Despite the ubiquity of the idea of adaptive management, worldwide it rarely appears to achieve learning and/or practice change. This paper presents examples of successful adaptive environmental flows from two sites in SE Australia. River operators on the Mitta Mitta River, working with university based ecologists, experimented with transferring consumptive water between Dartmouth and Hume dams to reduce negative environmental impacts. In the Edward-Wakool River System the ecological impacts of environmental watering are being systematically monitored, and lessons from that monitoring are influencing further watering events. As well as obvious lessons for management about ecological impacts of water managing, these two examples suggest that the successful adaptive management may be under recognised and under documented, at least in the discipline of river management. In neither case was adaptive management immediately obvious because the key stakeholders were compartmentalised and focused on core practice. In each case the success of the adaptive processes became clearer when a social researcher specifically sought evidence of adaptive management, and was able to combine multiple strands of written and anecdotal evidence from a range of stakeholders.