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Australasian brown bittern
this is not the one I saw in Christchurch (it is actually a stuffed one at the Auckland Museum) but it shows how awesome they are!! It’s a bit of a pain getting anywhere from Hokitika. For Samoa I have to take a flight to Christchurch, then another flight to Auckland, and then another flight from there to Samoa. Same in reverse for the return. Seeing I had to go through Christchurch and Auckland anyway I figured I may as well spend a couple of days in each to get in some extra birding. There aren’t really any birds in Hokitika. Up until now, in May, I had seen only 35 species for the whole year! So any chance I can get!!
Funnily enough, bird number 36 was at the Hokitika airport. It is just a very tiny airport of course because there’s only one plane and it only goes one place (Christchurch), and the plane itself is only about the size of a Ford Escort. While I was sitting in the departure lounge I spotted a New Zealand pipit running about under the plane picking up insects from the tarmac.
Christchurch was all sunny, despite the weather forecast for rain. I headed across town to my old stomping ground of Bexley Wetlands. Christchurch is a depressing place indeed now. In
the city centre all the falling-down buildings are all still falling-down buildings!! Two years later the place still looks like a war zone. My side of town is even worse, just abandoned street after abandoned street, the roads still torn up, the verges and properties tangles of overgrown grass and trees, empty houses demolished by looters. It’s like you’ve stumbled into the set of “I Am Legend”.
The abandonment of the eastern part of the side is good for the birds though. The first thing I saw as I walked up to the Bexley Wetlands was a white heron, a rather rare bird for Christchurch. A group of royal spoonbills huddled on an island in the middle of the wetlands surrounded by flocks of waterfowl, while Caspian terns hawked overhead on the lookout for fish. I even managed to spot an Australasian brown bittern in the rushes, only the second one I’ve ever seen. If there’s one bird that has benefited from the earthquakes, it is the bitterns!
I briefly checked out the nearby sewage ponds but there wasn’t much there and the sun was behind most of the birds which meant picking out
anything unusual would have been impossible, so I headed instead to Travis Wetland hoping to see the annual winter-visiting glossy ibis. The last couple of years he’s been a little hard to find (he’s been spending the winter here for 16 years!), and today was one of those hard-to-find days so he remains absent from my year list for now. I ended the day back in the central city at Hagley Park and the Botanic Gardens, where I could not find a little owl but I did find greenfinch and hedge sparrow. Would you believe there are apparently no hedge sparrows in Hokitika!? I’ve been there for a year and a half and I’ve never yet seen a hedge sparrow there!!
There was a change in the weather during the night to a howling gale which rather put a wrench in my plans for the day. It was the sort of weather where the trees themselves were being violently whipped around like....I want to say slaves? Something whippy anyway. If dolphins lived in the sky they would have had fun twirling in the horizontal rain but, not being a flying dolphin, I went to the library instead
and read Dr Who magazines. Supposedly the rain was going to clear away in the afternoon so at 11am I jumped on a bus out to Kaiapoi. Last year a white-eyed duck turned up at the Kaiapoi Lakes from Australia (and I saw him then) and he must have liked it there because he stayed put, so I figured I’d go see him again. By the time the bus got to Kaiapoi the rain had indeed stopped which was good because it’s a couple of kilometres walk from the nearest bus stop to the lakes and I would have been severely storm-lashed otherwise. Once I got to the lakes the rain started up again but I just used bushes as breaks. The white-eyed duck, however, was a no-show. He likes to play hide and seek amongst the willows so you can’t count on seeing him on any given day. Especially a day as bad as this one. I hung around for a few hours checking all the lakes repeatedly (also looking for marsh crakes) but no luck so I packed it in and went back to the hostel to dry off.
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