud between drying pool and encroaching grass. And old sharp-tail aka woody the sandpiper walking small around the edges or the centre here and there, his tail bobbing as he goes, like a little tuft of mud up and given form. But today, an old familiar friend re-appeared—one I’d wondered at whether or not he’d left when the lake began to dry; a smaller type of hen, really, larger than a crake (who I also haven’t seen for days, weeks)—cooli, the buff-banded rail; orange headed and chested with stripy lines to boot, a kind of turtle-shell-coloured brown on his back, slinking through the grasses by the winter lake’s edge, now dry. Cooli who I’d missed. Cooli who’s stayed. (Almost three years since the lake has fully dried.)