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The scenery at Kennedy is, for the most part, vast – the range is 75km long – and therefore hard to show by photo. The gorges are pretty but, for me, it was the interesting rocks (see other blog) and the sounds of walking that made an impression. The sound of walking? The nature of the rocks means that walking here makes a clinking, brittle and brick-like sound at every footfall. This sound and the accompanying ever present humanizing wind were a dominating aspect of the Kennedy experience. But for the wind it would have been very hot and dry walking in this desert environment. There was no water in the accessible sections of the gorges and, as a result, very little bird life bar the odd butcher bird, family of babblers and tweeting of some unseen LBJs. Yes, I said ‘unseen’ but they were bound to be LBJs. There was a wonderful exception to the lack of bird life as I started to walk into Honeycomb Gorge. Here the increasing volume of squeaks and chatter gave away the presence of finches. Besides enjoying the crazy patterns in the dry waterfall of this gorge, I spent time watching some typical finch behaviour. There were several hundred Zebra finches moving through the gorge. Small flocks of 15 – 20 were flying from one small tree to the next and making their way around the sides of the gorge and towards the waterfall. Finches have an uncanny ability to be absorbed into a relatively small tree. It’s like watching a film of falling leaves in reverse motion where the finches settle ‘upwards’ into the tree and click into a pre-determined position. As they land, they disappear. When they move off, they fall like leaves then fly away. The vanishing into a tree was achieved despite the finches being brightly coloured – zebras have a bright red-orange beak and orange cheek patches in the males – and the fact that the destination tree needed to hide a hundred plus finches at any one time. The destination in Honeycomb Gorge was a small tree above the waterfall, indicating water higher up in the gorge. There was a moment of drama when a small bird of prey – or some other finch-eating bird – flew into the tree; spooked the whole finch mob, which promptly dispersed; and then chased the flock. It happened so fast it was impossible to know the end result for finch or predator. Seeing this attack, you can understand why the finches move so invisibly and circuitously around the gorge. However, I’m not sure that evolution has realised that their noise is more than a tad betraying of their presence. Visual disappearance is their art form, auditory disappearance is not. Maybe this is to give the predator a half chance of catching some finch flesh. As an aside, I finished reading Bill Gammage’s book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, about Aboriginal land management while I was at Kennedy. This book describes the complex, extensive and active land management practiced throughout Australia prior to European ‘discovery’. When I look at the land in an area that I’m not familiar with, I have difficulty telling apart the introduced weeds (frequently escapees from productive European-style pasture) from the natural vegetation. Difficult as this is, Gammage’s book challenges our perspective of ‘natural’ and heightens the complexity of seeing the land as it would have been in 1788. These thoughts went through my mind as I looked down from the view point. The vegetation looked ‘natural’ but was it the ‘managed natural’ as designed by the traditional owners of 1788? Who knows the answer. There was no one to ask while I was at Kennedy and there would likely be very few, if any, who could now answer the question anyway.