We get another calm, well, not so windy day to fly the drone, a birds eye view helps gain a better understanding of the country at a landscape scale. Later 21 Pink Cockatoos dropped in for water, they are a beautiful bird. We also find a moth as big as some of our birds here.

Heading out along what we call the North Track we found an interesting melaleuca flowering, Melaleuca lecanantha perhaps. This track was in need of some repair so some track maintenance was undertaken today. We spot a Scarlet-chested Parrot, this parrot is one of our most beautiful Australian parrots, bright blue, green and yellow and Scarlet.

We explore further north east beyond Burnabbie along the old Burnabbie-Madura road, which crosses the Damper Flat. We find plenty of interesting geology, past infrastructure and wildlife. We find fossils in limestone dug up during the construction of a water storage facility, this possibly is the Linesman Camp described in written literature to be north-east of Burnabbie. These above and below surface tanks provided water to linesman who maintained the telegraph line. We read that travellers to the Western Australian gold fields in 1890’s who followed the telegraph lines exhausted such water supplies. The storage is dug into limestone incorporating silt traps and multiple entry points to capture runoff, it would have taken a lot of hard work to dig through this limestone, it’s like concrete. The way they joined broken telegraph line was also impressive, we find such handy work along the old telegraph line. We find abundant evidence of land snails and walk up the escarpment to find more Bothriembryon sp. These type of species are good indicators of the health of the country. A lone grevilla was a great find, a lone tree on a shrub covered flat.

We walk the Horse Paddock Track and fix some of the signage, this track strangely traverses the old horse paddock associated with the telegraph station, now recovered to its original mallee habitat. We take time to visit the Sunset Lookout Track just before sunset, it’s a good time to photograph the wind swept dunes in this cool yellow light.

On Sunday night we experienced an earthquake, 4.6, not a biggie but it woke us up and also woke the local bird population. Details can be found at this link.