It lies about 90 kilometres (56 mi) south of Perth on the eastern side of the Harvey Estuary and forms part of the Peel-Yalgorup System Ramsar site.

It lies in a natural depression in the coastal plain and is separated from the eastern shoreline of the Harvey Estuary by a vegetated fossil dune ridge some 600 metres (2,000 ft) across.

There are stands of banbar and swamp paperbark fringing the northern and eastern margins, with a patchy understorey of broadleaf cumbungi.

The south-western corner is dominated by pasture and the midsection of the western shore is open eucalypt woodland, including tuarts, flooded gums and swamp peppermints, with a grass understorey.

Some 163 hectares (400 acres) of the reserve has been identified by BirdLife International as an Important Bird Area (IBA) because it regularly supports over 1% of the world populations of red-necked stints, sharp-tailed sandpipers, white-headed stilts, red-necked avocets and red-capped plovers, and sometimes large numbers of blue-billed ducks.