Hello again everyone! In a somewhat ironic state, our normal roles here at Intrigued have been inverted. Normally, I am the one having to be “given” care for whatever mess I’ve gotten myself into – noting ever grateful as it is the season for Thanks-“giving”. Today, however, it is my turn for “giving” back as Linda is recovering from her knee surgery. Trying to remember the last time I took care of Linda…hmm, likely when she had her heart surgery many, many moons ago. Truth be told, I am probably a better care receiver than “giver” owing to the amount of practice gleamed from unfortunate…ummm.. mishaps that have befallen me to this point – I also take direction better than her, but shhhhhhh, don’t tell her I said that! While I tend to the wounded, Brad is going to once again take the helm of the USS Intrigued and sail us Down Under for another adventure in Kiwiland. Keeping with our “Newvember” theme (technically a carryover from last month), Brad will be bringing you not one, not two, but THREE new lifers! You can really tell when performance reviews are coming due around here, although he knows my opinion of the bird he snuck in at the end. Enough Bri, let’s get sailing.
Take it away Brad…
Very often birds will give us a full photoshoot pose package. They will stop to pose on the end of a twig in perfect lighting conditions. Some will rotate to show both their left and right sides. They will dip their heads to show us the color on top, and then give us a full view of the colors on their backs. Many will even show us their belly feathers or under their tails to complete the package. Then finally give us that face-on view that says, “We are done. Go away!”
NOT!
Photoshoots rarely happen this way. And today’s subject birds are no exceptions. However, most of today’s subjects did give us at least a few photos before being distracted by food someplace else.
Jan and I were staying for a couple of days in Rotorua, New Zealand. Our busy photo assignment had a small hole of time in the schedule one morning. Since we were staying at a hotel on Sulphur Point, we took a walk along a trail through the Sulphur Flats on the shores of Lake Rotorua. It’s really the Rotorua Caldera that has filled with water over time, but is still geologically active. Meaning it can get rather stinky at times.
The trail took us as far as we could tolerate the sulphur fumes which were quite strong. Thankfully, this morning, the wind mostly shifted to be from the south which kept most of the fumes blowing away from the trail and towards the lake itself. The prior night the winds had done just the opposite and we woke to very strong sulphur smells inside the hotel.
Jan and I walked about 1 kilometer (or just under ¾ of a mile) anti-clockwise around the bottom of the lake, starting at about the 6:00 position if the lake were an analog clock face. For those who only have digital clocks, go ask your parents or grandparents to show you an analog clock face. The first bird Jan and I spotted, about 50 meters (or yards) away on the sulfur flats were these black and white beauties.
Quite the cuties! Hit the jump to read about the rest of Brad and Jan’s finds.
These are Pied Stilts (Himantopus leucocephalus) and definitely a +1 for us. They are gorgeous in their stark black and white formal wear. Their normally pink legs are crusted with sulphur and mud deposits from digging around for food. Even the 500mm lenses couldn’t bring them in very close, so I’ve had to crop these a fair amount.
Stilts can live to over 20 years in the wild. They are not normally migratory. Their territory includes New Zealand and Australia, but they have recently begun to expand their territory, spreading very slowly to the adjacent islands of Indonesia. They tend to be seasonally monogamous, nesting in small colonies of up to 50 pairs.
A few steps further along on the windward side of the trail was a rare find, at least for us. Jan and I have been trying to photograph swallows, of any kind, in motion for a while. I’ve seen some of the photos that you, the readers, have captured and they are stunning. On two separate occasions, we caught these Welcome Swallows (Hirundo neoxena), sitting perfectly still, or at least not flying at 1,000,000KPH trying to catch bugs. To find a Welcome Swallow, a +1 by the way, actually sitting still, with its beak in the mud is rare; at least for us it is. It was October in New Zealand, prime house building and breeding season for these swallows. Maybe the stinky mud works better for housing, keeping the pests away?
Welcome Swallows look very similar to Barn Swallows from North America. In flight, they look identical for someone who can’t get a camera to focus on them. But sitting still (never seen a Barn Swallow sitting still) there are differences.
