I went for a walk recently at Lake Monger and was saddened to find that it’s drying up. It’s normal for Perth’s smaller lakes and wetlands to dry up over summer, but not Lake Monger - it’s one of the largest lakes in the area, and although the water levels rise and fall with the seasons I’ve never seen the levels as low as they are now.

The first photo shows the shallower western side (the wooden posts are normally under water), and the second shows what is normally a channel of water surrounding a small island. The sign advising not to enter the water looks a little out of place! While most of the lake still has water in it, much of this is alarmingly shallow - one bird I saw standing in the middle of the lake had water only up to its knees (or the part of its legs where the knees would be if it had them).

Why is it so? The lake occurs in a low-lying area where groundwater reaches the surface, and so groundwater levels affect the lake depth. A percentage of Perth’s water supply is pumped out of the ground, and this percentage has increased over the last 30 years. Combined with a doubling of the population in this period, and a decrease in rainfall, it’s not surprising that the lake level should be abnormally low. It wouldn’t have helped that last year was our driest on record.

With still another two months of warm weather to get through before the brief rainy season, Lake Monger will undoubtedly get even drier - hopefully not too dry for all the bird life that depend on it when other lakes have dried up.