On the day of the big wind I take an evening walk down to the river at Harvey Beach. This would be one of the few places in Perth slightly protected from this roaring southerly. While there I remember that nephew Fin has been telling me about a couple of chicks he’s been watching grow on a branch at the northern end of the beach. He says he sees an adult come in and feed them. I look in that direction and there they are—a couple of mimal darters, fairly large now, maybe both adolescents, maybe one adult and an adolescent, one of them burying its long needle-like beak into its feathers—at the end of a branch that overhangs the water, and which remains relatively still as tuart trees bluster and blow all around it. Further up the branch looks strangely white. And then, in the background, further upriver, I notice a solitary adult on another branch, on another tree. 

The next day I return, and it is one adult and one adolescent on the branch today. No other mimal seen. And today the adult one has a stick in its beak, and it’s trying to add it to the whiter part of the branch which I now see is a nest of dead twigs. But first the younger mimal has to move off the nest, and only then can the new, grey, dead stick be placed atop the others.