Recent additions to my gallery include well over a dozen photos of bellbirds—korimako or makomako in Maori. The New Zealand bellbird is a small olive green bird that can easily be overlooked, but its voice is one of the most well known and liked of all our native songbirds. Valued so much that 50 were recently released at the Hamilton Gardens—part of a massive translocation effort, moving 200 birds to Islands in the Hauraki Gulf off Auckland, and Hamilton City. Some of the photos in my gallery show birds from the translocation, post release, with leg bands and radio transmitter used to monitor their progress.
New Zealand storm-petrels are fast and highly maneuverable in flight, making them a challenge to shoot—with camera or net-gun.
It has been noticed that recently I have been a bit tardy with additions of new images. One of the things that has diverted some time from image processing has been the New Zealand storm-petrel project. These little sea birds had been considered extinct for more than 150 years but were rediscovered in 2003. Now that we know where and what to look for, they are regularly seen on pelagic bird watching trips in the Hauraki Gulf (off the north east coast of the North Island), however relatively little is known about them. One major concern is that no one knows where they breed, and this raises fears that mammalian predators or other events could have catastrophic impacts on what is almost certainly a perilously small population. Accordingly, finding the breeding site has been the focus of recent NZSP research. (read more…)
