This morning, driven by some inner need to walk, I devoted two hours to an excursion to the Anderson Park Botanical Gardens, followed by another two hours in the Ross River Parkway.

After yesterday afternoon’s heavy rain that continued into the night, the Gardens exuded moisture. Water swirled in a small creek near the Balls Lane entrance and poured over a bridge, leaving grassy debris piled a foot high snagged on the bridge’s metal posts like thick, green streamers. The wet meadow where I had last week watched an adult royal spoonbill supervise its offspring’s feeding had been transformed into a shallow lake. The pond above which I’d watched a little black cormorant basking in the sun had stretched into a wetland bordered by sodden trees. Standing water lay in every depression. White ibises foraged in the wetlands, frogs croaked out stretched rubber band calls, and mosquitoes harassed me into leaving the Gardens.

Far more open and well-drained than the Gardens, the Ross River Parkway had fewer mozzies and granted me the opportunity to observe a group of rainbow bee-eaters hunting insects, the brilliantly-coloured birds zooming out over a clearing and then banking sharply and climbing straight up into the sky before returning to their perches. Flocks of nutmeg mannikins – small, finch-like birds with chocolate-coloured faces and brown bodies – chirped brightly while foraging in stands of tall grass. A common sandpiper tilted up and down on a gravel sandbar, a family of Pacific black ducks swam in the flooded river meadows, and an Australian raven with striking white eyes flew back and forth over the river, calling out a long, drawn-out “Ah-aaahhhh” as though warning of some impending punishment.

I walked as far as Aplins Weir, which rewarded me with a serene scene of the river flowing peacefully beneath the sun, the water’s surface a flawed mirror dented by wisps of wind, the river’s shores graced by the magnificently spreading canopies of  rain trees and other lush tropical trees. Even the fall of water over the weir appeared gentle, benign, the wild, unleashed energy of a dozen days ago nowhere to be seen. I wondered if we would see it again before the Wet loosens its capricious hold on North Queensland.