Kaukau this time.
The south easterly gave me a tailwind up to the top, for the most part.
Lots of sun, and a cooling ride home.
On today’s walk, eight eels and a new pūtangitangi (paradise duck) family…
Previously: tuna (an eel) in the same stream.
The blossoms haven’t been quite as profuse this year, but there’s still plenty of flowers and new leaves for the passing birds… like this kererū this morning:
Though it would probably be for the best if we cut out this cherry tree - the species is somewhat invasive here - it’s hard when in spring through to early December it provides such good forage for kererū and tūī.
I mean, just look at this happy face:
Previous springtimes:
It’s spring again! And so our cherry tree in blossom is host to a now-traditional tussle between the tūī and all comers.
Today: ding ding! it’s a pair of Rosellas!
(Apologies for the quality of the photo - it was taken through our winter-crudded windows.)
The tūī chased the rosella about a bit but it didn’t really go all that well in the end as the pursuer became the pursued and was chased off in turn. And the rosella went back to snacking on the blossom.
Round One: rosella!
Previous springtimes:
Being a fine morning R₂ and I went for a stroll to the neighbourhood cafe, taking Èibhneas with us.
On the way back I said to R₂ it would be good kōtare spotting weather.
And so it proved, with this dangerous looking specimen perched on a wire above a busy road.
That beak is pretty badass looking!
We see them a lot around here but it’s not always easy to get a close in shot, so I’m reasonably happy with this one.
I’m also wondering why they seem to like the wires above roads — are they waiting for potential prey to be hit by a passing car?
Or do I suffer from a cognitive bias and I simply see them above roads because that’s where I happen to be and where most of the wires for perching — and easy visibility — are?
Other kōtare:
You and me both, mate.
Kererū in the late afternoon sunlight
A hundred metres from my office building, a pied shag shakes its wings dry. 📷
In springtime this particular tūī was aggressively defending our flowering shrubs and bushes against all comers; at one point it fought off two kākā and a kererū simultaneously. Such drama in the garden!
Who else is a fan of Californian Quail?
I have R₂ to thank for this one, possibly the bird photo I am most pleased with so far.
It was one of those warm-calm and overcast evenings. R₂ was looking out the window and alerted us to what she thought was a Pīpīwharauroa (Shining Cuckoo) on our kōwhai tree. She was right, of course, despite it being a bird none of us has ever actually seen before.
They are not uncommon - their distinctive call heralds spring as they make their way south down into New Zealand from New Caledonia to breed each year. But they are very cryptic and easily disturbed, and the closest I’d got in the past was spotting outlines of them high in the trees.
This one was systematically harvesting the tree for the kōwhai tree moth caterpillars – there’s one in its mouth in this photo – and seemed to be OK with me just 10 metres away snapping madly.
Now, if I could only get a photo of its larger and rarer cousin, the Koekoeā (Long-tailed Cuckoo), which I have seen in a blur overhead, but once.
This has turned into a bit of a twitchery bird-nerd posting.
I love the sound of bellbirds. They remind me of two places that I don’t get to as often as I’d like these days: the family farm, where three or four bellbirds pass by many times each day on their circuits of the area; and around Lake Hāwea, where outside of the Christmas and Easter holiday periods they’re just about the noisiest things in the whole sleepy township.
For me bellbird song has come to represent holidays and relaxation. Every time I hear one my mood lightens and I just feel that little bit cheerier.
Each bird has a different call pattern. When staying on the farm I eventually learned to recognise each individual there when they called; and in one case, I captured some audio on my phone:
This is the sound of the male in the photo above; and a very handsome beast he was too (here’s some more pictures of him from April 2011).
So you can imagine how happy I am to hear any in the neighbourhood here in Wellington. They’ve come and gone in the last few years - they are not overly common but as Zealandia’s breeding programme continues, and the Council keeps trapping rats and possums, they are increasing in numbers a bit.
There’s been one around for much of the last month… or so I thought. My happy reveries were interrupted when I noticed that what I thought was a bellbird singing was, once I spotted the singer, actually a gangly juvenile tui, much like this one:
I was a bit unreasonably annoyed. Now, every time I heard the “bellbird”, I’d feel a little flash of dissonance. Was it a real bellbird? Or a fake? So I named the tui Rūpahu.
Clearly I wasn’t thinking straight. Tui are great imitators, and juveniles in particular will pick some environmental sound, copy it and repeat it every minute or two for all the daylight hours (and more) - sometimes even car alarms and other, odder noises. Which meant that Rūpahu had to have learnt the song from somewhere.
