(Tursiops aduncus) continue to appear year-round in Cockburn Sound, with fourteen sightings logged since January—most recently on July 6. These are animals of remarkable persistence, moving through an embayment transformed by decades of industrial pollution and habitat loss.
The numbers tell a stark story: the sound lost roughly ninety percent of its seagrass meadows between the 1960s and 1990s as the Kwinana industrial strip developed along the shore. What was once perhaps 4,000 hectares of productive seagrass has dwindled to roughly 400. The dolphins' presence here is not a sign of recovery—the habitat remains devastated—but rather an act of ecological endurance, a reminder that some species will attempt to persist in places we have radically diminished.
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The ghost fungus grows on dead wood in this bushland, and in the long summer evenings it is faintly visible after dark, a pale luminescence on the bark of old logs. The quenda passes these without interest. It is looking for something that moves, or something that smells like it recently did. The sky above the canopy is still blue at the horizon. The air smells of warm eucalyptus resin and dry sand. Somewhere in the understorey, a small animal is pushing its nose into the ground.
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