It’s funny how it all works out sometimes.

I took the following series of photos from the driver’s seat in my work ute.

They were taken from beside a puddle in the carpark of a tip, a tip located directly next to the main thoroughfare linking Sydney’s burgeoning western suburbs to the bright lights of the city. I could hear the large machines of the tip in the background, the back-hoe firing, the excavators booming, the truck and dogs tipping their loads. I could hear the blaring motorway funnelling car after car, lorry after lorry from east to west and west to east. And there stood an Eastern Great Egret, awash with white and elegance, holding a hapless Eastern Water Skink in a tweezer-like grip. I drove my car beside it, within 10 metres, the poor skink writhing and wriggling for escape. The Egret didn’t mind me staring. It didn’t mind me intruding on its snack. I watched the skink being dunked into the puddle, presumably to help with the swallow. It was dunked, shifted slightly and down the hatchet, the skink breathing it’s final breath of life.