Cleaning up rubbish and removing burnt boxthorn.

Now most of the flood debris (and all the rubbish from our waterways) has been cleared, it is time to remove all the junk from the old brickworks site. Virtually anything of any value at all has been removed: we haven’t even found a single whole brick. We have found heaps of rusty tin sheets, plastic bottles and broken glass as well as the odd bits of a bed and a bathtub. We are placing the brick fragments in a drain to help take the Eastgrove stormwater into the wetlands in a way that will not cause erosion.

One of the grebes in their rather plain non-breeding colors. They still have their fluffy bums though.

Apart from this, the deeper water birds continue to come. The hardheads (white-eyed ducks) are settling in well and the Australasian grebes have returned, but not in their usual rich breeding colours. The seagulls (silver gulls) are forming bigger and bigger crowds. Last week we got over 200 that sat around and watched us work. They are mainly here because, just around the corner, Goulburn still has an old fashioned garbage tip with minimal recycling and composting. They are noisy and aggressive and the ducks just tolerate them. We did see them attacking lapwings (spur-wing plovers) and other birds that flew nearby, though they left the white-faced herons alone. A majestic white-bellied sea-eagle soared above the wetlands for a while, and I have vague hopes that it might rid us of a couple of gulls, but after a while it moved on.

Horehound thicket with rosettes of other weeds, such as Buchan weed.

Just as the ongoing rains are determined to drown some of our little plants, they have also brought new life into the killed weeds near the old brickworks. Huge, healthy thickets of particularly nasty plants are emerging from rubble turned to mud. The main culprits include Capeweed, Scotch and spear thistles, horehound, musky crowsfoot (not one of the native crowsfeet) and the dreaded Paterson’s curse. Looks like spraying time is coming soon … well, perhaps after the rain has spent itself.

Eastern Grey Kangaroos have been poking through the weeds but have moved on to greener pastures nearer the main pond.

On lower slopes, the weeds are mingled with grasses. Here wood ducks, teal, coots and moorhens have assembled in good numbers to eat the green pick within easy reach of our small lake. With them is our resident mob of kangaroos that travels across May Street from Rocky Hill to gorge on the greenery. There is more leafy growth than seeds, but enough remain to attract small groups of house sparrows and crested pigeons, very different from the large flocks that dominated the landscape during the drought. Interestingly, some good sized flocks of red-browed finches have been visiting the wetlands for some weeks now, traveling between the boxthorn thickets we have deliberately left for them.

Ray, Heather and B1 remove the flood debris blocking the car park.

After the flood there was a lot of cleaning up to do, but half a dozen eager hands and a sunny morning made the work fly. By 11:00 AM the tree trunks were piled for the birds to use in the nearest pond, all the tangled branches were put on the heap to be burnt before too long and the mulch scraped off the tarmac and wheelbarrowed back to where the floods had removed it in the first place. By 11:30 the place was (almost) as neat as a pin again.

High and dry: the white ibises leave the now deep pond for easier pickings in the wet long grass.

The pools are now back to their maximum depth of between 1.2 and 1.6 metres, so they no longer suit wading birds. There are a few that have stayed on though, such as the masked lapwings and the white ibis. There is still a sizable flock of these left over from the dry times and that stay probably with thanks to the garbage dump. Now they are probing around in the long grass where small skinks and baby snakes are likely to be hanging out. Occasionally the odd ibis will patrol the edge of the high water just in case something delicious returns. But the silver gulls have returned en masse, together with more grey teal. A few black ducks have also returned and I saw a solitary white-eyed duck or hardhead sitting inconspicuously with the teal on a rock berm.

Just a small sample of the 90 strong contingent of gulls that visited last Wednesday.

Melaleucas planted in May, now flooded.

The June flood (yes, I made a mistake in my previous post, sorry) resulted in many of our new plants being underwater. It was a hard call. The drought was lasting so long we thought we might have enough time for the little things to grow.  We knew that under flood conditions most of these plants would be under water, but we didn’t think it would happen so soon.

Debris cast up by the flood.

Within a day the flood waters receded. The wetlands were mostly intact with little or no waters covering most of the grassy areas. Where the waters had risen, they had left additional mulch on top of existing mulch in most places, though there were a few places in which our mulch had been washed away. There was no serious erosion. The car park on lower May Street was covered in our transported mulch, as well as a few logs and branches, so this week we’ll have quite a clean-up job.

The baby tiger snake rescued by Rodney 2.

Apart from the debris, underwater plants and high water levels, the other main sign of the recent flood was the crowd of ravens, magpies and Indian mynas. These birds were looking for small creatures washed out of their holes and grassy nooks by the floods. Rodney 2 came to the rescue for one small tiger snake by presenting it with a stranded plant guard in which it could climb. He didn’t want to pick it up. Apart from being easily hurt by being picked up, baby tiger snakes, despite their tiny fangs, are just as potentially deadly as the adults. The guard, with snake, was placed near dry shrubs and it slithered off into the grass towards them.

Clearly, we’ll have a bit of cleaning up to do this week.