And so it turned out. The other morning I thought I heard two bellbirds. I crept outside to have a look… and there they were. Rūpahu in the cherry tree; a bellbird in the kowhai tree about eight metres away from its copyist. Both making the self-same song, note-complete with the same whirrs and buzzes too, and often at the exact same instant as if in stereo. It was slightly surreal.
I managed to record them, though sadly the phone’s mic is mono so the full effect is lost:
But if you listen carefully you can just about detect that one of the calls is a slightly different pitch. I couldn’t distinguish between them at the time.
Since then I’ve seen the pair of them around a few more times. I suspect that young Rūpahu is a bit confused hanging about the bellbird like that… but I’m happy that it has had such a good singing teacher, and happier still that we have a bellbird around.
Long may they both remain in the neighbourhood.
Back in May I took a day off for my birthday, and amongst other things I went for another look around Zealandia. There was not much new to report: deeper into late autumn there seemed a little less life around. It was cooler, and overcast, and the light made it even harder to snap the locals.
But all the usual suspects were in force, like this robin that came along while I was eating lunch:
The more I rucked up the leaves on the path, the more it hung about. Eventually I had to carry on as I wanted to walk up to the wind turbine to have a look from up there (also: I like climbing hills).
Turned out there was not much of a view from inside the fence, so back down I came, returning to photography.
This wasn’t hugely productive either. I had a better time just quietly waiting and observing. Down a dark gully there was a stitchbird, streaking from branch to branch below the path. Sometimes it would alight on a branch illuminated by a shaft of light from a break in the canopy. But I was never quite quick enough - this was the best I could do as it braced to take off:
Well, that was that. Time to walk out to the café to meet R. and continue the rest of the day.
This awful weather we’re having. Well, it’s winter I suppose… but it makes me want to look back at this summer past.
And I remember now that I posted nothing here over that period. Clearly time to do something about that then. Lots of photos to follow…
Summer started (or rather, late spring continued) with the local kererū pigging out, as per usual, in our cherry tree:
It’s quite nice to be able to provide them with a little food, if only for this short period of each year. But they seem to do OK around Wellington the rest of the time, foraging everyones' gardens.
We headed away to the Deep South in the days before Christmas. The waters of the Strait were almost eerily calm; fog, no wind; all of which was pretty unusual in crossings that I’ve experienced:
Further south, once on the Mainland, the Southern Rātā was in bloom. There’s always a picturesque clump or two above the sea in the windy bits of road just before Haast:
Of course, there are lots of large and more impressive older rātā trees around there and also up the Landsborough River, but somehow we always seem to stop at this particular spot above the sea.
Another place we like to stop after our previous experience there is the Blue Pools along the Makarora Valley. We were not disappointed. Although there were fewer of the little Riflemen that we spotted there last time, we were very pleased to see a noisy family trio of these:
This is a Yellowhead, or Mohua, and is very rare these days for the heartbreaking reason that it can only exist in native forest fertile enough for it to be able to reproduce fast enough to keep ahead of rat and stoat predation. I suspect the drops of 1080 in the Makarora in the last few years have greatly benefitted these guys and any other remaining native birds in the area. But what would I know.
What I do know is that the New Zealand bush is pretty disappointing for the average, noisy clomping tourist family. Most of the people who were walking the little trail we were on didn’t really see anything. You have to stop, listen carefully, and wait for the flickers of movement that tell you that several little somethings are coming your way. Our surviving endemic bird fauna are, for the most part, just not that obvious.
Once down on the farm the weather turned very hot and dry. This was apparently quite a contrast to up north, where it was wet in most places over the Christmas statutory holidays.
You’ll be pleased to know that there was at least one overcast day with a few spits of rain. This was the day that my Dad collected us all up into his farm truck and drove us across to a farm dam inhabited by a Pied Stilt and three little roadrunners:
While we watched this little family the other adult was flying around and around, quite close and making quite a bit of noise, and so we thought we’d better move off before we disturbed the pair too much. It would not do to have the chicks abandoned.
Naturally we had our bikes with us, and sometimes I’d ride to town to get a coffee (about a 30km round trip on fairly quiet roads):
These guys actually make quite good coffee that would stand up in any of the major cities. They’re best known for their pies, cakes and pastries and I very much like stopping there.
On the way back there are a couple of spots waiting for a camera (especially on this particular day, which was extremely hot and requiring of several stops):
This is an old railway carriage, left behind in the late 1960s as the tide of railway track that brought it here receded back to Dunedin.
