Muriwai Gannets

Continuing on with our Northland travels from before Covid. I thought I'd better finish soon as we're now heading back to the North Island for a few months!  And I'm afraid it's going to be a bit of a gannet photo fest.

Our last stop before heading into Auckland was at the Muriwai Beach Motor Camp. I wanted to check out the gannet colony and also try for some west coast sunset shots.

Muriwai Beach

The gannet chicks were in various stages of development; tiny bald youngsters, big fluffy white chicks & motley coloured juveniles testing the limits of their nest boundaries & flapping to strengthen their wings 

A tender moment with a parent

Time to take 40 winks

Contemplating life in the colony

There's not a spare piece of real estate left on all available rock stacks & plateaus

Juveniles watch on as an adult displays

"You keep off my patch you here?"

Can you see the lookout at the top? there are areas you can watch the gannets from

Muriwai Beach

I managed to capture the sun setting on the first night...

...and also had some great light on the way home.

But the next evening it was very unsettled and then a bank of cloud rolled in. I still found some great subjects to photograph; fisher people & other photographers.

When I got back to camp, David was having happy hour with our neighbours who were visiting from the Netherlands and travelling around the North Island in a motorhome. 

He had a surprise for me, they had offered us two of their tickets for the open day at Gibbs Sculpture Farm which wasn't too far back up the road, you'll remember we passed it on the road to Muriwai. They'd bought four tickets for two different days so they had options if the weather wasn't great. They'd decided to go the next day so we could visit the following day. 

David decided he wouldn't go so they kept that ticket to pass onto someone else. There was no way I wasn't going! I couldn't wait...

Footbridges and Fine Sands- Part 2

Continued on from Part 1

I did the next road trip by myself, David had had enough of winding roads and sandy beaches. I wanted to visit the Pataua footbridge, this one is a lot shorter across the water than the Whananaki bridge but the distance by road to the opposite side is much longer at 50kms compared with 13kms.

It was once again a 20km long winding narrow road out to the coast to visit Pataua North and I had a bit of a laugh when I pulled into the boat ramp carpark; a lovely new ramp and carpark too.

A white Ford Ranger pulled in right alongside me; I had seen it following me in the mirror for much of the way, catching up and then dropping away and disappearing out of sight. I kept thinking, when it caught me up, that I must pull over and let it pass but then it would drop away again. And there were very few places to pull over too.

It turned out to be my niece & her boyfriend, they'd decided to take the dog for a run at the beach, a beach they hadn't visited in years. I must have lit a spark when I told her mother earlier in the day where I was going. They headed off to the beach but I decided to check out the bridge first.

The holiday settlement of Pataua North is located on a golden sand beach of Ngunguru Bay while Pataua South is across the footbridge on the edge of the sheltered waters of the Pataua River & estuary. Pataua South can be reached by road via the Whangarei Heads but the footbridge gives residents and holiday makers access to the best of both worlds. 

On the south side of the estuary outlet into the bay is the cone shaped Pataua Island known locally as Pataua Mountain, only it's not really a mountain or an island just a small hill which was once a Maori pa site.

I walked across the bridge, through the small reserve and along the edge of the estuary past a few of the holiday homes...

...including this one with these stunning metal sculptures in the front garden...

...and then back to the bridge...

...where I crossed back over...

...stopping to watch a kayaker battled the out going tide and a windy chop as he paddled his way under the bridge and back to the boat ramp.

I should have headed over to the beach to see my niece but the cacophony of  screeches, squawks and other bird chatter coming from a flock of Red Billed Gulls/Tarapunga grabbed my attention. 

Three rocks, right alongside the new boat ramp were covered in nesting, resting, fighting and copulating gulls! 

I wonder if the locals knew these rocks were a rookery for gulls when they planned the ramp, which was now also a resting spot for gulls and covered in poop.

I spent ages watching the goings on, checking for eggs and chicks and locating some of the odd places that birds had decided to nest.

Some had been relegated to the stalls, teetering on the side of the rock, just above the tide and fighting to retain their nest material....not only from falling over the edge but from being stolen by other birds.

This gull had the right idea, hidden away from all the fighting and activity. I even saw one bird drop into the middle of the astelia where I'm sure there were more nests.

It took me awhile to locate some chicks, it seemed that most of the nests still held eggs. It was a hot day and this gull stood over the chicks keeping them in the shade but letting the light breeze cool them down.

The parent then climbed off and fed a thin liquid to both chicks, they looked to have only recently hatched, the egg shells were pushed over the nest edge and still largely intact (don't forget to click on the photos to enlarge them).

I finally managed to pull myself away from the life & times of Gull City and drove around to the beach to find my niece loading the dog into the ute and about to head home, oops! 

The beach was deserted except for a family surfing near the mouth of the estuary. 

I walked around the point and back into the estuary and followed a sailor as he tacked back and forward up the estuary... 

