If you look carefully here you will see flood debris caught in the branches quite a way up in sone of these trees. It’s a bit hard to imagine that much water in this river now its dry! Each little collection of debris is important though, because it creates a little micro-habitat for things like invertebrates and maybe small reptiles and mammals to live in.

One of the things we noticed along the way was how big rocks come right down into the river bed. This is sometimes where waterholes form because the water gets trapped among the rocks and can’t soak into the sand. It probably stays there until something drinks it dry or until it evaporates. When the river flows, it causes rapids as the water swirls around the rocks. That’s what makes it quite dangerous to go floating down the river when its flowing you never quite know where there will be rocks!

You can just imagine water rushing over these rocks and you can see how they are a bit rounded where the water is gradually wearing them away. That’s called weathering, and sometimes little bits get broken off so you get small rocks amongst the big ones. Eventually these small rocks break down to form gravel and sand that’s how the rock cycle works.

Some of these rocks are huge. And you can see the dark water marks which show there was a waterhole here for quite a while after the river stopped flowing. This would have made a good home for fish and frogs and water insects for a while. Some of these animals will now have burrowed down into the sand to wait for the next rain or at least they may have left eggs buried somewhere to hatch in the next flood. The plants like it when the flow has stopped because they get a chance to get a ‘roothold’ in the sand without being washed away.