I do like my polarising filter overmuch, don’t I:
A bit further down the road, this shed is similar to that more famous one at Wedderburn on the Otago Central Rail Trail. What not many people know is that the original shed at Wedderburn was sold some years ago… and the shed that’s now at Wedderburn is a ring-in that the locals there purchased and took from the next station down the track on this line. There’s no such thing as genuine: how would you define it?
There’s always time for a couple days at the family crib at Lake Hāwea. I got out on the bike for a couple rides down the river trail and across Hāwea Flat, where I saw this striking, but I suppose not uncommon, sight:
It’s a field of rapeseed, or what the Canadians rebranded Canola, presumably grown as winter feed for stock. That’s Mt Maude in the background, and a very nice walk to the top can be had if you are fittish (it’s about 900m above the plain). The other nice thing about this photo is the sky - the Upper Clutha Basin on hot days has the most beautiful skies.
The sky is the best feature in this photo too:
We’re down by Lake Hāwea, but instead of looking north for the conventional lake view this is back up the terminal moraine, past a dead tree I could probably have done more with. But those swirls of cloud!
And back at the crib, the small:
I was pretty impressed with this Holoplatys jumping spider catching such big prey. It wasn’t quite able to drag it back into the narrow gap between the boards, and so it stayed in a helpful-for-shooting spot for a some time. Despite this helpfulness, I still mucked up the depth of field on all of my photos of it.
Back on the farm we decided on a trip to somewhere we’d never been before: Oamaru. On the way, we stopped at the Moeraki Boulders:
While the Boulders were pretty cool, the better thing for us was spotting a pod of Hector’s Dolphins working their way along the surf. There’s actually two in the above shot.
I got a bit over excited and tried repeatedly to capture a decent shot of the little dolphins. Sadly, this was the best I could manage:
At some point in the future we should go for a visit to Porpoise Bay in the Catlins, where there is a pod of Hector’s Dolphins almost always in residence. Some years ago when R. and I were passing by there on our way to Curio Bay nearby we watched them play in the surf with the kids from the local camping ground. After hearing this story both B₂ and R₂ liked the idea of the chance to do the same.
Oamaru is known by visitors for two things, mainly: its beautiful Victorian architecture, and its penguins. We had a pretty good look around the former, and in the evening went to a clifftop outside town where we could spy upon the latter–specifically the larger of the two local species, the Yellow-eyed Penguin:
They were surprisingly noisy, the nesting bird calling to its mate (who sometimes we could even see, waddling out of the water and across the beach far below, past the seals and into the scrub at the beach edge).
The next day we drove back through the Waitaki Valley, following the Vanished World trail to Duntroon. Thoroughly recommended: fossils, strange limestone country, Māori rock art, and at the end quite a nice visitors' centre where the girls found some fossils of their very own in the blocks of limestone provided. Then we drove over the Dansey’s Pass to Naseby and the Maniototo and onwards back to the farm.
Not long after that we had to come home to Wellington. From then on for us summer was mainly Wellington; school; work; slowly drawing in days. Though this year was also a festival year we didn’t get out to much except one or two of the free events, like Arcane:
So there you have it: in one blog posting what I would have taken ten to do in earlier years. And I can barely wait for the warm dry weather to return. Roll on summer.
This weekend I’ve been back down on the farm for A Significant Birthday (not one of mine). Which was very nice.
Another really nice thing was being there in autumn. It’s probably been 20 years since the last time I was in Central Otago in the autumn, and I’ve really missed those colours.
The other thing I miss are bellbirds, of which there are few in Wellington, though possibly increasing in number. My Mum has several (fairly sleek and well-fed) individuals she feeds in a tree outside the kitchen window, and every half an hour their regular beat takes them by. On their way past they stop to sing, and so their song is always nearby.
Of course, I had to try and get some photos…
I stood under the beech tree by the old rough-cast concrete water tank, and as one of the males swung by for a feed by I repeated its song back at it. He flittered about in the tree a bit, working his way closer, pausing every so often to cast his fairly spooky red eye at me.
I kept whistling my response back. Closer and closer he came, until he bounced out of the tree and on to the old tank, just a couple of metres away.
Still, I whistled his song back at him. Off the tank he came and [into the shrubs even closer to me.
And then… he dropped down almost to the ground, about a metre or so from my feet. Not since that nearly disastrous time in the apple orchard have I been this close to a bellbird:
Not finding much to impress him, he flew back up into the beech tree, then along to the bird feeder for a drink, then away to the top of a leafless silver birch tree to announce his presence.
