By Meg Mooney

I first see them scuffling around

between the lettuce and broccoli

plump little birds

black and brown hieroglyphs

on their bellies

mosaics of triangles along their backs

streaked with moving lines of silver

they don’t dally

move quickly around the vegies

briefly risk the open

one or two at at time

all their wild beauty on display

four, six, maybe ten

now they’re in the saltbush

I can see it wiggling

occasionally a head appears

with a bright red berry

stuck on the end of its beak, then gone

they’re making their way

to the edge of the garden

through the wire fence

down a short open slope

into the long grass in the drain –

up the other side

and they’re safe in the bush

perhaps it’s for those juicy berries

or the pond water

or the bounty of insects among the vegies

they make this trek

I only know I’ve seen a few precious minutes

in the lives of these visitors of big flood years

and treasure their scrapings in my garden

Quail drawing by Neville Cayley, taken from the Australian Government’s Australian Botanic Gardens website

The Bush Plants Trip is taken from Alice Springs writer Meg Mooney’s recently launched book, The Gap, one of the winners of the Picaro Poetry Prize at last year’s Byron Bay Writer’s Festival. Out of  8 finalists, including locals Leni Shilton and Meg Mooney, four collections were chosen for publication by Picaro Press.

The Gap, which is the title poem of the book, was inspired by Meg’s observations and reflections on the significance of the Gap, which has long been a symbolic gateway int Alice Springs but has been an important site to Central Australian Aborignal people for for longer.

“I wrote a poem in which I and an Aboriginal friend were driving through the Gap and talking about Aboriginal people being moved on from camping in the wide open spaces of the creek, in contrast to the new flats, ‘boxes’ my friend called them, built just north of the Gap. Then more poems came to me, in which the geographic Gap was included and the other gap, the one between Aboriginal people and whitefellas in this town.”

Meg is a two times past winner in the poetry section of the NT Literary Wards, she has been a guest at the Darwin, Perth and Sydney Writer’s festivals and has had poems and short stories published in numerous anthologies both locally and nationally.

The Gap is her second publication, in 2005 For the Dry Country: writing and drawings from the centre, Meg collaborated with artist Sally Mumford. Meg has also been a long-term contributor to Alice Online.

I pick up the old ladies from the sorry camp

in a quiet edge of the community

they’re cooking chops on a little fire

sitting companionably on the ground

between bed frames with piles of colourful blankets

near their well-made humpies –

sheet of iron, canvas, leafy branches for verandahs

if you didn’t know, you might think this camp was primitive –

a nearby tap would be handy

we meet up with the school troopies, head for Warumpi Hill

collect branches of plants on the way, to teach the kids

nyawa! ultukunpa! akatjirri! arrkinki!

look! honey grevillea! bush tomato! bloodwood!

the women call out, their old eagle eyes

spotting different foods and medicines

so soon the dashboard is full of plants

as we’re driving in the narrow gull

between the head and thorax of the honeyant

the women start singing, chanting phrases of its story

the droning of Daisy, Topsy, Tilau and Punus

fills the troopie, resonates with the ridges around us

they’re waking up these dry hills

so bare since the big fire a few years ago

not much rain since then –

dead brown poles replace

the tall white staffs of ghost gums, speckled bloodwoods

shrivelled bushes have no sweet fruits or flowers

maybe these hills won’t come back

buffel grass, a weed, is all over them now

but the women still sing to the honeyants

they’re still there, jus the same

through the pass next to the ant’s head

they tske us to groups of rockholes

slits in sloping rock slabs

empty now, not covered with stones anymore

maybe they did dry up sometimes

the kids laugh, cluster around the largest hole

so we can take photos

the ladies arranged around them

singing again, arms moving

bodies swaying into the dance

like the last of the angels

alert, busy Topsy

tall, graceful Daisy

Tilau, tall too, a little bumbling

small determined Punus

when rain does come and the ground is softer

they’ll dig metre-deep holes in mulga woods

to find the honey-pot ants

each abdomen a sweet, golden bubble

now they tell us lots of people used to camp

on this plain beside a curve of hills

it was a really important place

they talk to the children about the honeyants’ travels

speak strongly, like their grandparents did, shouting

tjukurrpa kanyini!

we hold this dreaming!

