This fantail (Rhipidura fuliginosa fuliginosa) hiding behind the fern was a little bit reluctant about having its photo taken. This was taken on a misty morning up the Riwaka Valley Road, on the track to the Riuwaka Resurgence. It was one of two fantails flitting near the track, always behind something, too focused on bug-catching to be bothered with posing for the human.
This tarn is just a ten minute walk from Fenella Hut in the Cobb Valley. The beech trees growing alongside the tarn are rather scrubby, attesting to how hard life can be in the subalpine zone.
The tuft of white feathers on a tui’s throat is called a poi, and this one is giving his poi a good shake belting out its song. Tui are nectar and seed eaters and so are important in the propagation of many New Zealand native plants.
From the Flora carpark at the end of Graham Valley Road, you can walk up the Flora Saddle, then down to the Flora Hut. The hut is divided into two bunk rooms with a fireplace servicing each room and the woodshed in between. It was originally built in 1928 and was refurbished in 2016.
The South Island robin (Petroica australis australis) is a worm eating machine. It’s also a worm caching machine: robins are known to cache their food (and to steal from one another’s caches). Experiments conducted by Victoria University biologists suggest that these robins can also count. A video on YouTube shows an experiment carried out where some robins were shown a single mealworm being put into a hole in a stick. The robins would retrieve the mealworm and go back to the researcher, hoping for more mealworms, doing their usual, friendly robin thing. Then, some robins were shown two mealworms being put into the stick, but the researcher concealed one beneath a ‘trapdoor’. The robin in the video saw two mealworms and expected two mealworms. When it found only one mealworm and its searches could not reveal the second, it began scolding the researcher. ‘Where is my second worm, you stealer of worms!’ This research suggests that robins can distinguish different numbers of prey items to a higher number of items than any other untrained wild animal.
Wingspan-wise, the Caspian tern (Hydroprogne caspia) is around the same size as the black-backed gull. The Caspian tern is not only New Zealand’s largest tern species, it is also the world’s largest tern species. The black cap and black legs are typical of adults, although the black cap will fade to grey outside of the breeding season. The chicks are born with a pale orange-yellow bill; the orange traffic-cone version is for grown-up terns.
It’s the start of August, which means that a month from now, spring! will be here. And somewhere around the second week of spring, eastern bar-tailed godwits (Limosa lapponica baueri) start arriving in Motueka, after travelling from their western Alaska breeding grounds. During that entire trip, they don’t stop. At all. For six to eight days. For 12,000 kilometres. This photo, taken last year, shows a male and a female on the Motueka estuary. The female is the one in the foreground, with the longer bill.
Young riflemen (Acanthisitta chloris) don’t have the creamy white chest of the adults. Their colours are quite variable, and this one has a white collar that might be the start of the white chest.
This is the outlet from the Kaiteriteri Inlet at low tide. The exposed rocks are covered in little black mussels (Xenostrobus neozelanicus), shut up tight, waiting for the next high tide so they can start sucking plankton from the water once again.
This little owl (Athene noctua) could be a fledgling. Its chest feathers are pretty fuzzy and it doesn’t have the spots on the top of its head that the one I posted a few months ago does. Little owls breed from October to January and this photo was taken late last summer, at Marchwood Park in Motueka.
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