Nothing much for him to see. Moving right along to the next item in the day’s business.
Once again, I am the “campaign manager” for the New Zealand Falcon in this year’s Bird of the Year poll. I submitted the following to the Forest & Bird blog in support of the Falcon, where it was published early last week.
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Recently, I managed to obtain an interview with Kakarapiti, a cocky young male kārearea resident in Wellington, to ask who we should vote for for Bird of the Year. His answer was not what I expected.
Me: What do you spend your time on at the moment?
I spend my time on the three “F"s: Flying, Feeding, and, er, Finding a Mate. That’s quite a lot of action to fit into each day. Especially at this time of year where that third “F” is most important.
Me: OK, we’ll try and keep it short. Tell me who should be New Zealand’s Bird of the Year 2010?
Well, I am a fan of blackbirds. They sit in exposed spots and sing about how they own the neighbourhood or something—to be honest I’ve never really listened to their witterings—but the really nice thing is that when they are startled they sometimes fly straight straight up, which means if you time your stoop right you can let them fly right into your talons. Most satisfying.
Me: Hang on a bit there. New Zealand Bird of the Year is when we choose what bird we like the best, not which bird we like to eat the best. Generally we humans like colourful, cute things with nice singing voices–
Pointless! An earful of song never got your belly full. The feathered I< like best are the feathered that feeds me. Look, you asked the question, and I shall answer it.
I like ducks, though I am too small to catch them by myself. That is something I hope to do with my future mate. My nest-mother and nest-father once brought a duck back for my sister and I before we fledged. We feasted for a day!
Sparrows are OK, though small. I don’t like starlings. They taste bad. But there are so many of them. And food is food.
Me: You’ve named only introduced birds. Why’s that?
You mean the feathered that arrived with the plague of you? Well, there are so many more of those.
But yes, a tuī is always nice. They think they are so tough in numbers, but they will all take cover when they hear me. I wonder about kaka, but they are a little too smart and large to be easy prey. In days past our larger cousins would have made kaka their prey.
I’m told there are lots of interesting feathered that come out only at night time. There is one, the kiwi, that is much liked by you featherless. What does it taste like?
Me: You can’t eat a kiwi!
What? So you like them, without tasting of them? That does not make sense. I want to taste one. There is a wooded valley not far from here full of the feathered of these islands, and even some kiwi. But that area is already held by a nesting pair and I dare not go there.
I forgot. Another feathered I really like are those white ones some of you keep.
Me: You are talking about pigeons? You realise that’s a bit upsetting, you eating those. They’re our pets you know.
“Pets”? I just do not understand you featherless. If you do not eat them, why do you keep them? Look, they are really easy for me to catch. I just have to wait close by until one of you lets them all out. So easy.
Easy is good. Easy means I have time to do the other two “F"s. Furred and feathered alike, and especially young males, look for the easy. When you were young, what was the easy way for you to get food?
Me: I used to raid the fridge.
All right then. You may think of me as “raiding the fridge”.
Me: Uhhh, OK. Nearly finished now. Last question: How do you feel about being anthropomorphised so shamelessly?
Personally, I do not care. But I think it reflects pretty badly on you so-called brainy monkeys that you have to make your representations of us talk and think like yourselves before you can understand and respect us.
But what would I know: I’m only a bird.
And with that, he was off.
Vote New Zealand Falcon / Kārearea for Bird of the Year. Just don’t eat them.
When not Flying, Feeding, or Finding a mate, Kakarapiti may be found on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kakarapiti.
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As it happens, I did manage to take a picture of the resident falcon from our deck last week. But the picture is a little underwhelming and I’ll have to keep trying. I know they’re around: yesterday morning, at about 5:40am, a falcon woke me up. That hunting cry is pretty alarming, and I’m not even a small bird. And friends of ours watched one eat its prey, perched on their neighbour’s rooftop in Ngaio.
The falcons are out there.
On the way down here the other day we stopped to do the very short Blue Pools walk. There are many short bush walks off State Highway Six, and we thought the girls might enjoy the sight of the trout in the Makarora River.
However the water was (as advertised) the milky blue of glacial runoff, and we didn’t see a thing in there (though the water was very pretty). But I had gotten completely diverted by another sight: something I don’t think I have ever seen before: lots and lots of Riflemen.
(In fact, up until that point I don’t think I’d ever seen a Rifleman at all. They are New Zealand’s smallest bird; the adults are a lovely bright green and are presumably named after the famous British greenjacket rifle regiments of the Peninsular War.)
