Braeside Wetlands is a small state park about forty minutes south east of Melbourne. Today I bought my first pair of binoculars (GPO Passion ED 8x42) and wanted to try them out. I feared it would be too hot, and while the water level was quite low there were still plenty of interesting birds around.

	Gray Fantail. First bird I found, if you ignore the Noisy Miner grabbing a drink from the fountain at the car park. Definitely much easier to identify with magnification!
	Pied Stilt. Found a couple wading around the edges, very distinctive look.
	Gray Teal. Super common duck that I had nevertheless not seen before.
	Pink-eared Duck. Zebra duck! Spotted a couple with a brood of chicks.
	Masked Lapwing. Have seen a few of these before, but they look so cool I wanted to include in the list.
	Straw-necked Ibis. Didn't know there were other kinds of Ibis around, this one was perched on a log in the water.
	Little Black Cormorant. Sharing a log with the Ibis.
	Great Cormorant. Chilling on a different log. From what I can tell the Australasian one has less pronounced white patches.
	Little Pied Cormorant. Look it might not be as Great as its brethren by I still reckon its OK.
	Royal Spoonbill. What a bird! The exact kind of goofy/handsome I aspire to be.
	Australian Pelican. Their were either two of these, or one went for a big swim. Both plausible.
	Freckled Duck. Only spotted a single one of these late in the game.
	Great Egret. Single bird perched on a branch over the water, after I thought I wasn't going to find anything new.
	Black-fronted Dotterel. Spotted through the bins trying to sight a different bird. Very lucky, would not have spotted from shore!

In addition I saw plenty of more common birds I’ve seen before including Pacific Black Ducks, Swamphens, Coots, Miners and a solo Willie-wagtail. Dipped on identifying any Shovelers but according to a woman with a large camera they were around. There were plenty of ducks I wasn’t sure about so this was probably one of them. Also saw a bird with shape and beak of a kookaburra but darker that flew off before I could figure it out, and probably two Australian Reed Warblers but I didn’t back myself enough to call them.