Traveller

-- Background Information TRAVELLERS Dr Duck Australia is one of the driest continents on earth and many native water birds, like the ibis, travel great distances in search of suitable freshwater wetlands and estuaries. One such place is Narran Lakes - one of the largest remaining semi-permanent wetlands in south-eastern Australia. It supports 190,000 waterbirds during major floods – including many species of ibis, egrets, night-herons and spoonbills, as well as Magpie Geese, Jabiru and Brolga. These birds are the ‘fly in, fly out’ birds of the outback. They fly in to breed when times are wet, and fly out again to more temperate climes when floods dry up. The mystery is how birds on the coast know when to fly over 1,500 kilometres to a wetland that has just been filled by rain that landed weeks earlier a further 600 kilometress to the north. Shearwaters All of the world’s 23,000,000 Short-tailed Shearwaters breed in Southern Australia, and most of the 285 colonies lie in Bass Strait – on the windy exposed islands and headlands of this channel that separates mainland Australia from Tasmania. The Short-tailed Shearwater is at present Australia’s most abundant seabird. The Short-tailed Shearwater annually migrates one of the longest distances of any migratory bird. It migrates trans-equatorially to spend May to September in the highly productive waters of the northern North Pacific, Okhotsk Sea and Bering Sea. The shearwaters live on average 15 to 19 years so over that time could clock up a mileage of 250,000 kilometres with their annual migration to Bering Sea being approximately 14,500 kilometres. Broome Waders Roebuck Bay near Broome in Western Australia is one of the most important migration stopover areas for shorebirds in Australia and globally, regularly supporting over 100,000 water birds. It is the arrival and departure point for large proportions of the Australian populations of several shorebird species. One of th