I visited Lyneham Wetland this morning for a 20 minute, two hectare survey. I’m going to try to do this within the first few days of each month for as long as I live in the area.

A 2ha area at Lyneham Wetland encompasses the main pond and approximately five metres back from the edge. Helpfully the wetland is ringed by a path at about this setback, which makes assessing which birds are countable and which are not a bit easier.

There’s a fairly large deviation from this rule on the eastern edge, starting at a small bridge over the drainage channel and running north along a fenceline until it reaches a second bridge and a second channel. This section has the only significant stand of eucalypts and I deliberately drew the survey area to include these. The site is otherwise only lightly vegetated with rushes and reeds.

I entered from De Burgh Street, spent a couple of minutes at the stormwater drain outlet, turned up and observed from the bridge across the centre of the wetland, turned left and walked along to Goodwin Street then doubled back and circled around the top. I finished up at the northern end on the platform over the Dickson Wetland drain.

The first thing I saw were many Australian wood ducks sitting at the outlet, including a small group of ducklings. There have been two broods in the site – one group arrived on 20 August and are quite big now, the other group arrived on 22 September. This was the latter – six ducklings with their protective parents. I suspect that they’ve arrived from somewhere else as they seem a bit too big to only be about two weeks old, though they’re certainly still smaller than the six week old brood.

Two dusky moorhens were chasing each other across the pond. A rock dove came in to drink.

There are willie wagtails nesting atop a native pine here and, in a nearby eucalypt magpie-larks are doing the same. Their presence has attracted Australian ravens and pied currawongs quite regularly. The result is some fierce battles – two aggressive and territorial little birds defending their nests from these much larger opportunistic predators.

Somewhere in the area this morning there was also a little raven – far less common around Canberra, but this is the second time in as many days that I’ve heard it call from the wetland.

The eucalypts on the eastern edge near the bridge are, I’ve decided, at least partially red box. This morning they were hosting rainbow lorikeets, noisy miners, and a crimson rosella. A crested pigeon sat cooing on an electric wire. Somewhere in one of them a grey butcherbird called – one of two immature birds that has been a regular in this area over the past few months, I imagine – and from the other side of the pond, another responded.

From the bridge I could see two superb fairywrens hawking in the rushes down by the water’s edge and hear a reed warbler calling from somewhere within it. The first large group of hardhead were here too – 11 of them in all, quickly swimming away from the bridge when I suddenly appeared on it.

A pair of coots have been nesting here too – I could see the white face shield of one sitting in the reed bed while the other foraged and shared.

A lot of agitation from noisy miners, a magpie and a group of white-winged choughs over by Goodwin Street turned out to be due to an unexpected source: an eastern grey kangaroo bounded down to the water’s edge before being chased off up Sullivan’s Creek by magpie-larks. I imagine it had made its way down Wattle Street from the mob up on O’Connor Ridge?

Three Australian white ibis flew low over the water as I left the bridge before apparently deciding not to settle and moving on to the north.

On the western edge and particularly the low walls there were spotted dove, grey teal, more hardhead and wood duck. I had my first Pacific black duck here, as well as sulphur-crested cockatoos calling. I walked up to the street and scanned the edges, finding more hardheads and an Australasian grebe.

Doubling back past the bridge I had the same large group of hardheads, the same coots, the same fairywrens. The only notably new birds here were the second brood of Australian wood ducks – all seven of the juveniles and their two watchful parents. This group were nine when they arrived, they lost two early on but have been stable at seven for a month now. They’re still a few weeks from flight but they’re big and gregarious and ranging further and further from their parents. On a couple of occasions I’ve worried that they’d lost another, but the seventh has (so far) always shown up.

My last bird was an Australasian swamphen which came out from the reeds near the coot nest right as my timer ran out.