A trip to the WTP
We haven't been to the Western Treatment Plant f(WTP) or a while, mainly due to traffic concerns as work continues on the "improvements" to the M1 west of the Westgate Bridge. It is finally beginning to look as though the end is near although the continually changing speed limits were a pain in the bum. The drive wasn't too bad however. On getting to the WTP a first issue was that my key didn't seem to work on the Paradise Rd gate. So we went to the T section ponds first. Where the key worked fine! Getting the big picture out of the way first we ended with 55 species and a useless "shorebird sp" over 3 checklists. A summary is in this eBird trip report https://ebird.org/tripreport/332603. The most obvious sighting there was a flock of Australian Shelduck which I estimated as about 1000 birds. This image includes about 1/3rd of the flock. Later, having got the key to work at Paradise Rd we found another big flock gathered in a dense m...