Where can one spot an eel making its way across land?

Some conjecture follows.

Genesis of the question

I’ve been hooked on eels for a minute now, so they find their way into my conversations.

This was how I discovered that my partner’s mum learned how to catch them with her hands as a kid. And why last month a farmer invited me to visit his well, which regularly houses eels.

I have sought eels out. I cycled to Tae Rak, a lake several days west of Narrm/Melbourne, and learned about the ancient Budj Bim stone traps.

I’ve read a lot about these lithe creatures born in the deep, their yearlong journey to shores across the world, where they linger in silent groups, waiting for a cold, moonless night to strike upriver in search of a place to dwell.

Encased in slime, they are even said to move over short tracts of land to find hidden pockets of water – like a well at the bottom of a paddock.

This last fact caught my friend Sarah's imagination.

She asked me:

Do you know what time of year eels tend to traverse the land? Gemma and I would like to do a dark and stormy excursion to witness a crossing.

It would be around April, I determined, or thereabouts, depending on the rainfall.

But a trickier question followed: where to look?

Tracing their inland path 

Sarah lives in Sydney, where I also lived for years, so I began my research there.

Immediately there was a candidate location: Centennial Park.

Just a few minutes from the CBD.

“[The eels] of Centennial Park make their way through the waters of Botany Bay, travelling through stormwater channels and entering through the parks’ Musgrave or Kensington ponds. Most will make the journey home at 40 years of age. In autumn each year, when water levels are higher thanks to recent rain, the eels glide through the ponds – exiting the very same way they entered – to make their way home to breed and then die.”

In fact, one article even had a compelling map!

But it’s rather speculative: a “green corridor” between the bay and the park, from marsh to wetland to dam to lake to – finally – the ponds. Looks good from above. But on the ground, there are many dry gaps to contend with.

The article contains this unsourced claim:

“[I]n times of low rainfall when the waterways and golf-club fairways are dry, the eels can even flip and slide their way over short distances on land.”

Crossing fairways

Not everyone takes overland escapades for granted.

I found folks on a forum thread discussing the matter:

Stu asks about eels crossing land, and reckons that his friends saw snakes, not eels.

Jason replies first. Have seen it happening, mate.

But he only saw it on TV, and can’t even remember the program.

Ron ain’t having a bar of it:

I think they were definitely snakes. I don’t believe for one minute that eels cross land at night.

Others are equanimous and open to the idea:

Detective work

Uncertainties on uncertainties.

If we’re to believe the map-article above, a promising spot to witness land traversals might be short sections of grass between water hazards on the golf courses.

After checking satellite imagery and a golf course planner, I identify one such place at the western end of hole #1, which goes between the hazards of holes #8 (north) and #18 (south):

Here’s another angle, from a flyover video on the club’s learning platform:

However, the Australian Golf Course is a private course, and the only public road access is locked behind tall gates overnight (i.e. the time when eels are most active):

Oddly, those gates don’t seem nearly wide enough to meet in the middle. But presuming they do, eel-seekers must enter the course from a stealthier approach.

It seems an easy hop over this residential brick wall abutting the club’s barbed-wire fence near the roundabout of Tunstall and Day Avenues, conveniently located near the green of hole #1:

But that unmarked white van makes me kinda nervous.

And surely only lost eels wind up on the golf course, because after some more digging, I learned that water leaves Centennial Park via a culvert on Alison Road. And crucially, after that, “water flows almost three kilometres via underground pipe and formed channel to the Botany Wetlands”.

So, it would seem that from here...

...the savvy eels travel out of sight, beneath the citizens of Kensington, all the way to (or from) the Mill Stream, which takes them to Botany Bay:

Given that the present-day terminus of Mill Stream runs alongside the reclaimed land of Sydney Airport’s third runway, it may be as likely for us to spot an eel hitching a ride through the air as to find them on land.

Into the gardens

What about in Melbourne?

Rumour has it that short-finned eels (a slightly different species to their northern compatriots) sometimes cross land from waterholes to the Yarra.

The mysterious commentator “GB“ (Gleaming Body? Ghostly Baiter?) left this hot tip:

Navigating not just a two-lane road, but multiple footpaths!

This tantalising possibility is corroborated in a typewritten 1983 dispatch of the Friends of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne newsletter.

Eve Almond (the “Interpretation Officer” of the Gardens) ponders the fate of the resident eels when the lake was temporarily drained for restoration works:

All this leads me to think that the Northern Lawn is where we have perhaps the surest chance of witnessing eels begin their long swim back to the Coral Sea with a short little slither.

I’ll let Seamus Heaney paint the scene for us. Here he describes an eel departing an Irish lake:

See you on a rainy night next April...

Nathan