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I’m not having much luck with the weather on the New Zealand parts of this trip! Almost every day seems to be raining, with today not an exception. I caught the bus out to the Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant where lots of shorebirds gather. Birders like to gather at sewage plants too. Funny that. I didn’t know the tide times so I just went out first thing in the morning and hoped for the best. It was low tide which isn’t ideal but there were still lots of wrybills feeding on the exposed mudflats along with all the regular sorts (pied stilts etc), as well as more sacred kingfishers than I’ve ever seen in one place before (they get rarer the further south in the country you go, so down my way they are more random). I walked along to the shell-banks and found a pair of NZ dotterels. The shell-banks and islands are just by the path and are where the waders roost at high tide. A couple of weeks before there were two little egrets here, vagrants from Australia, but I didn’t know if they were still around or not. In any case, because it was low tide all
NZ dotterel (Charadrius obscurus)
this is a photo I took at the Auckland Zoo the birds were out feeding and not here roosting so I’d have some waiting to do. I walked back the way I’d come and made my way to the causeway that leads to Puketutu Island. This is the spot for NZ dabchicks and black-fronted dotterels. The canal along the causeway was abuzz with literally
hundredsof welcome swallows hawking for insects above the water’s surface. I have never in my life seen so many swallows together; they looked like swarms of newly-hatched mayflies. There was also a very large flock of starlings swooping back and forth along the far bank in the amazing unified fashion that starling flocks have. I walked all the way to the end of the causeway where it joins the island, and there on the saltwater pond were dozens of NZ dabchicks. I thought I wasn’t going to find any black-fronted dotterels today but walking back along the causeway, just before the rain really started hammering down, a dotterel flew up from the canal edge and settled on a sand wedge by the shore. They are one of my favourite waders!! So little you could fit a dozen on the head of a pin and so cute
you can’t help but go “tee hee hee” in a high-pitched girly voice when you see one.
I waited out the heaviest of the rain under a handy tree and then headed back towards the shell-banks. The tide had started coming in and what had been a little rivulet through the mud-flats was now a much broader channel. There were royal spoonbills strutting through the water sweeping their spatulate bills side to side, bar-tailed godwits scuttering about the edges, and then something white flew up that was too small for a spoonbill. A little egret! The first one I’d seen in New Zealand. I was busy being all happy about that when I got distracted by two teeny-weeny terns hovering overhead of the egret. Little terns! Another vagrant and also the first I’d seen in New Zealand! (Actually the first I’d seen anywhere, which was even better!). Two new NZ birds within one binocular view equals a very good day!
The next day was a Saturday and I had the whole day free before my flight to Christchurch at 6.30pm. It was pencilled in as a zoo day but when I got up at
6am the rain was still thundering down. That would make it a museum day then! However by 9am the rain had disappeared and the sun had sort of come out so it was a zoo day after all. Auckland Zoo is a brilliant zoo, my favourite in the country. I’d just been there last September so I skipped some of the bits that didn’t interest me as much (chimps, tigers, kangaroos....). My first stop was the New Zealand section, Te Wao Nui. In the “Night” area I was hoping to see the short-tailed bats which I had missed last year. Sure enough I did, not only in flight but also grounded at the feeding station right at the window so I got to watch them sitting there chomping away on mealworms. I also saw an Archey’s frog but the giant weta was “currently off display” (I’ve seen them before, but not at the zoo). Another new thing at the zoo is that the crested porcupines now have their very own nocturnal house (the old kiwi house just by the zoo entrance), where instead of being sleeping bundles of spikes like at most zoos they are wide awake and plodding around
like arthritic explosions. Very cool indeed.
After the zoo I caught the bus back to the city centre and walked over to the War Memorial Museum. Last time I was there the “Weird and Wonderful” section was closed for renovations. This is a really neat place. It’s supposed to be for kids (erm, I was the only adult there without a child attached....) but there’s so much cool stuff in there it can’t be missed. There’s a fair number of live exhibits including Avondale spiders, cockroaches, moray eels, lizards, etc.
Zoo and museum taken care of, day completed, I flew down to Christchurch for the next part of the voyage home.
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