Bird Paradise Lies Just Beyond The Cage

The Age

Wednesday May 24, 2006

RACHEL BUCHANAN

Truganina Swamp is a place to stretch your wings.

Alma Hare was the one who told me about the swamp. Alma is a volunteer at the Louis Joel Community Centre in Altona, and when I asked Athol, another volunteer there, for information on birdwatching clubs, he referred me to her.

Alma, a bird-fancier, lives in a part of Altona known as the bird cage, a chirpy pocket of the suburb where the streets are called Kookaburra, Robin, Dove, Seagull, Lark, Wren, Emu and Curlew. When the bird cage ends, the swamp begins.

"For 16 years I've been walking my dog in the swamp. It used to be a tip, then it was turned into a park," Alma said when we met. Alma was a founding member of Friends of Westona Wetlands, the community group that pushed for the protection of Truganina Swamp.

Before the group started, the swamp had two purposes. Officially, it was part of a drainage and flood protection system for houses in Altona and Altona Meadows, but western suburbs hoons also used it to race motorbikes. They built BMX jumps through the pigface. They set fire to stolen cars and drove them into the bullrushes.

The swamp has never really been left alone. In the late 19th century, Europeans farmed cattle, sheep, oats, pigs and chooks there in the marshy ground. Before that, Woirworung and Bunurong people caught fish and gathered other food there.

Now the swamp is fenced in and given over to birds, butterflies, frogs and a whole lot of insects whose calls make the place hum and chitter. It's part of the internationally significant western wetlands, migratory bird habitats that encompass the nearby Cheetham Wetlands down by Skeleton Creek and Lake Borrie at the Werribee sewage treatment plant.

On their daily walks through Truganina, Alma and her little old terrier, Liz, look for the rare Altona skipper butterfly, a tiny, bee-like yellow and grey creature that feeds on the chaffy saw-edge that grows in the swamp. Alma has seen the shelters the skipper builds, but is still waiting to spot the actual butterfly.

While I prefer big, flashy birds such as the pelican, Alma's favourites are the less common, tiny ones: the little grebes, near-silent birds that stay under water for up to 10 seconds; and stints, transparent twitterers that come to the swamp from north-eastern Siberia in spring and perform acrobatics over the grass.

She also loves the sharp-tailed sandpiper that arrives at the swamp in August, and the many visiting ibis - the glossy, the sacred and the straw-neck, as well as the more common white ibis.

After talking to Alma, I was keen to see the swamp for myself. Until I met her, my birdwatching had been confined to those I saw fly over our backyard, especially the magnificent pelicans, and the other birds that fish along the Altona foreshore: black swans, gulls, oyster-catchers, ducks and cormorants. Obviously, there was more to see.

There are two ways to approach the swamp. You can either walk behind Mt St Joseph school and cut across the Werribee line train tracks, or go along Wren Street, onto Purnell and then wind through the rest of the bird cage.

I crossed Lark Street on a wet weekday, and there it was: 148 hectares of damp earth fringed by train tracks, houses, roads and heavy industry. I could hear the hum of mid-morning traffic on the Princes Freeway, the chik-chik of a passing train. Steam poured from the chimneys of the chemical factories along Kororoit Creek Road. Two enormous orange-yellow flares burned at the refinery, two splashes of light in the moist grey sky.

The birdwatching hide was covered in tags. The noticeboard was, too. The most recent Friends of the Wetlands poster was dated 1999. I walked along the track past the high-wire fence that guards a cream-brick retirement village. Swans, pelicans, ducks and herons swam in a small lake to my right. When I stood on the footbridge, I could see the reflection of the flares in the water, two orange fingers tickling the swans' bellies.

Over the bridge I saw a green parrot in a saltbush. A pair of herons flew by. I kept going and reached Laverton Creek. What a beautiful sight. There were dozens of birds in the water, mainly swans and pelicans, and they were making lovely, soft trumpeting noises.

Alma had loaned me a couple of birdwatching books, and I had read that pelicans took off by hopping with their feet together, whereas most other water birds run. As if on cue, a pelican stretched upwards, spread its wings and began to hop across the water. Like a fat adult trying to get airborne on a jumping castle, it was a ridiculous sight. The only other thing I saw that week to rival it was a three-legged kelpie barking at the model aeroplane two elderly gents were flying down on the beach.

© 2006 The Age

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