When I get up in the morning now, I go and check on the butterflies. For around 2 weeks the bush orange (Capparis mitchellii), which I planted 12 years ago, has been home for dozens of caper white butterflies.

Well, for a number of them it has been home for some time. They’ve been living in 50 or more papery cocoons on my little teenage tree. And they’re the reason for all the visitors fluttering around.

Caper whites are so named because they lay their eggs and their caterpillars feed and pupate on trees or bushes in the caper family. In Central Australia this is either the bush orange, a small tree with dense dark green foliage, or the bush passionfruit, a large shrub.

Both these caper plants have exquisite flowers with large velvety white petals surrounding a spray of long stamens. They’re called passion flowers because they open up at night and die off in the morning. Bush oranges flower regularly around this time of year and some trees are covered with the gorgeous flowers after all the rain we’ve had.

Both these caper plants also have edible fruit, around the size of the foreign fruit they’re name after, with sweet yellow, jelly-like flesh, with a slightly bitter after-taste in the case of the bush orange.

Back to the caper whites. The medium-sized whitish butterflies with black edges to their upper wings and black veining with yellow patches on their underwings flying around my tree are males. They’re here because the cocoons are opening and they’re looking for females to mate with. Females look similar to the males but their underwings are much yellower.

Caper whites’ mating, as I discovered this morning, is not a particularly civilised business. A cocoon, about the length of a fingernail and cigar-shaped, was breaking open. Two males were tugging a female out of the cocoon. Before she even had her wings open one of them had the end of his abdomen joined up with the end of hers.

From reference books, I’ve found out that the female genital opening is near, but not at the end of her abdomen. The opening at the end of the abdomen is used for laying eggs.

Back to this morning: the second male caper white didn’t give up on the female because the other male was attached to her. For around 20 minutes he kept bumping and flapping around them, as they hung from a stem, apparently trying to separate them. This seems to be normal behaviour for caper whites.

When I went outside again, half an hour or so later, the mating couple seemed more settled. Both their wings were closed, his whiter ones over her yellow ones, offset a little, and with their heads at opposite ends, the male hanging on to a stem. This seems to be the common arrangement of mating couples, which still get occasionally disturbed by other males.

There are usually a couple of dozen males fluttering around the tree with three or four mating couples. So the males greatly outnumber the females at any given time. I assume this is because once a female has mated she lays her eggs and flies off. I don’t know what happens to her after that. Assumably she can mate again, as not all mating happens around the caper plants.

Any males hatching from cocoons join the throng of eager suitors. You’d think these fresh young males would out-compete the older ones, which have flown in, and often look a bit ragged, but this is apparently not the case.

Sometimes a mating couple flies around, maybe because they’ve been disturbed, with the male doing most of the flying, opening his white wings to reveal the closed yellow ones of the female, a pretty sight.

I haven’t yet witnessed the end of mating – it seems to go on for an hour or more – but I have seen a female laying tiny pale yellow eggs, the size of a pinhead, in neat little rows on a leaf. They hatch out in less than a week, I think, into little brown caterpillars, a few millimetres long.

Within days the dark brown caterpillars seem to be several centimetres long. A number of them are now munching their way through the leaves of my little tree. There aren’t as many as I’d expect, so quite a lot of them must have become food for some other insect, or spiders – I haven’t seen any birds hanging around the tree. There probably won’t be many leaves left in a few weeks when the caterpillars form cocoons themselves.

I think almost all the current round of cocoons are now hatched on my tree, so I guess the males will soon head off elsewhere. Some of them look rather tattered – bush oranges are spiny – and might not last much longer.

Caper whites occur over most of Australia, except the southern half of Western Australia. Apparently they can migrate for up to several weeks at a time, sometimes in huge numbers.

I’ll miss checking up on these butterflies when I’m around during the day and seeing them all settle down on the tree each evening, hanging like exotic leaves.

