Next the native parrot, Kaka.  Not such a good image, but the light level was low and it was a fair way away:

A more common sight in New Zealand gardens is the Tui, especially if one has a flax bush:

They are a fine-looking bird, with their delicate white feathering at the back, the irridescent green plumage and the white ruff at their neck.

Now we get to the really special creatures.  The Takahe was thought to be extinct until just a few years ago, but here is a live one, right at the exact centre of this image:

Well yes, they are rather elusive and shy.  However, eventually it did emerge, looking a bit like a dark green football:

Now the reason for this appearance becomes clear: food!

OK, now comes the confession.  All the shots of that tui and the takahe were taken while my wife and I were enjoying a coffee at the Mount Bruce wildlife centre.  The other pictures were taken during a wander around their wonderful reserve. 

The kokako shots were actually taken through the quite dense wire mesh of its (very large) enclosure.  By using the maxmium aperture on my tele lens, the depth of field becomes so small that the fence is thrown completely out of focus and almost disappears.  The downside is that focussing becomes very critical, so most of the shots I took were not ‘keepers’.

Mount Bruce is well worth a visit.  Travellers from Wellington can also stop off at the many excellent wineries around Martinborough, almost as good as our Nelson wines!

The water was beautifully clear:

with some nice reflections to be found:

Wildlife:

The Pelorus Bridge Scenic Reserve has several easy walking tracks with good opportunities to see local wildlife.  In the past the area has had a problem with an invasion of wasps (an alien invader to NZ), which really like feeding on the honeydew found on beech trees.  The honeydew is actually excreted from a small insect which bores into the tree and is an important source of food for insects and small birds.  Efforts to reduce wasp populations appeared to be working, but there were still plenty to be found.  Note the drop of honeydew on the tendril at the very top of this picture:

I was using a long (300 mm) telephoto lens for capturing wasp images, when suddenly I heard a bellbird quite close nearby, sounding a very loud warning call.  I managed to get some fairly rushed shots off.  I chose this one for this post, even thouigh it’s rather soft, because it really shows the bird shouting its alarm.

Then I heard a rustling in the fern undergrowth.  A weka was about 3 metres away, in fairly thick cover.  All I could see was a part of its back, so here’s a close-up of weka feathers:

When it finally emerged from cover onto the track, it was only about a metre from my feet, much too close for me to focus with that long lens.  It then decided that I wasn’t someone to get too close to, so bolted.  The bellbird followed on its trail, sounding its alarm call the whole time.  It obviously wasn’t me the bellbird was worried about.  Anyway, how’s this for a poor shot of a weka?

If I’d had the wide angle lens used for some of the earlier shots on the camera, I would have had some winning images!  Bird photography is not all that easy.

I did get a shot showing that the local farmers have a sense of humour though.  The sign below was obviously a response to the suggestion that gaseous emissions from cows were a contributor to NZ’s greenhouse gas problem.  It obviously had not worked very well, because the honesty box had been removeed (or stolen).  The spelling was not too flash either.

I booked a tour with “Albatross Encounters“,  who operate out of Kaikoura.  It’s the same company that run “Dolphin Encounters”, but more on that at the end of this post.

I got some great images.  This first one is a closeup of a female Wandering Albatross, with mating plumage accentuated by a diet of shrimps and krill:

Wandering Albatross (Diomedea antipodensis)

These wonderful birds have a wingspan of  around 3 metres and breed on the sub-Antarctic Islands way south of New Zealand.  They are common around Kaikoura at this time of year, no doubt drawn by the abundant marine life.  On the water, they are at times a lot more aggressive than on land:

More reserved were the Northern Royal Albatross, distinguished by the black line along the cutting edge of it’s bill:

Northern Royal Albatross (Diomedea sanfordi)

It was fun to see these large birds sailing into the action with their wings arranged to make themselves as impressive as possible:

We really did get very close to the birds.  This next shot was taken with a 14mm wide angle lens.  The bird in the foreground is a Cape Pigeon or Cape Petrel, Daption capense.

This guy, known affectionately as #512,  has been banded and is seen frequently on these birding trips.  They lose their darker colouring as they grow older.

Juvenile Wandering or Antipodian Albatross (diomedea gibsoni)

A few more images:

Salvin's Albatross (Thalassarche salvini)

We saw 6 different species of albatross that morning.  It was an excellent trip, one I certainly can recommend.  Our skipper Gary was an old sea salt who knew a lot about (and was interested in) the birds we were seeing.

If you are interested in albatross, then the book “Albatross” by Tui De Roy, Mark Jones and Julian Fitter (published by David Bateman Ltd) has many beautiful photographs and a lot of good science as well.

I mentioned the dolphin encounters earlier.  It appears that the tourist operators are still running these trips in a way that greatly adds to the experience.  Instead of dropping the swimmers in amongst the dolphins, they are placed quite some distance away and told to make themselves interesting.  If they are interesting enough, then the dolphins will choose to come and swim with them.  Of course, they almost always do, but that’s not the point: it’s the dolphins’ choice.  We had one person on our trip who had been out with the Dusky Dolphins at dawn.  She was still on a high from the experience, which seems to be the usual reaction.  As a New Zealander, it’s a pleasure hearing about tourism done well!

Wax-eye

I’m sure there will be more to come.

Even though the fishing was not great, we all came home with some nice fish and a crayfish or two.  My neighbours were delighted to receive some blue cod fillets, always best eaten fresh.

As usual, the bird life was just great. At least a couple of different varieties of albatross, giant petrels, shearwaters, plus lots of gulls.  Here are some examples:

The gull gives a sense of scale

a Flesh-footed shearwater

Salvin's Albatross

The fish is about 20 cm + long!

Photographing them under these circumstances is tough!  I was using a big telephoto which has a very narrow depth of focus.  So on the pitching boat I had to track the birds well enough for the autofocus sensors to latch onto them.  It was hard enough to keep the birds in the frame, let alone get them in focus. Thank heavens for digital photography!  When I got home, I think I deleted 70% or so of the images and ended up posting about 10% or so.

You can find them here (along with pictures of my fishing mates) in low resolution, or the best in higher resolution in my birdlife galleries.