Usually this particular area is short of birdlife apart from the introduced blackbirds and the occasional tomtit (has DoC been poisoning the rats and possums? I hope so). But as we were walking down to the river I kept hearing little whistling calls, lots of them.
When I stopped and let the girls go on ahead, I could see what was causing the calls: little swarms of tiny grey birds skittering up the trunks of mossy trees, then from woodfall to woodfall, then across the leaf litter. They’d cross each other and turn and bicker, then split and hop: always active and fast.
They appeared to be shepherded by green birds about the same size, and it was at this point I realised that what I was probably seeing was families of riflemen, with their mother or father.
We passed at least three groups of birds on the short walk; each of at least four to seven in number. And on the way back, R. and I managed to get B₂ to slow down and see what was in front of her (both girls had been a bit put out by the lack of excitement in our little enforced sidetrip, and sadly R₂ was not at all receptive to sights of seemingly drab little birds) and we were well rewarded with a couple of the chicks working their way closer and closer to us across the leaflitter until they were within about 2 meters of our feet.
Just at that moment though there was a flash of green and a flurry of wings and whistle between us and the chicks; and they fluttered quickly back to a safer distance. One of their parents had spotted them getting too close to us, and had chased them away, telling their incautious children off in no uncertain terms.
It was a beautiful moment.
Note: yes, I know that the polls have closed for this year… but I found this draft posting which I was going to enliven after the article I wrote for the Forest & Bird website went live. But for various reasons that didn’t happen for a of couple weeks after I wrote this, and then I forgot about it. For my own records, there’s also the Facebook page, and a posting on the Wellingtonista too… but as we know, in the end, the Kiwi won, though the Kārearea did get into the top 10 for the first time ever…
It’s time once again to vote for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year over on the NZ Forest & Bird website. Voting starts tomorrow and goes through until October. (I’ll get the link sorted out when the voting page comes live.)
This year I’m taking a more active role in all of this: I am officially the campaign manager for the New Zealand Falcon, the Kārearea.
As part of all this I’ve convinced one falcon to join Twitter. While he may have entirely the wrong idea about Twitter (to him I think it sounds like the perfect place to find food) he’s happy to talk, for now. Follow @kakarapiti.
I’ve also had to write a campaign opening “speech” for the Forest & Bird website…
No animal should to be anthropomorphised - but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Kārearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.
It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Kārearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children. Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles' Harrier?
Luckily the Kārearea is not as large and physically threatening as these birds, though it still has its moments. In defense of their nests the falcons are utterly fearless, and will remove hat, hair, and chunks of scalp tissue from any human daring to get too close. (There’s many a back-country musterer become unhorsed from accidentally riding across a nesting territory, though you’ll seldom hear tell of it. Their dogs get a fair share too: I’ve heard of one dog being unable to shake the falcon gripping its back until it jumped off a bluff into the nearest creek.)
Unlike most of our native birds, they actually seem contemptuous of humans. Once I tried walking up to one sitting on a fence post. It let me get to within about five metres of it before it gave a couple of wingbeats, enough to lift it over to the next fencepost; and all the while its eyes were on mine. I advanced on it, and again it beat to the next post. After a couple of repeats of this though, it took off, slowly flying away as if it felt I was of little interest and even less threat.
In hunting too, they are fearless predators, taking on much bigger birds on the wing. I’ve been told of watching a duck, trying to fly up out of a creek; it was high above the water when the falcon slammed into it from above. With talons jammed into its back and the weight of the falcon bearing down on it, all the duck could do was allow itself to be ridden down to the ground, and certain death.
Once, I walked across a ridgeline and paused for a rest, looking into some dead trees in the gully below, full of noisy roosting blackbirds. Over my right shoulder a dark silent shape sped past and down, at the last minute voicing its hunting cry “ki-ki-ki-ki-ki”. An upwards startle of birds met the falcon at equal height and a catch was made, as easy as that.
So by now you must be thinking: why should I vote for this steely-eyed assassin? Why should the Kārearea be 2009 Bird of the Year?
It’s simple. We need the wild.
New Zealand is not a garden: it needs the feral and free along with the pretty and cute. It needs a hint of danger, sharp of eye and red of claw, to leaven the sweetness of voice and plumage of the other candidates.
Yet there’s fewer and fewer falcons about, with the usual catalogue of introduced predators, together with newer threats like power lines, reducing their population. Falcons need our help.
And, help given, think of the benefits of a larger, stable population! Even us city dwellers might start to see more of them as permanent residents, more than just the occasional visitors Blenheim, Palmerston North and Christchurch have enjoyed recently. And while possibly not everybody would be happy to see them, to many people they’d be a fantastic addition to the avian fauna of our cities.
