There’s a dilibrit mud lark that lives near the lake who likes to frequent the window mirrorglass by the cafés and gym, and there come to meet his own reflection. He sings to/at it, flies at it, pecks at it. His high pitched singing, the clacking of beak on glass, the black and white flurry of wings—all things to contend with in this morning meeting.

Just when I was saying to my friend that there are really no birds left at the dry lake except the swamphen, the heron, a sandpiper, some dotterels, rails, and a few black winged stilts, in fly a couple of raptors. “Raptors?” he asks. “Birds of prey.” In addition to all these walkers on wet and dry mud, we still have a couple of birds looking over; a couple of birds flying: the first a medium sized, compact, orange one, maybe a kestrel, maybe a juvenile hobby. “I’m not so good with my raptors,” I say. And then, a moment later into full view: a black-shouldered kite. “As I was saying, not much here, except…”

The only birds I can immediately see at the lake today are wayan the white faced heron, grey and thinly gentleman-like in his stick-like wanderings; and kwirlam the purple swamphen all dark and round, ball-like, close to the ground. Kwirlam is one of the few, if not the only bird, who’ll stay within the lake’s area when it dries completely. Not quite there yet, wayan stays around the lake, walking the drier and sometimes wetter areas; this day he’s half-way between both, quietly sizing up the insects in front of him. And from the south comes one kwirlm, hoofing along at a trot, surely not going to run right into wayan. But yes, we (me and wayan) both seem to see this at the last minute. I expect wayan to back away, this not being fully his place, but he raises up his wings, extends his neck and uncoils as if to throw his beak at kwirlam, spear like, and adding to this a kind of high-guttural cry. Kwirlam is taken aback, pauses, retreats a step, and then walks around wayan. Was I the only one who noticed this epic standoff between the nervous, head-like heron, and the round, digestive hen?

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.)

How often it seems you’re given a name for something you’ve been seeing regularly—”It’s a sharp-tailed sandpiper,” matching at once the name to the thing in front of you, wedded, known—when you go away for a couple of weeks and return, and think you’ve seen the same old friend as before, small of course, engaging the kind of naked-eye birdwatching that you do. “Old sharp-tail is back,” you proclaim, full of wisdom, to no-one but yourself, and this writing. Only to read in a monthly newsletter today that it is, in fact, a “wood sandpiper” (the article by the same guy who pointed out the initial sharp tail). I can see it in my mind’s eye now, its bobbing tail and short, sharp movements, its almost brown-grey feathers against the greyness of the drying lake. “Old woody is back!” I proclaim, and none could care less, except maybe woody (possibly sharp-tailed), and of course me, for my whole world has yet again changed.

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.

End of February, end of the water at the lake this season. Still enough of a pool, enough of a puddle to keep some birds here. Stilts stand in the water, their long legs sticking out. A sharp tailed sandpiper on the water’s edge, maybe two, or else a noodalyarong the black-fronted dotterel. I thought wayan the white-faced heron might have moved on, but no, there he is on the other side back a bit, on the drier ground, stalking. And then the morrhens on the even-drier ground, not too far from the rushes and reeds. Finally the swamphens mostly in a drier area to the north, amongst the green grasses, or moving in and out of the long rushes. Five karak black cockatoos fly directly overhead while giving glimpses of their fiery red tails. Two nyimarak shelducks circle above the lake a few times, but finding it not to their liking or depth, move on. At one point the swamphens and moorhens all move toward the cover of the rushes, their tales up. I look above, but can see no raptor, though he may be behind the trees. 

The birds, then, move from the sharpest and most sticklike, most nervous and headlike, in the middle of the lake, to birds more rounded at its edges. All of them together giving the picture of a human being with their head planted in the last of the water, with body and belly and feet moving out, maybe even up.

Perry Lakes this morning where they’re now channeling water in from nearby lake, and the levels are still high. Koorodoor the egret, ngoonan the teals, coots, a white ibis, and then what at first seems like a straw-necked ibis. All of these I’ve seen before and known. But something keeps me locked onto the darker coloured ibis—a bird so often overlooked, given a derogatory name here in Australia by colonisers. In Egypt though—Thoth—the god of knowledge, writing, wisdom and scribes. What we value reflected in thinking and language. Everything contains something worthwhile. I stay with the ibis. it moves a little, and I get a better look, then another. And something I might have initially glossed over grows clearer. The first glossy ibis I can recall seeing. And I wonder how much else I might have missed.