So next time you see a cloud of white butterflies around a bush orange or passionfruit go and see what’s happening.

Photo Travel Writers News

By Meg Mooney

We were camped at the beginning of a little gorge, up Birthday Creek from Stuarts Pass, our way blocked for the night by a deep pool. I looked upstream into the darkness between walls of rock and thought I saw eyes at the height of a human reflect from my torch. My heart raced, but then I saw the faint outline of a dingo, its eyes reflecting yellow-green.

The dingo padded quietly along the sandy creekbed toward us, keeping a handful of strides away, splashed through the silvery ribbon of creek and disappeared.

As I was going to bed I saw more eyes glittering close by, but they were a warm orange-red – a rock wallaby clambering around on the rocks.

After midnight the dingo returned – or some other dingo appeared. There was no slinking around camp nuzzling tins and mugs like I’m used to. Even dingoes walking quietly around swags wouldn’t surprise me.

But this one wasn’t interested in keeping a low profile at all. It howled, and barked. It didn’t leave when my friend threw the stones holding down – rather unsuccessfully in the wind – his tent pegs.

The dingo paced between our tents, growling. I laid low, with the false security of fabric between me and it. The dingo kept up its protests until my friend got up and picked up a stick from our ebbing fire. Then it skulked of, having made it clear that humans rarely visited and did not own this place.

My friend, who has done a lot of bushwalking and camping over many years in the Centre, had only once before known a dingo to behave like this, many years ago in Pitjantjatjara country. It was the same for me, although my other angry dingo experience had been only a few weeks prior to the Birthday Creek one.

That time I was pottering with a friend near a little waterhole where we’d been having lunch, half way up the gorge at the back of Mt Gillen. Suddenly we heard barking and howling, coming closer. Then we saw the dingo, about 20 metres away, just up the side of the gorge, still coming slowly towards us. I yelled but that had no affect, it kept coming.

My friend started taking photos of the dingo, which was doing a nice howling pose close by. This dingo wasn’t going away and was making it clear that it wanted us to do just that. I told my friend that I thought we needed to go, right now, scooped the lunch things into my bag and headed back down the gorge.

Thirty metres down the gorge we couldn’t see the dingo and it quietened down. We did want to go further up and after five minutes decided to try another sortie – maybe the dingo had had a drink and gone. But it started growling as soon as we got closer and we gave up on that idea.

Dingoes aren’t supposed to bark are they? It’s possible this one was a cross with a domestic dog. However, consulting the excellent and readable ‘The Dingo in Australia and Asia’, by Laurie Corbett (J.B. Books, 2001), I learnt that dingoes can bark but their bark is ‘sharper, more abrupt and more throaty than that of domestic dogs’. Some captive dingoes have apparently learnt to yap and bark in company with their domesticated companions.

Corbett says that pure dingoes have not been recorded barking in the wild. However, in his study, researchers observed ‘bark-howls’ by dingoes ‘in situations of extreme alarm, to warn pups or companions of immediate danger’. A bark-howl, according to Corbett, starts with one or several barks followed by a howl. That’s what we heard.

Corbett also reports that dingo trappers have recorded bark-howling by one of a pair of dingoes, after its mate has been trapped, apparently to warn of the trapper’s approach.

Also, ‘at night in remote areas, dingoes sometimes bark-howl when they unexpectedly come across human campsites on their line of travel’. So maybe that was what was going on up Birthday Creek.

The bark-howling event in the gorge behind Mt Gillen was probably because the dingo had a den close by. Dingoes breed once a year and in central Australia this is usually in winter.

A former Aboriginal colleague, long dead too young, once told me how his family used to take him out bush to get dingo skins. They often went out to escape ‘the Welfare’, who might take him away. One of the reasons he didn’t learn to read and write much, he told me, laughing, was that he was always going out bush to get away from the Welfare.

All the senna bushes are full of glorious, egg-yolk yellow flowers at the moment. Jungarrayi told me that when the sennas are flowering, that’s when the dingo puppies open their eyes.

