Autumn, late afternoon, Lake Monger

All photos by Doug Spencer, southwest shore, 13.05.19. Final image unmasks previous post’s fearsome foot.

The featured image shows an Eastern Great Egret, Ardea Modesta – Australia’s largest white heron.

Proverbially elegant, this bird usually hunts alone, catburglar-walking, then statue-still…until it darts upon its prey.

The Australian White Ibis, Threskiornis molucca is proverbially inelegant on the ground… but exquisite/regal in flight. This great opportunist has “invaded” Australia’s urban areas in recent decades, thus earning it nicknames which city-dwelling humans apply fondly, or otherwise: “bin chicken”, “rubbish raptor”, “dumpster chook”….

The Australian White Ibis only “arrived” in Perth circa 1950 – a fact which would surely amaze any Perth resident who arrived post-1990.

Click here for a bin chicken pictorial feast, and click this for an excellent radio program which may alter your preconceptions.

Also enjoying the same day – allegedly late autumn, but decidedly sun-drenched, with a little smoke-haze – were a pair of White-headed Stilts, Himantopus leucocephalus. (aka “Black-winged Stilt”)

These are common, nomadic birds, but much more specialised than ibis. The stilts feed in shallows – tidal places and along the edges of seasonal or variably-shored lakes.

They come to Lake Monger when its fringes contract. The Australasian Swamphen, however, is a vivid presence, year-round.

Also walking on Lake Monger’s shore was the “fearsome foot” depicted in Pelican Yoga’s immediately-preceding post.

It belonged to a thirsty member of an increasingly-ubiquitous, highly intelligent, very aggressive feathered resident of Australia’s urban places.

When an Australian speaks of a Crow, he or she is usually referring instead to a Raven, most probably to the Australian Raven, Corvus coronoides. Inexactitude notwithstanding, anyone who has observed them would surely agree that the plural – “murder” – fits these Ravens at least as well as it does any Crow-proper.