Clear sky minus some slight cirrus at the lake. It is cold. There’s a slight easterly at the river, but it is glassy at the lake. And today there is steam on the the water, and steam coming off logs in the sun. Fungus lives on a tree branch by the lake’s eastern entrance, white and wrinkled. A djidi djidy sits on the grass by the gazebo near the water’s surface; 1.26 metres. A swan shoes a swamphen. A swamphen shoes a coot. There’s a black face cuckooshrike. And wardong the old crow gathers a loose twig from a tree—he doesn’t fly straight to any existing nest but to another branch, where he sits a while watching me watching him; maybe he doesn’t want to show me the nest…maybe it’s the first twig of the one that’s coming next.

There is a kind of owl whisperer at Lake Claremont. I see her fairly often, and we have become kind of colleagues. She has rescued barn owls from the water, and from the attack of crows. She has no qualms about picking them up, or throwing something over them if only it will help. She’s been scratched and harassed in the process—by crows, magpies and owls. She looks for them, and finds them, amongst the trees beyond the edges of the lake; she tells me where, and sometimes I can see them too—like the tawny frogmouths to the east, or the barn owls to the north west in recent years. She tells me about other ones today. I look and look and cannot find them; not like she finds them, and they find her. And yes, she does (with no negative judgment intended) slightly resemble one.

Back to the lake today after five weeks of being away: USA away. And the thing I especially note are the bardoongooba—the Australian shovelers—tipping themselves 90 degrees to reach what they need to reach down there—most likely grasses—orange legs kicking in the air; the lake at 1.2 metres.

The first real cold front of the year has arrived, bringing lightening, thunder, wind and rain. Up to this the rest has been mere tropical lows dipping down, I would say. But the lake today looks almost full, or full to where the grass has advanced over the long summer at least. And the scouters of the last few weeks have brought back mates. From four yet Pacific black ducks yesterday we now have three or four dozen. The janjarak black winged stilts have remained in numbers—half to one dozen. Six nymiarak shelducks chase one another—one stands near five swans that sit among the grass of the western bank, pulling it up. Kwirlam the swaphen is still here of course, now outnumbered. Kanamit the welcome swallow swells up and down in a moving cloud in the south east corner. And about a dozen marangana wood ducks keep under the fig trees in their usual spot to the south. It’s almost as if they’re all adopting their positonings. Anyone seing the lake today and at its equivalent level at the end of last year might say: ”This place does not change! Even the very birds are the same.” 

I look around and the black and shelducks are actually swimming; and actually gliding down and landing on the water—although I do watch two black ducks come into land where a dozen or so stand amongst the puddles between the red-coloured ground cover, reaching out their feet to the water and, abruptly, suddenly, pulling up short. The swans on the other side, mostly in the grass, still stand. The wood ducks do a bit of both. And the ibis seem to have moved even further north, preferring the dryer bits. No more seagulls today, they seem to be a kind of pioneer, a first responder, though easily despondent; something in them knowing this is not typically their place, or mostly only with first rains.

While something in all these other birds seems to know this is their place, waiting patiently for first rains, sending testers, and then come the numbers. Something in them seems to know. A kind of patterning. But not a kind of thinking. There’s no doubt, or judging. They are following a kind of topography. A kind of languaging. One spoken here for eons. They do as they must—as they are directed by a patterning of the seasons without room for any reasoning or freedom. Not like us. We have to chose something—to live in accordance with a greater lawfullness…or not. One is naturally nature. In the other—something must be created.

There’s been some more rain overnight and the seagulls and ibis and Pacific black ducks are back at the lake. The water has spread almost all the way to the jetty on the southern side, and has started to link up with the other puddles slightly north by the rushes and reeds. There must be about 30 gulls on the water’s eastern edge. I don’t see the ibis at first, but they’re even further east amongst the red ground-covering plant, dipping their long protrusions of beaks down into the dryer (but now-slightly-less-so) parts of the lake, claiming something there brought by rain to new life…and death. There are half a dozen black-winged stilts, two Pacific black ducks paddling in the centre, sending little ripples out from their efforts—plus another two I see a bit later in the northern part, sitting down upon the water, hoping to float, but then having to stand again. I wonder where the shelducks have gone—none left this morning, but then I spy a group of six larger ducks circling above the lake, before flying to the east; they have white underwings, but from this angle I can’t tell if they’re shelducks or wood ducks or what—amazing what a change of perspective will do; I watch them fly by, and turn back to the lake, only to see two shelducks come in from the north—were they two that peeled off?—to land on a shallow stretch, by the jetty, only recently wet. 

