It's one of Australia's most important wetlands.
We're at Lake Cowal in
Central West New South Wales.
It's located in a triangle between
West Wyalong, Forbes and Condobolin.
It is an ephemeral wetland,
so sometimes it's completely dry.
But in flood times it's just a hive of activity with
birds, reptiles, fish, frogs,
and a whole range of other species.
Our family had a property on the western shore of
Lake Cowal, over a couple of generations.
When you, you know, work in this environment,
you grow up in the environment,
it's very important to you.
It's not a well-known site, so
visitation to Lake Cowal itself,
it might be, you know, maybe
1,000 or 1,500 people a year, and that might do.
So from here to the end is probably about 21 kilometres
and about 10 kilometres across.
It's New South Wales' largest natural inland lake,
so it's an area of about 13,500 hectares.
Once the water gets up to
that large river red gum down there,
it starts flooding over into
Nerang Cowal which is a smaller lake,
which is nearly 8,000 hectares and it all becomes one.
In terms of the environment, it's very exciting
just because of the activity.
It's one of those boom-bust ecosystems.
So you see all the stages develop
and all the species take off.
The entire area, woodland and wetland birds
we have 277 species recorded here.
We've got all three species of ibis,
so we have the Australian white Ibis,
the straw-necked ibis and the glossy ibis.
We have the grey egret and the intermediate egret
and we've also sighted a
good number of cattle egrets.
In terms of the ducks, we have grey teal,
chestnut teal, Australasian shovelers,
plume whistling ducks. Black swans. Pelicans.
We've got particularly large numbers of whiskered terns
and also black-winged stilts at the moment.
I haven't seen the stilts in the
numbers there in my lifetime,
so that's something different.
One of the most exciting things for a lot of people
at the moment is that we have
some Australasian bitterns here,
which is one of our endangered species.
In particular, the migratory birds
we have here at the moment,
the magpie geese coming down
from the Northern Territory.
A number of nests just in around
this little area here,
that's why they're coming in on this dam here.
The sharp-tailed sandpipers are coming down
from subarctic Siberia.
Latham's snipe from Japan.
And the whiskered terns, you know,
they're coming down from Indonesia and
those parts of the world, so it's very important.
All of the invertebrate species,
the little water bugs,
they're the things that drive the food chain.
If you were to go down and
look at a sample of water now,
you'd see that it would just be teeming with
a whole range of different water bugs
from blood worms through to damselflies.
They're really an indicator of
very good water health.
You can see by the response in the birds
that it is a good system.
You've got a range of habitats here from
fairly open mud flats through cane grass beds.
There's substantial cane grass beds
stretching for many kilometres.
In the northern end of the lake you have lignum,
which is very important for a
number of species in terms of,
well, habitat to hide in and feed in,
but also for breeding.
So it's got a full suite of
habitats that water birds require.
Just ahead of us here,
we've got probably about 1,000 grey teal or more,
just sitting on the water settling in,
and we've also got some black-winged stilts.
We'll see what happens when
we get over a bit closer.
It's good to see, it's good to watch it.
It's changing every day and every week,
according to the way the habitat is changing in
response to the climate and the weather system,
so from here on in, as the weather warms up,
the lake water level will change quite quickly.
So that as that happens, the species of birds
that are here will change as the food sources
diminish or some other species will thrive.