It was a slice of coastal Australia, a boat ramp under the watchful eye of a pelican, a picture-postcard yellow beach and a nearby stretch of marshland ringing to the cries of shorebirds.
I stumbled on the spot when I washed up in South Werribee one early-winter weekend while searching for orange-bellied parrots on their Victorian wintering grounds.
I drew a blank with the parrot but found a piece of paradise instead, a wild corner of Australia fighting not to be totally enveloped by humankind’s world.
It had been a long day in the field as part of a Birdlife Australia survey team to find the rare and elusive orange-bellied parrots but returning to the caravan park where I was staying I couldn’t resist exploring a wetland reserve I had noticed when I first arrived at South Werribee.
It was late afternoon and the sun was fading fast. In open ocean off the boat ramp gannets plunged into Port Phillip Bay catching fish and closer to shore a Caspian tern, the most striking of the terns with fearsome orange beak, hunted the same shoals.
Fishermen lined the beach and boats came and went to the boat ramp, dodging pelicans on the way.
A pelican surveyed the scene from the top of a lamp post on the approach to the ramp and a little further away on a tree I spotted a black-shouldered kite. The kites like to hunt at dawn and dusk and this fine male was looking for a meal before going to its roost.
The kite cast its orange eyes over the nearby saltbush at the Graham Wetland Reserve and soon I was doing the same with my binoculars.
The track leading through the reserve meandered through saltmarsh and high reeds and it wasn’t long before I saw an Australian reed-warbler climbing a reed stalk, singing a strident territorial song as it went.
The edge of the track was marshy and before me welcome swallows swooped to the ground to gather beakfuls of mud. Looking ahead to spring, the swallows were already building their mud-cup nests. On lagoons between the reedbeds chestnut teals gathered and as the sun began to set two black-winged stilts arrived, flying just above my head, their long legs trailing behind them.
A silence had descended across the saltbush and reedbed, the birdsong dying with the setting sun infusing the sky with pastel shades of yellow and then magenta. The silence was soon broken, however, by a trail biker who had slipped into the reserve, hauling his bike over a locked gate.
A roar, a cracking, buzzing coming from beyond the reedbeds, from a muddy track I had yet to explore. I couldn’t see him but I could see dirt rising from where he had struck firmer, drier ground. It was time to call it a day.