Travelogue Melbourne: Lake Emerald, Sherbrooke Forest and Lyrebird

We got up early this morning and went for a quick walk around Lake Emerald before heading away. Emerald is one of the stops on the Puffing Billy Railway, and this area is a general recreation area. It's pretty. It has two lakes, one of which is specifically a recreational fishing lake, regularly restocked. There are walking trails and a heritage nursery and paddle bikes on the main lake, plus water slides and parkland to play in. It's nice. Emerald looks like a place you could easily spend a day or two in with a family of kids. I'm just disappointed that I forgot to wander over and try out the playground at the children's camp, Wombat Corner. It looks good - tightropes between trees, tyre walks, all kinds of climbing things. Admittedly, only a foot or two off the ground, but even so...

We spent the rest of the morning walking in Sherbrooke Forest. There's a map of all the walking trails around the mountain that we bought at the info centre, and we used it to pick out a walk of the right kind of length and distance. So we started at the Sherbrooke Picnic Ground, made a loop in to Sherbrooke Falls and back out again.

It was pretty. I have to recommend doing walks like this. It wasn't a hard walk, the path through the forest was really beautiful. The trees are immense. For Perth people, they're very similar to karri trees, except a little bigger and taller. Mum was wandering through saying that it seemed a very natural place to find druids. She also mentioned that she was wondering if we'd see a lyrebird. It's lyrebird habitat. I didn't know if we would, figured it was unlikely. I wasn't even sure I could recognise the call. After all, perhaps 70% of the song they sing is mimicking other birds. Last year two druids I was walking with up here pointed out the song of the lyrebird to me when they heard it, but I couldn't pick it.

And just after saying this, we heard one.

I'm fairly sure that's what it was. There's something about the melody, the timbre of the voice. We heard a whipcrack peeeeee-CHONG! a few times, and then a kookaburra call, and then a single red-tailed black cockatoo chatter... all coming from the same spot. Each sounded identical to the real bird. But they also sounded identical to each other, like they were being sung by the same silver voice. Lyrebird.

It's a beautiful sound. I don't know what it is about their voice, but it sounds ... I don't know how it sounds. I can see why the local Aboriginal tribes named the Lyrebird the Songman, keeper of the local songs.

We walked on. The forest was pretty. The falls were nice enough, a wooden bridge crossing over rapids. We started to loop back, talking about the tree ferns and trying to work out which one was which kind, and then Mum stopped me. There was a bird quietly moving through the understorey on the higher bank beside us, going through the leaf litter scratching and turning up the rotting leaves. Tail perhaps eight inches long, dull brown, working its way along quietly. Lyrebird. It had a follower, a tiny little bird that was hopping around close to its feet getting the little insects or seeds that the lyrebird was scratching up and ignoring. She (we assumed it was a she) didn't seem to be bothered by us watching at all, just kept along her own way, scratching and eating. We watched for a while, then walked on through the tall trees and soft ferns.