After the summer rains and all the grass that’s grown since then, walking on the plains and low hills behind Kilgariff Crescent is like walking in a wonderful outdoor aviary.

You hear the ‘queel, queel’ of cockatiels, small grey cockatoos with white ‘shoulders’, as they zoom overheard singly or in groups of thirty or more birds. I don’t think I’ve ever seen cockatiels in my ‘backyard’ before and it’s unusual, in my experience, to see flocks this big, except occasionally near waterholes, where they breed in tree hollows.

Sometimes I’ll see a few of these birds sitting in a small tree, looking very cheeky with their yellow faces with a round red patch, like blusher, on each side. As I approach, a flock of the birds, which have been quietly eating grass seed, will suddenly zoom up from the ground and fly off into a tree.

The budgies have a different feeding strategy. You can hear their chattering half a kilometre away. As you get near them it’s almost a wall of sound. Their name in one local Aboriginal language is kulyirritji, and that describes the sound well.

As you approach a feeding group, you’ll start to see these lovely little birds sitting in bushes and moving among the grass. If you move quietly and slowly you can get quite close. More flocks might fly in, swerving deftly over and around you, so you find yourself ducking.

Suddenly your movement, or something else, like a black kite, will scare the birds and hundreds will fly up into a tree, all squashed together on the branches, chattering away. Or they’ll fly in to the air, sometimes forming huge flocks.

These birds are magnificent synchronised flyers. They wheel around in unison, so hundreds of birds flash bright green and yellow as they catch the sun. The flocks break up into groups and reform in endless patterns, like schools of fish or swarms of insects. Who would keep budgies in cages if they could see this?

The budgies and cockatiels, and possibly the quieter diamond doves, grey birds with white ‘diamond’ spots, and a red ring around each eye, all seem to be honing in on one particular type of grass. Everywhere I go, I see this grass is flattened, while others, including the useless buffel grass, are relatively untouched.

Summer grass - after budgies have had a feed.This favourite grass of the budgies and cockatiels is a Urochloa species, with the appropriate but not very informative common name of summer grass. A friend and I tried a comparative tasting, to see why the birds are so keen on this particular grass.

The summer grass has crunchy seeds, about the size of a pinhead, lined up in little side-branches along the seedheads. The other common native grasses on these plains, small burr-grass (Tragus australianus), button grass (Dactyloctenium radulans) and bottlewashers (Enneapogon species) have smaller seeds and a much lower seed to chaff ratio.

Urochloa grows on fertile soils that buffel also loves. Maybe the particular rain pattern of the last summer has suited it, or for some reason it has been able to out-compete the buffel in some areas, for now at least.

Some birds have also started feeding on the small clumps of button grass. Its seedheads have a radial arrangement around the size of a medium-sized button. The bottlewashers grass – you’ll know why it’s called that when you see it – is drying out and giving the gravelly hills an unusual snowy look. This snowy autumn has been a great one for budgies and cockatiels.

Meg meets spadefoot toad. Picture Bob Read.

By Meg Mooney

Summer rains mean frogs and the Centre, unlike some parts of Australia, still has lots of them. I spent Easter at Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary, several hundred kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, with the Alice Springs Field Naturalists Group.

The annual animal surveys had just started at Newhaven, which is a joint project between the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and Birds Australia. The first morning we got to go out and help check the traps. After staggering awake (me anyway) in near-darkness, we arrived at the samphire plain of the first trap site in grey pre-dawn light.

There were several parallel lines of pitfall traps, with small cloth fences, the height of a table tennis net, staked to run through the middle of all the traps in a line. Animals are blocked by this fence, run, slither or hop along it and sometimes fall into a trap.

Pitfall traps, in this case plastic tubes about 10 centimetres in diameter and half a metre deep, usually catch lizards, some snakes and small mammals like dunnarts. This time they are catching more frogs than anything else at the sites near claypans and small lakes, nestled among paperbarks or open to the plains. These pans and lakes are usually dry but after all the rain this summer there is water everywhere at Newhaven.

