fresh water, including farm dams and sewage ponds. The banded stilt is highly nomadic, having adapted to the unpredictable climate of Australia's arid interior. Sudden rainfall results in the influx of water to and filling of dry inland salt lakes. The stilts respond by travelling to these areas and breeding, dispersing and returning to the coast once the lakes begin to dry up. How banded stilts on the coast become aware of inland rainfall is unknown. The distances travelled can be large; two birds have been tracked travelling from a drying Lake Eyre in South Australia to a newly filled lake system in Western Australia over away. One of these birds veered northwest over the Gibson Desert, travelling a minimum of in 55.9 hours. Behaviour The banded stilt is gregarious; birds are almost always encountered in groups, from small troops of tens of birds, to huge flocks numbering in the tens of thousands. Breeding The breeding habits of the banded stilt were unknown until 1930, when a colony was discovered at Lake Grace. Even then they remained poorly known until 2012, when researcher Reece Pedler and colleagues attached tracking devices to 21 birds to gain an insight into the species' movements. They discovered that the birds travel large distances inland and gather at the recently filled bodies of water. The majority of observed breeding events have occurred at inland salt lakes in South Australia and Western Australia immediately following freshwater inflows. An exception to this exists where some breeding was attempted at The Coorong during a time in which salinity in the Lower Lakes was significantly elevated due to reduced environmental flows down the Murray River. Breeding events are initiated by the filling of shallow inland lakes after rainfall and resultant explosion in numbers of food animals such as Parartemia brine shrimp. This can happen at any time of year. Breeding sites are generally on low islands, of 1–1.5 m (3–5 ft) elevation, or spits on or alongside large lakes, on clay or gravel and generally with sparse or no vegetation. The nests themselves are scrapes in the soil, up to across and deep, with or without some dead vegetation as lining. Birds on stony soils generally gather vegetation instead of digging scrapes. Egg clutches number three to four (or rarely five) oval eggs, which vary from fawn to white marked with brown to black splotches. They can be long