A walk round East Basin

Lake Burley Griffin is crossed by two bridges and is ended by Scrivener Dam.  This splits the water body into three sections known as West Basin (Scrivener to Commonwealth Avenue Bridge);  Central Basin (between Commonwealth and Kings Avenues) and East Basin (Kings Avenue to Dairy Flat)

Today we walked the 10km (approximately) around East Basin.  The route, done anticlockwise, is shown in this clip from Google Earth.
Although we wanted to do some birding at Jerrabomberra Wetlands it is no longer possible to park there without a risk to finding you car has been broken in to.  So we parked at the Canoe Club and schlepped our binoculars round the route.

The first birds were these vermin. 
I have no idea why the Parks people haven't converted them into pate or some other useful commodity.  Presumably they will only start to take notice when they have reached Myna levels of population. 

After crossing Kings Avenue Bridge we got to the site of a carpathon.  The gale that was blowing appeared to be limiting the amount of decarping being achieved,  This angler appeared to be handling the stress OK
So was this Black Swan, which seemed to be guzzling a junior anglers bait!
We left the Lake shore to take the most direct route we could find though the slums of Kingston.  As we past one group of apartment I noticed some interesting things about the letter boxes.

  • What happens with anything bigger than a standard envelope?  These people must spend as much time in line at the PO picking up their larger mail as they do at work or sleeping.
  • For some reason the boxes for #s 2 and 7 are out of order.  I saw this also on another block so it isn't a one off mistake.  But what could be the rationale for this?
  • Some years back I looked at the incidence of No Junk Mail stickers across a few suburbs of Canberra and attempted to find some correlations with Census data.  The one that worked was level of educational qualifications.  Areas with a lot of stickers (>60% of boxes) had a high proportion of people with tertiary quals.  A rate of 3 stickers for 21 boxes would equate to most people in the area finding 3rd grade the best 3 years of their lives.
We pressed on to the Wetlands and found a few species of birds.  I thought this Darter interesting as it appears to be mud-stained, which I have never noticed before.

After seeing a very noisy fledgling Eastern Koel being fed by its Red Wattlebird host (and having to leave a hide due to arrival of the most unpleasant bunch of mini-bogans I have ever seen there) we left the Wetlands and walked down Dairy Road.  That was enlivened by seeing 3 Sacred Kingfishers on or around some phone lines.
All up we recorded 34 species of birds.

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