Sunday Swan Watch IV: The Washout

Now before I start don’t panic, today’s post has a happy ending.

I was up early this morning and soon after I headed out hoping to get some piccies of “our” swans.

This morning was bitterly cold (by Aussie standards anyway), intermittently raining and blowing a gale. In fact we have had atrocious weather all week, flooding rains right across the state and damaging winds in a lot of areas (it’s been Ok here in terms of wind).

Because of the weather I drove down to the swans’ pond. When I arrived I couldn’t see any sign of our family.

The only water fowl I could see was a solitary coot.More concerning is the pond has seen a rise and then fall in water level with the rain. This piccie shows a lot of reed debris left as the water has risen and then retreated. Somewhat concerning to me the swans’ nest has been destroyed by the minor flood. These short reeds are the ones that their platform was tethered to. As the water has risen the platform has been floated off and then broken up.

Interestingly some large water-bird has begun building another platform just nearby. I guess it isn’t our swans, but who knows.

As I said I couldn’t see any sign of the swans. I wasn’t really worried because the weather was awful and I guessed they were hunkered down somewhere keeping the babies warm. So I began walking around the perimeter of the pond, planning to check it and the ponds nearby.

But that was not to be, it began to really rain, so I beat a retreat.

A bit later looking at the weather I got the impression that I wasn’t going to be able to get out to get any piccies. I guessed I would have to post an up in the air post for today’s Swan Watch. Deb and I decided to go for a drive.

We drove up to Ballarat (about 90 minutes away) to have a look at Lake Wendouree, the lake is a shallow volcanic crater lake that lies in the heart of Ballarat. We wanted to have a look because with the drought we have had over the past few years the lake has been totally dry.

Until this week that is, we have had so much rain in the state in recent weeks and especially this week that the lake has begun to fill up again.While we were at the lake I braved the rain to grab a few shots of another swan family (I figured they would make a consolation prize given I couldn’t post piccies of ours).

The cob was keeping a close eye on me to make sure I didn’t get too close.He is the proud father of five cygnets. As you can probably see they are quite a lot larger than “our” babies. I’d guess these guys hatched three or four weeks ago.

Now to the happy ending.

When I got home this evening my daughter Io said the weather had improved for a while this afternoon. She and her boyfriend had gone for a walk. They saw swans grazing near the pond.

Very kindly they took some photos on a mobile phone (hence the quality).
In this first you can see some wood ducks and a couple of swans.Getting a bit closer they got some pictures of our babies (see the fuzzy grey blobs), before the cob told them to move on.
So all is well with our swans :-)