A resident falcon could:
Bring it on, I say. Vote Karearea!
So. I think you should vote too. Hopefully for the kārearea; but then again it’s all about having a little fun and raising awareness, so vote for whatever you like. Just vote though, OK?
Having become tired of developing end-of-tax-year reporting at work, and coinciding with some renovation going on at home and school holidays, I’ve joined the family in the Wairarapa for a few days off.
It’d been a few years since we’d been to Mount Bruce / Pukaha. These days there’s a nice walk up through the bush to the top of the hill overlooking the centre; and we set off on this hoping that we might see (or hear) a kōkako.
OK, so we didn’t see any of those, but we did run across a few of these cheeky chappies:
The Tomtit wasn’t overly afraid of us, and actually came closer and closer, at one point landing on the track between B₂ and me. Lots of fun; R. and I used to encounter the South Island subspecies a lot in the beech forests around Lakes Wanaka and Hāwea.
We made it to the top, and had a little rest before thundering back down the track in time for Kākā feeding at 3pm. The staff give supplementary food for whatever kākā turn up - there are apparently about 150 locally but only 20 or so turned up for afternoon tea today (although apparently this is quite a few):
After that we had a bit of look at the stitchbirds and the kiwis, but the girls were flagging somewhat and it was time to go.
Still, a really good afternoon. Continuing on the theme, I’m wondering how long the waiting list is for visits to Kapiti Island these days. The girls are nearly at a stage where they could walk to the top. And it’s been 10 years at least since the last time we were there. Could be good.
And maybe we should visit Karori again soon.
I guess the song thrush is my favourite among the European import avian fauna (although the blackbirds are slowly catching up). They have a very beautiful song, and, like the blackbirds, often become quite tolerant of their human neighbours. And while they aren’t very colourful, they make up for it with their very attractively chevroned speckled breast.
There just don’t seem to be that many around though. So I was pleased to find one using the deck handrail this afternoon as a vantage point for hunting out worms:
Somewhere in the wild ground to the south of our house, she has a nest. And in time, I hope, more thrushes.
It’s been a bit wet. Although not as bad as up north, it seems.
I don’t think the kōtare minded too much: here it was sitting in the cherry tree, rain dripping off its bill. Periodically it would dive down onto the lawn, presumably picking up worms escaping to the surface out of the waterlogged lawn:
But while the kōtare seemed not unhappy with the weather, the rosellas just looked miserable:
Bugger them, I say. I’d sooner have blossom in spring time for tui, and cherries in summer for kererū, than have rosella strip the buds now. So B₂ and I chased them off.
R₂ was asleep; B₂ was watching Nickelodeon (we don’t have SkyTV at home, so this was a bit of a holiday treat for her) and R. needed the laptop for her Playcentre treasurer job. What was I to do?
I took the camera and the binoculars out for a wander. Maybe I might find some of those lovely quail. Or another amazing stick insect.
Out the back of the house I tried to spot whatever mysterious insect that was making those charming jungle noises. But every time I moved the noise would stop, and not start for another minute or so. I got bored after standing for 15 minutes in the one spot without locating the source of the sound. Onwards, then.
So around the side of the house I crept.
There was a crash of bushes and a large brown bird ran across the lawn about 50 metres and through a hedge of bay trees. I didn’t get to see exactly what it was - too large to be a weka, at least.
On the other side of the bay trees there was more lawn leading to a macrocarpa hedge on the property boundary: I didn’t see it here either but I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth on the other side of the hedge.
I stopped here, crouching down beside a small bush as cover, and waited. There were a few more crashings, then silence. Where had it gone?
I waited. And waited.
Presently I could hear a new noise, a high pitched whistle, coming from the middle of the overgrown macadamia grove a little down the hill. Every so often it would be answered with a much lower pitched cry from a little further away. By chance connected?
I quietly crept down the hill, the boundary fence and macadamias over it on my left. The noises continued - maybe I had not been detected? By a fence post was a bush - good cover. I crouched there, took my glasses off, and got the binoculars out.
I scanned the area I thought the noises were coming from. It was about 60 metres away, a thick clump of scrubby weeds. And yes, I could see some movement. Just the neck of the bird, thick and brown. But wait - ahh - there’s the head, or part of it. It looked a little like a turkey with a thicker and brown neck; red skinned around the beak and face I thought. But it was all a little hard to tell. I put my glasses back on and tried taking a photo.
Hmmm, that wasn’t much use.
