By Western Australian standards it is freezing – well 2ºC – and just after dawn. I find myself sitting in a reed bed wondering why I abandoned a nice warm bed to be wet and cold.

Well the answer to that is four weeks ago I was here at Lake Leschenaultia mucking about with an old camera and lens when I spotted a small bird in the reeds that I’d not seen before. I grabbed a quick photo but it disappeared back into the reeds before I could properly sort myself out. When I got home I identified the bird from the blurry grab shot as a Waradja or spotless crake. Since then I’d been full of good intentions to go back and try to get a better photo, but,  they were sabotaged by a great deal of procrastination until the other day when I’d decided to resurrect an old favourite camera of mine – the original Canon EOS 5d from 2005. The original batteries had perished and would no longer hold a charge so I got a set of replacements and found a couple of memory cards at the back of a drawer. I just needed something to point it at, and that is when I remembered the spotless crake.

 

Things had changed considerably in the ensuing four weeks. There had been a lot of rain and the water levels had risen considerably. So much so that the area where I saw the bird was now under water. The other thing that had changed was that there was a lot of noisy building work going on – and when I mean noisy I mean really loud. Combine this with the cold and it was no surprise that there were no birds on the lake, not even the Eurasian Coots. Undeterred I parked myself in among the reeds as close as I could to the place where I’d seen the spotless crake and just waited. Some large jarrah trees cast their shade over me so I didn’t get the warming effect of the rising sun. After a couple of hours a flotilla of Australasian Grebes approached and gave me the once over and then made off to centre of lake to be in the sun. By now I was really cold and miserable. It was obvious that the spotless crakes weren’t going to put in an appearance so I decided to walk down the other side of the lake to warm up in the sun and restore some feeling back to my feet.

As walked past the dam wall I could hear the commotion of a whole heap of passerine birds moving through the forest understory. There were New Holland Honeyeaters, assorted thornbills, grey fantails and weebills. But, what really caught my attention were the splendid fairy wrens chasing insects at the waters edge. They were chasing small insects and occasionally they would perch on an old log or tree stump. For text twenty minutes or so I just took photos of them and then as quick as you like they were gone.

Is a splendid fairy wren on a log worth an invisible spotless crake in the reed beds ? Yes it was this time.