The dimensions of islands in seven braided river reaches are analyzed as an indicator of the scaling behaviour of braided channels at small scales. We examined the relationship, W~LH, where L and W are island length and width which are measured along the major and minor axes respectively and H is Hurst's exponent, which is a measure of scaling anisotropy. Islands are shown to exhibit near isotropic scaling (H = 0.88--1.02), or self-similarity, at length scales up to 1.5 times the braid plain width, with reasonable consistency occurring between all reaches studied despite large differences in scaling and hydrologic/geomorphologic characteristics. We suggest that previous conclusions that braided channels show more strongly self-affine scaling behavior have been influenced by the inappropriate application of simple linear regression and by basing morphological feature dimensions on their projection parallel and orthogonal to the braid plain axis rather than in terms of their absolute (major axis) dimensions.