But before the ducks I watch all the seagulls, previously quiet, start up a gradually growing racuous, first one, then another, growing louder, then many, then in a small group they suddenly, noisily, lift off, with most of the others joining them, except three, then two, as the rest fly higher in a noisy white cloud, disappearing off to the south west—ocean or river; a third then reappears and lands near one of the others, while the more solitary gull stands by the water’s edge to the north. And if I hadn’t seen their great departure and had only arrived now I would have thought there had only been but three gulls at the lake this morning (plus kwirlam the purple swapmhens frolicking to the north, and kanamit the welcome swallow flying low overhead, and dilibrit the magpie lark and djidi djidi the wagtail in the mix. the sound of the grey butcherbird, kookaburras to the south and east dipping down for food, the odd wardong on the water’s edge, half a dozen dotterels, a little buff banded rail suprising me not far from my feet,  and a faroff bird on dead tree limb in the northern part of the lake—a kite maybe—plus all the rest.) For what’s revealed in a moment must be joined to other moments, as best we can, in imagination—forward and backwards—resting as we must on the data of these momentary bits, and our own inner activation. But still, nice to be reminded of the bits we must miss.

After the first rains came some birds, perhaps we could say ‘the usual suspects’. Now after more rain we again go to the lake and find water filling, growing wider (or else the water table rising), and for the first time since it reached its serious dryness, yet—the Pacific black ducks—are back; there are about half a dozen, some of them even look as if they’re swimming, or at least floating. White ibis again, straw necked ibis—rain-time opportunists. The two shelducks are back again, coming and going as they have been these last few weeks and months, often doing their best spoonbill impersonations in the shoreline shallows. Wayan the whitefaced heron is here, so often as he is, in the backdrop. More janjarak black winged stilts—maybe half a dozen. Dotterels still, maybe a couple of new arrivals. And of all things we see a swan—sitting on the water at one point; two days later he’ll again be gone, as will the Pacific black ducks. But more janjarak will come. Wayan will stay, as will the dotterels and shelducks. And, eventually, the other ducks too will return, and all the others. Yet another breathing in and out in the bigger breathing of the seasons and the year, both for water and for all its attendants/attendance.

A couple of months ago someone at the lake said to me, “My wife and I have decided that the water isn’t going down any further because it’s reached the water table.” Something in the way he said it made me sceptical. And, anyway, I try not for explanations but for portraying. And so, in the meantime, though I have gone away and come back again, the lake, it must be said, has not dried out completely, though hot dry weather has persisted. And when it has rained new puddles have formed, but they too have not dried out during further hot dry weather that followed. So, without reaching for an explanation (perhaps failing), but reaching through portrayal, which my shoreline colleagues have somehow added to, we might well be forced to say that we are not looking so much at the drying water of the lake sucking itself away; but rather the breathing of the water level of the whole area—the so-called water table. If so, it is less a case of something drying from the outside in (or topside down), but rather something rising and falling from the inside out (or underside up).

At the lake again today I see Kwirlam the purple swamphen in a little puddle of water by the edge of the reeds he likes to inhabit this time of year. This bath sits under a little dead-log overhang, and seems now just deep enough for him to sit in and make a few red-beak head-dives under the water and then spill this over his back and wings, wetting his feathers. He does this rapidly—over and over again—diving down head first, while crouching, with the water falling over his back. After a dozen or so of these, he steps out and shakes himself a little in the sunshine.

At the lake today I see three manatj corellas head south over the pools of water. There have been many on the streets of Cottesloe closer to the ocean pecking at the cones of Norfolk pines and, maybe, other roots and seeds. But I realise it’s been a while since I’ve seen many here—these three seem to look down at the water, but decide to keep on flying. I lose them after a while, or look away, only to find a short time later koolbardie the magpie chasing three more manatj—or maybe the same—out over the lake, away from the golfcourse and trees. 

Djeran, adulthood season; first rains, without the rain.