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.

Wayan the whitefaced heron and kwirlam the purple swamphen on the dry lakebed. Wayan is still, white-faced grey, and silent, watching something in the dry mud, frozen mid-step and ready to strike, spear like. Kwirlam, all dark and colourful purple chested blue, with red nose and beak, comes up behind him, a little off to the side, and adopts the same position for a while, mirroring, mimicking, pausing mid step, and looking over, round as the heron is straight, full as the heron is line-like. The swamphen moves on, into the reeds, where he noisily and colourfully feeds, often on grass stems or seeds. The heron finally shoots out and pounces, something living soon no longer so in its beak. The one bird as if fallen down from the skies, thieving bugs and insects with a flick. The other, as if risen from the earth, like the sound of its guttural cry, as wilful as the heron is awkward and barely descended. The heron, when he does fly, flaps jerking at the air; the swamphen barely makes it off the ground, it’s feet dangling, ready to touchdown again, destined to be the only bird who stays when the lake finally, completely dries.

I’ve been visiting the lake to observe the drying process, and the freeing up of the dying forces. When things dry out, collapse, something else is freed up. The lake was full of water and of life, a real world in miniature, even just a few weeks ago. Now there are seven swans, two Pacific black ducks, a sharp-tailed sandpiper, three stilts, one white-faced heron, a handful of crakes, some moorhens, swamphen regulars, and maybe a rail or two in the rushes and reeds. Green grass is growing on the drying bed. The landcare people are measuring water quality today. I’m not sure they’ve ever been here before. They don’t know the usual water levels, that it dries out most summers. “We looked up the history before we came—this is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Perth. The water levels used to be right up there. The canopy was tuarts and paperbarks.” They get their shoes caught in the waterline mud as they reach for the water with a bottle on a long pole. They scatter swans and ducks, and the sandpiper and stilts move on. They ask if the old fence line was a jetty. I ask them what they’re expecting to find. They talk about heavy metals, the way the tropical fig leaves impact the water quality. I tell them about the figs already cut down for the borers, the paperbarks from before colonisation on the way out. They look surprised. The wind picks up as they try to approach the lake, blows them backwards. They put on Wellington boots. I wish them luck and leave them to it.