I took my glasses off again and went back to the binoculars. I still couldn’t resolve much detail. What were they?
Suddenly, there was an alarm call and two birds broke cover, with great speed despite their bulk, flying up out of their cover and over my head. They moved too fast for me to follow with the binoculars, and by the time I scrabbled around for my glasses they were gone without me getting any better idea of what they looked like.
Bugger. I had thought I might really be on to something.
The next day D., R.’s Dad, returned from Masterton. “Did you spot any pheasants?”, he asked.
Aah.
And as I lifted the camera to aim, the tui said, quite clearly:
Don’t fuck with me, boy. Don’t even think it.
I could understand why. Here was the perfect gig, lots of sweet sweet nectar, flax and bottlebrush and he [I assume for no good reason] spends most of his dinnertimes looking out for a pair of psychotically overprotective blackbirds who keep dive bombing him every time he settles in for a good noshing.
Being a pretty hard to fluster kind of bird though, he just stands his ground, turning to face the much smaller blackbirds with all his neck and chest feathers ruffed out and full, occasionally bugling a little at them as if to say is that all you’ve got? Come back again, sucker! and R., the girls and I watch on in amazement as the blackbird tag team fail to make him move.
So yeah, I’m not going to bother you too much more, my friend.
Around the house at the farm there’s a plethora of birdlife: mainly because my parents' last cat died about a year ago. Everything is quite tame: my mother had a bellbird pair nesting about three feet outside the kitchen window; swallows perch on the TV aerial (the little shitters); and there’s a family of fantails (piwakawaka) living in the trees at the corner of the house.
This one was busy collecting dog hair (moulted from Grace, the elderly retriever) for her nest and didn’t mind me with the camera at all.
I’m testing out the video sharing concept: there’s a few options around where people are trying to create the Flickr equivalent for video. There aren’t many clips I’d want to share: most I do on the camera are of the kids. But sometimes I take something interesting (I think).
At first I thought I’d use Google Video - so I signed up and uploaded a couple clips - I even complied with their requirements (unencumbered formats: MP4 for video and MP3 for audio). But for some reason the audio has come out crap, so I’m now trying Vimeo, which is a more obvious Flickr clone.
I can’t quite see Vimeo taking off as strongly as Flickr: video is just not as straightforward for users as photos are. But who knows: maybe in a couple years something will have happened to change all that. It usually does…
They scattered away, into the deadfall, topknots bobbing. B₂ on my shoulders, I whispering to her and she knowing to be quiet anyway. She’s done this sort of thing before.
We crept up to the edge of the fallen branches and crouched quietly. And waited. It’s another hot day, even more humid than yesterday, and the sun is intense.
We were rewarded with the occasional chirrup from somewhere inside, and then, some hens climbing out to have a look around, followed by a handsome cock-bird. Their chicks are almost fully grown now, here at the tail end of summer, and it’s hard to tell who’s who. But the males are very distinctive with their black face and white stripe, and large topknots.
They don’t immediately see us, and we watch them for a couple minutes from less than 10 metres away. But then they tumbled to us, gave a couple of alarm calls, and the covey took flight, all 30-odd, into the neighbour’s place.
They are beautiful little birds, the California Quail, and we continue to hear their calls, like something from Tarzan, all throughout the afternoon.
There’s a lot of that sort of thing here. B₂ is still excited about the little fish that nibbled at her feet yesterday at the beach (“my fishy friends”); we have a dessert plate full of her cicada shells on the kitchen bench (somewhat disturbing for her grandmother); and two of her insect “friends” liberated inside that we can no longer find.
But she’s not the only one to get excited. It’s a warm still night here now, and just before, in between the calls of the Morepork in the bush behind the house, we think we heard a kiwi. Unlikely, but nevertheless we are all sitting here waiting for it again…
One of the rules I’ve invented for myself is this:
That first day after a bout of the flu in which you finally feel up to going to work? Don’t. Stay at home. Your body is deluding you, and you will not be ready until tomorrow.
So that’s why I’m at home today. The only thing to miss about work is the heating. Through the wonder that is Terminal Services, I can access my work desktop and assuage any vestigial sense of protestant guilt by reading my emails and generally pretending to some kind of “work”. And there’s no possibility of an afternoon nap at work - it’s very uncomfortable under my desk.
On the other hand, the girls and R. have gone to their grandparents for the rest of the school holidays, so it’s very quiet here. No excuses for not being productive, then.
