Day 13, Narracoorte to Wangaratta
Unnamed dry lake near Donald
Date: Wednesday October 16th 2024
Project:ÌýEastern Australian Waterbird Survey
°¿²ú²õ±ð°ù±¹±ð°ù²õ: John Porter (NSW DPE), Paul Wainwright (SA DEW)
°Õ°ù²¹¾±²Ô±ð±ð: Scott Henshall (Vic GMA)
±Ê¾±±ô´Ç³Ù: Thomas Clark
Departing Narracoorte we flew north to reach survey Band 2 and then continued east. The countryside was noticeably dryer than the previous year and many of the smaller wetlands and creeks were dry. Near the town of Dimboola we counted over a highly saline wetland called Pink Lake. The pink colouration is primarily due to a bacteria and not red algae as previously thought (although some red algae is still present). As in most years the lake had almost no birds.
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Counting over the Wimmera River
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Counting over the Campaspe River
The first big wetland on our list was Lake Buloke. It is a shallow, temporary wetland that can extend up to 4,800 ha when full and it can also support high numbers of waterbirds. Sadly today the lake was dry so no birds were seen.
Tang Tang Swamp east of Rochester was partially inundated and there were several hundred waterbirds – mainly Grey Teal and Black Duck. The Corop wetlands / Cooper Lakes were the next large wetlands on our list and we found them full of water and waterbirds!Ìý The next hour or so was very busy as we swooped around to identify and count the waterbirds on each of the 20 or so wetlands in this system.
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Counting on Green Lake
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Counting on Green Lake
The next significant wetland was Waranga basin - a large (5,000 ha) freshwater storage reservoir in the Goulburn River basin. It was built primarily for water storage and irrigation and has deep turbid water that generally is not high quality habitat for waterbirds. We found low numbers of waterbirds consisting of mainly terns, cormorants, coot and swans.
We finished the day counting over Lake Mokoan, a decommissioned water storage that was about 35% full. The water looked black and heavily coloured with organic material, however there were thousands of waterbirdsÌý- mainly Grey Teal, Black Duck, Mountain Duck, coot, egrets, herons, darters, Black Swans and cormorants.
With our counts completed we headed to Wangaratta for the night.
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Lake Mokoan