There are 60 trapping sites on the sanctuary. The pitfall traps at these sites are covered with lids for most of the year. In the next 4 weeks, each will be opened for 3 days, as the survey team rotates through the sites, also putting out a line of 20 Elliot traps at each one.

The Elliots, designed and made in Australia, are aluminium boxes roughly the size of a letter box, and hinged so they can collapse to pack into a carrying case. Bait – a ball of peanut butter and oats – is put at one end of the box and the other end latched open. A tripping device closes this ‘door’ if an animal walks into get the bait.

As well as hopping mice and other native mice, the Newhaven surveys regularly catch brush-tailed mulgaras in the Elliots at some sites. These meat-eating marsupials are the size of a small rat, but more attractive. They are sandy brown, have big round ears and a carrot tail, with a crest of black hairs, tapering away from the body.

Mulgaras have suffered from the arrival of cats and foxes and changes in burning: they feed in recently burnt spinifex country and shelter under old, thick spinifex. They are listed as vulnerable and not found in many parts of the Centre anymore. Aboriginal people ate them.

All the traps are checked early in the morning and at late afternoon. The animals are observed, measured and/or weighed on site and returned to their country.

Back to the frogs: we found three different types that morning. Before they reached down, the survey team members shone a torch down each trap to see what might be in it. Small animals, like spiders, beetles, skinks and frogs, are often hidden in the dirt put at the bottom of each tube for them to shelter in. ‘A centipede latched on to me at the first trap, so I’m wary this morning,’ said one surveyor. He was wearing gloves, unlike some of the others.

The first frog we found was brown with a cream line down its back and a pointy snout. A Main’s burrowing frog, Cyclorana mainii. These frogs can be plain or mottled, the line down the back is distinctive. They occur around Alice Springs too and their call is a kind of baa, so they’re sometimes called sheep frogs.

As the country dries out, these frogs fill up their bladders with water, burrow deep in the sand and enclose themselves in impervious cocoons of dead skin. They can remain like this for months or even years. Now they have broken out of their protective sacs and come up to the surface to breed.

Aboriginal people dug up a close relative of this frog, which lives in the Tennant Creek area, to get water from it. They may have used this one too.

The next frog is beautiful: it’s covered with black wavy designs on a yellow background. This is Neobactrus aquilonius, another burrowing frog. Burrowing frogs only appear after heavy rain in the warmer months. They don’t waste their energy on light showers.

Next we find an evening more stunning frog. The desert spadefoot toad, Notaden nichollsii, is plump and covered with bright orange, yellow and white warty dots. I’ve heard about these frogs. Some years ago, Aboriginal women from northwest of Alice Springs showed some scientists how to find them.

Neobactrus aquilonius. Photo Bob Read.

The women could tell where the frogs’ burrows were from patterns on the sand and the kinds of grass and herbs growing there. They dug 20 centimetres or so into the sandy soil, with a billy can, and found a couple of dozen in each burrow.

In the same hole, they found smaller frogs, with the same coloured spots on their backs. The Aboriginal women, and the scientists at first, assumed these were young spadefoot toads. But on closer inspection, the scientists realised the smaller frogs were a different species.

They were Tanami toadlets, Uperoleia micromeles, and this was the first time that scientists recorded different species of Australian frogs sharing communal burrows.

The Aboriginal women left the toadlets, but seared the toads on hot coals, then buried them in ashes to bake. When they were cooked, the women split open the frogs’ abdomens, sucked the juices out, then ate them whole. These frogs would have been a reliable food source in dry times.

Sure enough, the next day, the Newhaven surveys find some Tanami toadlets, only a couple of centimetres long, around half the size of the toads.

Spencer's Burrowing Frog - back to life in time for Easter

Easter has its own feeling in the Centre. That feeling isn’t always accomodated by a good rain, but there’s a widespread expectation that it should be. When it does, this brief, sweet period of cooling-down allows the thirsty earth time to absorb the gift  rather than the sky reclaiming it in evaporation.