Meanwhile, the wind has switched to the south and between it and the rain is causing a sweetly tragic shower of cherry blossom on to our unkempt lawn. The tui don’t mind though - they are living it large at the moment and even in this foul weather there is almost always one or two in the cherry tree bustling about. It’s very cheering.
And I might put the fire on. That will help too.
Now this is quite hard to believe… but when R.’s parents were unloading their car for the trek down the stairs to the house yesterday, they were buzzed by a New Zealand Falcon (Karearea). It circled around, gave a couple of calls, and flew off.
These aren’t exactly common, but you can see them from time to time in the less busy parts of the countryside. They are very beautiful birds; magnificent flyers; and almost arrogantly unafraid of humans. On the farm down south (where we called them “sparrowhawks”) I once tried to see how close I could walk up to one perched on a fencepost. I got to within about 15 feet of it before it gave a couple of contemptuous flaps of its wings and settled on the next fencepost along - keeping its eyes on me all the time. I kept advancing, and it just kept going to the next fencepost… until finally it got tired of the game, and flew off.
My father once watched one take down a duck in flight - a bird much bigger in size and weight. It just dug its talons into the duck’s back and rode it into the ground. That falcon was one of a pair that used to nest on a rocky bluff above a creek, not far from a crossing. During the nesting season they would attack the musterers on horseback as they rode down the hill. Once one even attacked a dog, and would not be dislodged from the dog’s back until the dog in panic jumped into the creek. But I guess our constant incursions into the nesting territory eventually got too much and the birds moved on. They still nest on the farm somewhere and most years I can still get to see them if I’m lucky.
And so there’s at least one in the Western Hills now. The species survey at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary records these occasionally, but I hadn’t heard of any over our way.
I seriously want to see it.
In the last week or two there’s been a change in the bird chorus, particularly at dusk. I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but I often found myself thinking of this:
…long summer evenings after a thunderstorm, the scent of pine and grass heavy in the cooling air. It’s the crib at Lake Hawea: the rain has driven off the noisy hordes with their jet-bikes and egg-beaters and it’s mostly silent except for the muffled sound of the band at the pub a kilometre away. And the bellbirds. Having spent some time at the Grevillea outside the window they are standing off in the trees announcing their presence with short bursts of liquid notes, clear and loud…
So I only realised tonight that the bird sound I was hearing was probably a bellbird, and not a tui. It’s taken me that long to connect the feelings of vague nostalgia I was getting with the sound from outside. Apparently bellbirds have been missing from Wellington for decades, so that’s why I hadn’t heard them before. They’ve been breeding from some translocated pairs in the Karori Sanctuary and now we are getting the benefit of the spillover.
In Central Otago it’s the bell-birds that are relatively common and the tuis rare. Once, I was picking apples (a classic holiday job), standing on the very top of an old rickety wooden ladder. A bell-bird landed in a branch just a metre away and, fixing me with one malevolent eye, it bugled once. I jumped, only just staying upright after a bit of flailing about, the ladder wobbling under me. I would have been toast if I’d fallen off. The bell-bird just kept looking at me, and once I’d regained my balance, it flew off.
I hope it got a good laugh.
This afternoon I saw my first Grey Warbler (Riroriro). There are quite a few around where we live, and I often hear them as I walk to work. They are not always easy to see, by all accounts, as they are quite small - even smaller than the Waxeye (Tauhou). Apparently they are the favourite host of the Shining Cuckoo - my friend Phil (who is much more of a bird expert than me) was asking me if I had heard many Grey Warblers or Cuckoos, as it seems their numbers are diminishing. The arrival of the cuckoos each year from the Pacific seems to be some sort of local signifier of spring - much as my father on his hill country farm in the south of the South Island looks for the arrival of a quite different species of bird… but that’s a story for another day here.
Today was a strange sort of a day - starting cool and grey, then rain poured in from the north for most of the late morning and early afternoon. After it stopped we went to the Supermarket for our usual Sunday afternoon shop. We were coming down our steps toward home, laden down with groceries (114 steps with a full tramping pack). The sun had finally come out while we were doing the shopping, and now it was bright yellow and intense, warm too in the way that the late afternoon in springtime can be. There was birdsong everywhere, the blackbirds in particular seeming to be pleased to see the rain off. In a tree ahead of us somewhere I could hear a Grey Warbler; the sun was shining through the leaves and I thought I might actually see it.
I did. Small, fast, grey… and fairly non-descript really. It stopped and sang a few notes, then flitted away into a tree above and behind me. I called out to R. and B₂, but they missed it.
I think I must be turning into a twitcher. Why else would I get so excited about seeing such a dully plumed little bird?