Once a site plagued by acid sulphate soils, Cattai is now protected wetlands with hundreds of species to admire.

I’ll be honest, I’m no naturalist. I couldn’t tell a bladderwort from a buttercup before I started poking around Cattai, and I still occasionally mix up my sedges.

What I do know is this place rewards anyone willing to slow down and actually look, which is really all birdwatching requires anyway. And the twitchers really do love it.

Getting there and getting ready

Cattai sits just off the Pacific Highway at Spring Hill Road, tucked between Coopernook and Harrington, and it’s easy to drive straight past without knowing what’s hiding there.

Two wetlands share the one address, a perched freshwater wetland and a brackish tidal one, and between them they shelter more than 170 bird species along with kangaroos, wallabies and the odd spotted goanna sunning itself on the boardwalk.

Give yourself a good hour for the main loop, 2.3 kilometres there and back with plenty of reason to stop. Bring covered shoes, a hat, sunscreen and your own water, there’s nowhere to refill once you’re out on the track, and the toilets live back at the car park, not out on the walk.

Cattai locks its gate at 3pm on weekdays and 5pm on weekends, so don’t be the person still wandering the boardwalk as the sun drops, I may or may not be speaking from experience.

Ferns, flowers and a very sneaky plant

Just off the track in the forest you’ll spot something genuinely rare, a giant climbing maidenhair fern more at home north of Coffs Harbour, growing here at the base of the paperbarks and reaching up to 8 metres tall.

Come summer, keep an eye on the dam for the bladderwort’s yellow flowers, a plant with a secret cruel streak, tiny bladders line its stems and snap shut on unsuspecting insects that swim too close.

The stork everyone gets wrong

Follow the boardwalk out to the wetland view and you’re looking at the real drawcard, the black swans gliding past and, between spring and autumn, the cape waterlily throwing up its purple flowers across the water.

But if I had to pick a favourite local resident, it’s the stork everyone gets wrong.

You might be surprised there’s only one true jabiru in the world, and it lives in South America, nowhere near Cattai. What you’re looking at here is a different bird altogether, the black-necked stork, Ephippiorhynchus asiaticus if you’re after a good trivia night answer, though locals will call it a jabiru regardless and nobody’s likely to correct them mid conversation.

Get close enough and you’ll notice its neck and wings aren’t really black at all, they’re a shimmering purple-green, with legs the colour of coral. It’s not quite what it’s called, and not quite what it first appears either, which is probably the best compliment you can pay a bird.

Butterflies, lookouts and a bit of history

Push on and the tall saw-sedge marks your next stop, its serrated leaves hosting the saw-sedge brown butterfly, a big dark beauty with orange wing spots that flutters about looking for somewhere safe to lay her eggs.

Between here and the next stop, take the short detour up to Spring Hill Lookout for a proper 360 degree payoff, the Three Brother mountains to the north, Crowdy Head to the east, and Cape Hawke down at Forster to the south.

Further along you’ll pass Sawpit Gully, where more than 2000 native trees have gone in to stitch the bush back together, then the old wharf site on Cattai Creek, a reminder that European settlers once floated hardwood timber out of here to Harrington’s shipyard in the 1800s.

The circular patch of land nearby isn’t natural either, it was built so boats had somewhere to turn around.

A quiet comeback story

Keep walking and the story turns properly environmental. This whole site was farmland once, plagued by acid sulfate soils that were quietly poisoning the Manning River, until MidCoast Council bought it back in 2003 and set about repairing the damage.

Watching that recovery play out along the boardwalk, native trees replacing camphor laurel, a strangler fig doing its slow patient work on its host tree, wet eucalypt forest sheltering koalas and the endangered little bent wing bat, it’s hard not to feel a bit hopeful about what patient effort can undo.

If you’ve still got legs left in you, the Lookout Loop adds another 1.1 kilometres for those Three Brother views, or the Forest Loop tacks on 840 metres of shady Blackbutt forest, just skip that one on a windy day.

Watch your footing throughout, there are snakes, ticks and the occasional trip hazard from fallen branches, and keep the kids close if you’re near the water, it’s shallower than it looks but no less worth respecting.

I still can’t identify half of what grows out there. But I can tell you Cattai Wetlands is one of those places that quietly rewards patience, and that misnamed stork alone is worth the visit.