The lakes sit about 80 kilometres west of the tiny town of Bedourie, hard against the longitudinal dunes of the Simpson Desert, which form the area's western wall. Their water comes through the swampy floodplains of the Mulligan River and Eyre Creek, part of the vast inland drainage that ultimately feeds Lake Eyre by way of the Warburton River. This is Channel Country at its most characteristic: a maze of anastomosing channels, floodplains, permanent waterholes, and dry lakes spread across grey clay soils. When the upstream catchments flood, the water spreads and slows here, pooling into shallow lakes across the plain before the desert sun begins to take it back.

Mumbleberry and Torquinie are ephemeral lakes, filling in most years but never holding for long. There is a chemistry to their dying. When a fresh flood first arrives, the water is sweet, and life moves in fast to exploit it. But these are terminal basins with nowhere to drain, so as the sun evaporates the shallow water month by month, the dissolved salts left behind concentrate, and the lakes turn steadily saline before finally returning to bare clay. Each flood is therefore a moving feast that shifts from freshwater habitat to saltpan over a single season, and the birds that depend on it must time their arrival to the brief window when conditions suit them.

BirdLife International recognised this area because the numbers, in the right year, are simply extraordinary. The lakes regularly hold over one percent of the entire world population of several waterbird species at once: freckled ducks, pink-eared ducks, red-necked avocets, grey teals, and sharp-tailed sandpipers, the last of these long-distance migrants that breed in the Siberian Arctic and somehow find their way to this remote corner of the outback. When the floodplains were systematically surveyed during a major flood in 2001, they were estimated to probably contain over a million waterbirds. The desert IBA's signature land bird is here too: the elusive Eyrean grasswren, slipping through the canegrass on the dunes at the lakes' western edge.

The Channel Country runs on a clock no calendar can predict. For long stretches the lakes lie empty and the birds are elsewhere, scattered across a continent, waiting on weather they cannot see coming. Then a wet year arrives and the whole machine springs into motion: water spreading across the plains, fish and crustaceans and insects exploding in the shallows, and birds converging from thousands of kilometres in every direction to breed in the brief abundance. This boom-and-bust pulse is the defining ecology of arid Australia, and few places express it more dramatically than here. Protecting the lakes means protecting the possibility of the boom, the intact basin that birds across half the continent rely on when the rains finally come.

Few outsiders ever lay eyes on these lakes, even in flood. They sit deep in the Channel Country, reachable only by long unsealed roads through some of the most sparsely populated land in Australia, where the nearest settlement of any size is tiny Bedourie. Yet remoteness should not be mistaken for emptiness. This is the traditional country of Aboriginal peoples who read the inland rivers for tens of thousands of years, who knew which waterholes endured and which channels would run, and who timed their movements to the same pulses of flood and drought that govern the birds. The grasses, the floodplains, the boom and the bust were understood here as a living calendar long before any survey marked the lakes on a map. The ducks and avocets that arrive in their hundreds of thousands are only the most visible inheritors of a country that has always answered to water.