Stranded in Adelaide, I bought an Easter bilby today because it reminded me of home. But I have to admit this endangered bandicoot has never struck me as the most appropriate antipodean symbol of fertility. As a symbol of rebirth it works a little better – and more so with every bilby bred at the Alice Springs Desert Park.
But after reading this piece by Meg Mooney, I’ve been wondering whether we shouldn’t be chocolating up Spencer’s Burrowing Frog. It would not necessarily be a replacement, but as an addition to the menagerie. We could take the kids out to sandy riverbeds and hide the frogs in the sand (with a few clues to help).
Meg Mooney wrote this piece in February (republished with permission from the Alice Springs Field Naturalists Newsletter), while the rain was still fresh, but all over Central Australia fellow-travellers will be experiencing similar delights this Easter.- D.R.

Bradshaw Walk at the Telegraph Station – 27 February 2010

by Meg Mooney

It’s early morning and a small group of Field Naturalists are in a quandary. When I arrive at 6.45am, a little late, Rosalie and Raf are about to head across the flooded but not too high Charles Creek to at least have a look at the Todd at the Telegraph Station, and Barb is about to drive back home.

My arrival causes yet another discussion and soon we are all driving to the Telegraph Station! The trip to a gorge to the north of the Station has been abandoned, because ‘you have to see it in the sunlight’ (Rosalie) and that walk would now involve crossing a flooded tributary.

So we opt for the Bradshaw Walk and disappear into a kind of fairyland in the bouldery hills just south of the Station. All the little streams are flowing, with clear water. There are frogs, moss, ferns and liverwort, miniature worlds with soft cushions and sprays of green beside little waterfalls and pools, sandy beaches.

We see one big fat Spencer’s burrowing frog – we see quite a few of these frogs – scrabbling desperately not to get washed down a little stream, finally failing and disappearing spreadeagled up side down near the surface of the water.

The ‘bok-bok’ of these frogs, a little like gentle knocking on a door, is a major feature of the soundtrack of our walk.

Trickling, tinkling, splashing, and the occasional low roaring, of water are the main other sounds. We do hear and occasionally see some Pied Butcherbirds and Willy Wagtails but birds are generally silent and not to be seen.

There’s a big waterfall down a taller ridge. A rock-wallaby watches me climb up to see if the fall’s fed by a pool at the top, then scoots away. There’s no pool, just a tiny, winding stream.

Under witchetty bushes beside some streams we find clusters of little white puffballs, like tiny Pine Gaps. (Does anyone know exactly what these mushrooms are?)

Rosalie, who walks here often, points out some of her special sites. There’s the tree (a bloodwood? – I’ve forgotten) with branches grown together to make a spyhole; a big bullock bush (Alectryon oleifolius); a darker green, thicker moss growing on a boulder, different to the softer, bright green moss on the ground; a relatively rare commelina (native wandering jew) plant with bright blue flowers.

Eventually we come out on to the banks of the Todd, largely taken over by buffel grass and couch. Still, it’s an unusual, and wet-footed (the gullies), experience to walk back north beside a great expanse of churning, milk coffee water.

Todd River - Bradshaw Walk

I’m just getting to a place on my walk in the hills behind Kilgariff Crescent where there are two spreading mulgas beside a little creek a couple of metres wide. I love these mulgas, always cross the creek beside them, so you can see my track there now.

The mulgas keep the creek near them clearer of buffel grass, and so clumps of my favourite golden beard grass still grow there. Each clump has tangles of ribbon grass at the base and thin, chest-high stalks with ‘beards’ of fluffy seed heads near the top. Long after the seeds have dispersed and the seed heads have disappeared, the tall stalks remain. They used to line these little creeks like rapier-thin sentinels, but buffel grass has mostly taken over now.

At the mulgas I hear an unusual sound. A can rattling along the ground. I guess immediately what it is, hope I’m not right. I follow the creek upstream 20 metres and peer cautiously into bushy erosion gullies – it could be a snake. There’s silence for a while then the rattling starts up again and I see it, a little goanna with its head stuck in a beer can, trying desperately to shake it off.

