The impact of the Dry

As August draws to close and we have now had three months with no rain the impacts of the prolonged dry season can be clearly seen. Earlier this week I went back to Holmes Jungle to find that all the areas of open water have now gone and there was just a small area of liquid mud remaining (which I am sure has now dried up completely). Yesterday I went to Knuckey and the visible difference from when we first arrived is immense.

The red arrow is an approximation of where the water level reached when we first arrived - I had thought that I had taken a picture showing it but have not. You can see from the staining on the galvanized fence in the foreground where the water level can get to during the wet!
From a coastal birders point of view this is good news as it concentrates the birds into one or two favoured sites - although less good for birds in the interior of the continent that have to migrate to the coastal fringes.
The spectacle at Knuckey is getting more impressive each time I visit as more and more birds are coming in.

On a different note my apologies in advance if there are longer gaps between updates in the next few weeks but I am having huge problems with Blogger / Google. In order to open / write  / upload to the blog I have had to change my Internet browser. I am now on my third and today I had problems just logging in to update. I have contacted Google to see if there is an explanation for this but have received no reply. If this continues and blogger stops functioning in my current browser I will look at migrating the blog to a different server, obviously would post link on this blog and send all the new page address. I hope I don't have to do this but we will have to wait and see....