Fogg Dam

After nearly a month of playing golf and lolling about the caravan, yesterday we headed outside the Darwin city boundary to Fogg Dam, about 70 kilometres east. The dam was built in the 1950s to provide a year round water supply for an ambitious local rice growing project, by the time the project failed a few years later the wetlands created by the dam had become a dry season refuge for water birds so the area was proclaimed a conservation reserve.

The Northern Territory Parks and Wildlife Service run free ranger activities in various national parks throughout the dry season. We've attended quite a few of these in our previous Darwin visits, the talk at Fogg Dam being one of the few new ones for this year. As usual, we were the only people in attendance at the talk, where the ranger gave us exhaustive details on the birds that inhabit the wetlands, in particular the large and noisy magpie geese. Appropriately there were several of these foraging in the waters below the lookout where the talk was held, along with various ducks, egrets, finches, a beautiful spoonbill and even some brolga. After the talk we did most of the walks on offer in the reserve, wandering through the woodlands and rainforest areas around the wetlands. The walk across the dam wall was closed, as a large saltwater crocodile has apparently decided to take up residence and has a habit of sunning himself on the roadway, we kept the car doors and windows firmly closed as we drove across.

On the way home we stopped for a pub lunch in Humpty Doo, surely one of the silliest place names in Australia!