Deserts and swamps

After the Grampians I drive northwest to a place called Little Desert in Victoria and after that to the Ngarkat Conservation Park in SA . I have never seen a desert before and I am not going to drive to the Outback Australia during this trip .. there can be easily 35 or 40 °C now in summer - and that's not really my comfort temperature.

The Little Desert  and Ngarkat are actually no deserts in that sense but a very dry sandy regions with sclerophyll scrubland (and some eucalyptus species, of course) on it adapted to drought and hot temperatures. Mallee has an unique wildlife as well with special adapted animals like for example the rare Mallee fowl. The gag is that I freeze in the desert: It's around 20 °C and the wind feels really icy. You may laugh now - but after weeks in 30 °C you really shiver when it is 10 °C colder and windy! I just walked around a nature trail then to get some kind of impression of the landscape and plants. Animals you usually don't see that often during the day. They are more active during dawn and dusk and night.
My original plan was to camp at some bush camping site in the desert - but then suddenly I feel like having a shower and a cool beer for a change. No problem - you find a motel in nearly every village.

Desert Banksia, a typical plant of the mallee scrub. It is well adapted to fire since its fruits (nuts??) open only after a heat threatment.

 One of the information tables of the nature trek. Information is well done in the national and conservation parks here.

In that area there was also a swamp with boardwalks. Really funny was to see eucalypt trees growing as swamp plants .. like Alnus or Fraxinus in Europe :). Funny also to see a swamp here in this rather dry area. It falls dry during the summer though.
Apart from the nature conservation areas there is a lot of agriculture in this area of Victoria. I drove through endless corn fields, all of them yellow and to be harvested during this time of the year. Most of the water for irrigation comes from the Murray-Darling river system here in southwest Australia. There are big debates going on about water usage. Farmers would need more water or at least guaranteed access to water. In drought periods this is not necessarily the case and then they have to spend much money buying water from somewhere else - or they loose their crop and even more money, I guess.
On the other hand there is already taken too much water out of the Murray-Darling river system causing ecologican problems. With not enough water in the rivers, they can fall completely dry during drought periods - and what that means for water organisms is quite clear .. There also needs to be enough water in the river to flush out salts accumulated due to agricultural practises, otherwise the whole system can collapse.

And again there are kookaburras, those strange birds which are related to kingfisher. They are quite big though. Often such a kookaburra sits on some branch really quietly and just watches you .. like a ghost. A few kookaburras can make quite a lot of noice though - they make sounds like laughter. Actually I have heard those birds already in the beginning of my trip in the rainforest of the Royal National Park close to Sydney. I just had no idea what it could be - sounded like apes to me .. but it was that bird.

There were also some small yellowish birds flying around .. This one seems to be quite annoyed of me who intruded into its swamp.