I try holding the can up in the air with the goanna dangling from it, hoping gravity will help – that wasn’t a good idea. Then I hold the can firmly on the ground, so the goanna’s got something to pull against. That doesn’t work either. The goanna’s now pulling against its scales, and they’re jamming against the little opening.

Damn, it’s sunset and I’m tired, but I can’t just leave it to die. So I trudge the two kilometres back home, run into my next door neighbour, Paul, who with his wife has dealt with this problem once before. We gather towels, gloves, a little esky and his two daughters and the animal rescue mission trundles off in my hilux.

It’s not hard to track down the goanna, even in the half-dark, it’s still rattling around in the little gully. Meanwhile, Paul’s wife, Jayne, rings the reptile centre. Rex is out at an Indigenous ranger camp but his off-sider gives Jayne instructions, and she’s seen Rex carry out this procedure.

We bring the goanna back in the esky. I hold it on my lap, with my good leatherjacket across my knees (a towel would’ve done). First Jayne uses her dissection scissors to cut the can in half, crossways. Now the goanna’s head is in the open air, but its neck is still stuck in a miniature rack.

Paul uses tinsnips to cut part of a V in the top of the can. Jayne does the last bit of the V, which has its point near the goanna’s neck, a delicate operation. The goanna is still, maybe because I’m holding it rather tightly. Finally Jayne is through, and she and I can pull at each side of the opening to free a rather scared animal, who squirts over my leather jacket at this point.

We inspect the goanna’s neck for cuts, but there don’t seem to be any significant ones. Lucky. It can’t have been trapped for very long when I found it. The goanna that Jayne and Paul rescued a few months ago had some nasty cuts and had to spend a few days recuperating at the reptile centre.

Lucky, a young sand goanna, overnights at my house in the esky and I drive him back home in the morning.

Naturalist and writer Meg Mooney wrote this lovely piece about Ellery Gorge in December last year and I put off using it in the hope I could go out to there and take some pictures of grebes. Floods and other events have made it impossible to do so but I found this snap of the beautiful gorge I took on my mobile while there with friends a bit earlier in the summer.

Ellery is one of the biggest permanent waterholes in the Centre. When this picture was taken, it was at the end of a long dry spell. It would be great to see some pictures of it in the wetter times, which Meg evokes in her story.

In summer, I’ve taken to going out to Ellery Creek Big Hole for a morning or afternoon most weekends. During the week I carry with me the feel of silky water and the chop of the little waves in the gap, where the creek comes through the range. I love the view of the cliffs against blue sky as I lie on my back. Since the Lord of the Rings movies this has always reminded me somehow of Minas Tirith.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve got so familiar with Ellery waterhole I’ll know if a grebe is missing, a python got in the night. Grebes look like fluffy little ducks, but they’re not. They’re almost tail-less waterbirds with lobed rather than webbed feet, and apparently of ancient origin. Some people call them dabblers or chick-divers, as they spend a lot of time under the water, looking for small animals to eat.

Grebes’ legs are set well back and on dry land they have to skid their bellies along the ground to take off. They can only do this from smooth surfaces, like lawn, but are strong flyers.

A couple of years ago, when the water was high, the grebes built a nest on a big mat of waterweed near the bullrushes at the downstream end of the waterhole. The grebe on the nest blended in so well with the pile of dried branches and reeds it was sitting on that it was hard to see, even with binoculars. Sometimes the grebes would leave the nest but they always covered up the eggs, I could never make them out.

Each weekend I would eagerly check the progress of the nest, see whether there was a bird sitting on it. This went on for several weeks. How long did it take for the eggs to hatch? Experts I asked said around three weeks.

Then, just as I thought I’d see the chicks, called downies, the next weekend, big rains came. All the creeks out west flowed, cutting off the road for the weekend. A week later, Ellery Creek was still flowing strongly, the waterweed and nest were washed away, the reeds flattened, all the grebes gone. You wouldn’t think it looking at them but they can fly long distances if necessary.

Within a few weeks they, or other grebes, were back at Ellery, but I didn’t see any chicks. Maybe they survived: for a couple of weeks after they hatch, the chicks ride under the parents’s wings, even when they dive underwater.