My happy place (Angela Sanders)

Angela Sanders

Ecologist – South West WA

Our Red Moort Reserve in south-west Western Australia is a fragment in what is one of the most floristically diverse parts of the planet.

We have lost so many of our plants and animals in this corner of Australia and I love to sit on this breakaway in the centre of the reserve and look out and pretend that they’re all still there.

The vista takes in the Stirling Range, some 290 million years old, a long line of peaks stretching 65 km from east to west.

The rocks that I sit on in this happy place are 40 million years old and yet we, in just 70 short years, have changed this landscape forever.

My eyes rest on the mallee canopy and I wonder what they have seen over their long lives. This reserve hides many Malleefowl that are using their nest mounds to hatch chicks that we record on our remote cameras.

I spied on an Emu teaching its chicks to bathe in a clay pan and found scratchings of Button Quail amongst the Red Moort trees.

This small remnant protects a wonderland of what once was and it throws up surprises at every visit.