Barn Swallows have a rufous-colored breast, where the Welcome’s only have only a rusty-orange bib with a pale grey-white belly. Barns have a steely blue color where the Welcomes are blue-ish/black. Depending on how the sun catches them and which camera angle you have, their blue backs and wings appear very close, especially if they are only a blur anyway. They are nearly identical in size. Barn Swallows have long deep forked tails with “streamers” whereas Welcome Swallows have much shorter tail feathers without streamers. Both will frustrate the hell out of me trying to photograph them in flight.
A few days before, I did find some Welcome Swallows in Cairns, Australia, on the wing of course. I watched them for quite some time, wondering if I wanted to subject myself to the torture of taking thousands of photos only to find I had blurred every single one of them. Eventually a pattern emerged from my observations. The swallows were flying from under the boardwalk. They would emerge and fly along a stream in the tidal flat looking for bugs. Both would fly out about 50 yards, zigging and zagging along the stream. As the stream met the tide, they would circle to the right quite a bit then fly back under the boardwalk. I just sat there keeping the camera focused on one spot along the stream while keeping my left eye open watching for them to emerge.
Voila! Full disclosure; this is really one out of about 400 photos I tried. Most are blurred and on the digital darkroom floor. I kept these because I’ve never been able to catch one in flight mostly in focus, let alone two of them. I may use this photo in a later story, so please act surprised if you see it again.
Back to New Zealand and the walk along the path along the sulphur flats. As the trail became more closed in by the foliage, the temperature started to rise. The small breeze that had been keeping the fumes at bay, had also been providing a nice cooling effect. The tall shrubbery stopped all of that. Now it was getting warm and stinky again.
Ahead of us a bit on the trail, we kept seeing a grey flash moving between the greenery. First, it would go from right to left. Then it would hop out from the left and dart back into the shrubbery on the left. Actually, shrubbery may not be the right word; these greens were well over my head.
This is a Gray Gerygone (Gerygone igata), also known as the Grey Warbler. It is also known as “riroriro” by the Māori (indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand). The Gerygone is another +1 we found on this trail. Notice that sometimes I use the ‘a’ and sometimes the ‘e’ in the word Gray/Grey. That’s precisely how I found it online, and tried to use the most common spelling of each as I found them. This tiny little bird has brilliant eyes and is mostly, as you would guess, gray (or grey). They do have an off-white belly that sometimes has yellow-ish highlights.
They live to rid the world of insects; a noble pursuit to be sure. They have a unique skill of hovering mid-air while capturing insects and spiders from outside foliage. Their year-round range is New Zealand and the islands just a few miles off-shore. Females build pear-shaped nests of grass, incubates 3 to 6 eggs and feeds the chicks, all on her own. A pair will sometimes raise two clutches of eggs per breeding season which runs from August to January.
As with most LBJ’s we find, this one gave us about ten photos and was then back deep inside the shrubbery, leaving us with only the faint sulphur smell on the trail.
With the temperature and sulphur smell increasing, Jan and I headed back to the hotel to clean up a bit and find a snack. That afternoon we were going on a tour of the Redwood forest of New Zealand. Yes, you read that correctly. In the late 1800’s, building growth was exploding in New Zealand. In 1901, some enterprising Kiwis brought some California Coastal Redwood seedlings to New Zealand to help grow the future building supply of the country.
The Whakarewarewa (no, I can’t pronounce it either) Forest on the outskirts of Rotorua is a magical place. Once you leave the parking lot, you are instantly transported to a California redwood forest. These trees here are only 120 years old and are still considered youngsters in the grand scheme of things. Hence the reason most of them are still standing: redwoods grow very very very slowly. Too slow to be of any use for building materials in anyone’s lifetime. Though it didn’t take very long for someone to realize they had a goldmine for tourists and naturalists. A park was created that only charges a nominal admission fee to help keep the forest pristine.
After the Redwoods, we returned to the hotel. As I got off the bus, my ears picked up on something that I didn’t think we’d find in New Zealand. And wouldn’t you know it; Jan and I find the bane of the birding world: a house sparrow. Yes, we found a House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) in New Zealand. Right in the parking lot or our hotel.
I brought out my phone to check and thought Merlin was pulling my leg. I had to grab a photo to prove we actually saw what is turning out to be the most common bird in the world. No, this house sparrow is NOT a +1 for us. Literally, we are half-way around the globe and bump into House Sparrows.
Thank you for reading. If you want to see more of the birds featured in this story, please visit here.
Credits
Thanks again to Jan for proofreading and editing. Thanks to Jan for many of the photos in this story.