...and then walked back through the holiday houses to the ute, spotting this letterbox on the way. A new take on the old microwave letterbox!

Totaranui- Bird Antics

Catch-up

Let's see if I can keep the typing (talking) to a minimum on this one, I still have another Totaranui blog to post and I don't want to get too far behind again. 

As I said previously, Totaranui (Abel Tasman National Park) is a great place to spend some quality birding time but the trouble is, if you're a photographer and a birder, you end up with screeds and screeds of photos to process, and way too many you want to share. I managed to whittle them down to these few; some cute shots, some fun shots, a couple of unusual shots and a sad one too.

I finally found some weka chicks during the second week, in fact after only seeing a couple of chicks during the first week, they were suddenly everywhere, although the parents do keep them hidden in the bush most of the time. 

It's easy to spot a weka who has chicks; if they find food while foraging out in the open they suddenly take off, running very fast (they are comical to watch), making a beeline for the bush, clucking loudly. Not a great strategy if you don't want predators to find your chicks I would have thought.

A few weka head down to the beach very early to check out the overnight tide lines, weaving up and down to the water and round and round in circles along the beach like some drunken sailor. It was cute to find adult footprints with tiny chick prints running alongside one morning. But it was also disappointing to find dog footprints one day. Dogs are not allowed in the Park but obviously someone thought the rules didn't apply to them.

I found this older Weka Chick standing out in the open all by himself. He suddenly decided he was out of there and ran off calling loudly for Mum 'Arrrggghhhh.....she's after me, she's after me, heeelp!!'  (and my settings were not ready for his quick departure).

This has to be one of the most unusual photos I have taken of a bird (and now a favourite). An acrobatic (pole dancing someone suggested) Kereru/NZ Wood Pigeon out to get the tastiest Tree Lucerne shoots at the end of a very thin wispy branch. They are very versatile and agile birds for their size but this is something else.

I was walking back to camp when I thought I saw some paper caught in a bush. It wasn't until I got closer that I realised it was a Kereru hanging upside down. It was so absorbed in hanging on while stripping off the tastiest shoots that it didn't take any notice of me as I crept closer. When it eventually spotted me it let go and hit the ground with a thump, before flying off. 

The pigeons were often the subject of my lens, there were just so many of them about. Here they are; chasing each other, stretching for shoots and flying off in the wrong direction when I was trying for some flight shots.

Even though they are quite slow flyers they tried my patience many times as I attempted to get those flight shots.

And sometimes they just played peek-a-boo...

Here are a couple of comparison shots- one taken in the shade and the other in the sun. While there seemed to be some slight variations in colouring amongst birds, you can still see how iridescent the head and in particular the breast feathers are here. That green is quite spectacular and stands out like a sore thumb when you're scanning the trees for birds.

Spring wouldn't be spring without ducklings and especially our native Paradise Shelduck ducklings. Here's Mum (one of the few native females that are prettier than their male counterparts)

And Dad (who is still quite handsome)...

And their four gorgeous fluffy ducklings... 

It's hard to believe that this isn't a pond they're swimming in, it's a small depression that has filled with water (so much rain over winter) alongside the 'Grand Entrance' trees. They also swam in another couple of large muddy potholes on the edge of a track on the other side of the trees. 

And it's where I headed each time I wanted to check in on the family. Although they spent a lot of time at the pools they would also do a loop each day, waddling all the way up to our campsite bay, cutting through and then heading back along the estuary edge to their pools; quite a feat for 4 tiny ducklings. 

I say 4 but it wasn't long before it became 3 and then 2 ducklings. Anyone who has been following my blog knows I'm a sucker for ducklings and it usually ends in heartache so I try not to become too attached to them.  But how can you not resist these cute bundles of fluff?  

"Please will you just sit down Mum!" says this duckling who reminds me of the 'Joker'. Check out his 'grin' (click to enlarge the photo), it's a dirt line from dabbling in the pool.

I was sitting on the van steps one afternoon when the family came waddling through, now with just the two ducklings. I reached inside to get my camera and went to take a photo just as a weka came racing out from underneath the van and grabbed one of the ducklings. I managed to click off a couple of shots as I raced towards the melee waving and shouting (excuse the photos, once again I wasn't expecting so much action). Here you can see the duckling in the Weka's bill,  Mum was quickly after it, trampling the 2nd duckling as she chased. 

Dad was a bit slow off the mark, the weka still has the duckling but dropped it soon afterwards. Weka are known to predate ducklings and I've also been witness to one stalking a Pukeko chick at Lake Kaniere on the West Coast. 

The family departed at a very fast pace down the estuary track, quacking and cheeping to each other. Later in the evening, when I checked in on them at the pools, there were still two ducklings.

But the next day they were down to one. It's a tough life being a duckling, it's no wonder they usually have so many.