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Published: September 24th 2012
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As previously mentioned, the main purpose for this Auckland trip was to see some of the country's birds I hadn’t seen yet. The New Zealand dotterel from the other day was one of those endemics; kookaburra was another (non-native) bird; the pelicans just happened to be in the country at the time of the trip so got in by default. The best birds I was after though were found on Tiritiri Matangi island out in the Gulf. The island was formerly pasture for cows, all grass apart for a few scattered trees and thickets. In the 1970s a move was made to revegetate the island in native bush and reintroduce native birds, and now it is almost entirely forest and is alive with rare and endangered birdlife. The two endemics I most wanted to find there were the kokako and the little spotted kiwi. I had seen the rear end of a little spotted kiwi at Karori in Wellington but it wasn’t enough to count as a sighting; and the closest I’d ever got to a kokako sighting was in aviaries at Mt. Bruce. Tiritiri is an open sanctuary, so anybody can visit via a ferry service, and there is a
bunk-house for overnight stays. The ferry doesn’t run on Monday or Tuesday, so if you’re savvy enough you can go across on Sunday and then stay for three nights with nobody at all on the island for the middle two days except the few other people in the bunk-house (which only sleeps 15 people).
I really can’t give enough glowing references about Tiritiri, it is absolutely fantastic. We could easily have stayed there a week longer than we did. Within the first ten minutes, while walking up the track to the bunk-house, we saw a pair of kokako feeding in a nearby tree; and just a few minutes after that a pair of saddlebacks (the only other surviving type of wattlebird). On the first day we saw almost all the birds we were looking for, including takahe, red-crowned kakariki, fernbird, whitehead, brown quail and stitchbird in that order (all of these were lifers for Andy, most were just year birds for myself). Fernbirds are pretty sneaky little characters so we were surprised to find them so quickly but apparently there are “gazillions” of them on the island. We saw some every day but never even got close to getting
a photo of one. Brown quail was another cool bird. I’ve seen them in Australia and the Lesser Sundas, but they were a first for my NZ list. They were introduced to this country from Australia in the 19
th century, but are now declining over most of their New Zealand range; Tiritiri may well end up being the only remaining site for them here. (New Zealand used to have its own native quail by the way, so brown quail may well just occupy the same niche and be as good as harmless). The only native land-birds we missed out on over the course of our stay were rifleman, which we’ve both seen before anyway, and spotless crake, which neither of us have seen. Usually the crakes are a sure thing on “the brown teal pond” just up from the wharf, but the water level in every pond on the island was too high to allow for any mud-banks around the edges so even though we spent quite a bit of time waiting by them we saw no crakes.
The other people staying on the island were a regular couple and eight researchers, four of whom were studying birds and
four of whom were studying reptiles. Naturally we hung out with the reptile researchers. They were testing for salmonella in the island’s lizards and tuatara, which of course involved trapping them and taking swabs. Helping with this meant we got to add common gecko and copper skink to our island list. We found tuatara by ourselves, and spotted a moko skink as well. We missed out on Duvaucel’s gecko and shore skink though.
It wasn’t all day-time birding and reptiling though. Little spotted kiwi required walking round at night as well. The first night went spectacularly, first with brown teal scuttling along the track ahead of us. During the day if you see brown teal they are usually asleep, but at night they zoom all over the place like little ducky roadrunners. A morepork (another lifer for Andy) allowed close views as it sat on a branch above the track, and little blue penguins were also seen. A stop at one of the stitchbird nectar-feeders found ground weta, and we also found a couple of Auckland tree weta later on. Giant weta have been released on the island but just 25 of them so far so we had no
luck with them sadly. Finally we found a young tuatara sitting on the grass in the middle of the track. The only thing missing was a kiwi. Or perhaps I should say, the only thing missing for ME was a kiwi – Andy saw one but it had vanished before I could see it! Because Andy had seen one he went back to the bunk-house to go to sleep; I kept roaming the island until midnight and then gave up. The next night I gave up by ten-thirty because I’d only had three hours sleep the night before; still no kiwi, although we did get an even better view of morepork as well as more teal and penguins. By the third night I was getting desperate. Everybody else on the island had seen a kiwi (in one case within probably five minutes of looking!) and most of them were just really blasé about it (“oh yeah, we saw a kiwi already”, that sort of thing). I was prepared to stay out till dawn if that’s what it took. At about ten Andy was done for the night. We walked back along the track we had just come along....and there was
a kiwi right smack in the middle of it!! It stood there for a bit, then slinked off to the side and sat next to a big log, giving excellent views. It was so small in comparison to the brown kiwi we are used to, and looked almost round rather than shaggy. We watched it for about half an hour – or rather, we tried to watch it as it hid in the undergrowth before disappearing completely, but still a very satisfying conclusion to the night, especially given the fact that I had been going to go off and try another path while Andy went back to the bunk-house and if I’d done that then he would have ended up seeing two little spotted kiwi and I would still be on zero!
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