Backyard birds

It's a bit warm here just now so I've not been out much recently. That doesn't really matter though as there's enough wildlife in the back yard to keep me happy.

Channel-billed Cuckoo with it's Pied Currawong foster parent

We have two young Channel-billed Cuckoos in the trees out the back at the moment. The Channel-bills are the largest parasitic cuckoos and unlike other cuckoo species they can lay more than one egg in the host's nest. This means that, in our case, the pair of unfortunate foster parents are running around after not one but two huge noisy youngsters.

Greedy fat cuckoo

The big spiders are still out in force but I've realised that only the Huntsman spiders are scary and, in fact, the others are all very nice. A Net-casting Spider has been living in the side passage for a while now. By day it pretends to be a stick but in the evening it spins it's web net and waits for prey to pass beneath. It then throws the web down onto the bug and catches it. Magic!

Net-casting Spider

New Zealand (Part II)

Dunedin - New Year's Morning

Dunedin claims to have the steepest street in the world and I can confirm that Baldwin Street is indeed very steep with an incline of 1 in 2.89 but is it really the steepest? I'm not sure but I hear that it was certainly steep enough to kill a couple of drunk students who apparently attempted the descent in a supermarket trolley! The Otago uni students are particularly infamous for their foolish antics!

Baldwin Street

Taiaroa Head

New Zealand Fur Seal

We started our new year with a drive out along the Otago Peninsula which is a very nice place to be. We scored the Royal Albatross at Taiaroa Head without having to shell out the 50-odd bucks to get inside the fence as three of them popped up over the headland and soared overhead. There were also plenty of friendly New Zealand Fur Seals on the rocks and in the water and little Blue Penguins hiding in their burrows. We also saw a pod of several hundred dolphins pass by out to sea. Quite remarkable.

Blue Penguins in their burrow

A Yellow-eyed Penguin comes ashore

After spending too much of the day enjoying the Otago Peninsula we realised it was time to hit the road once more and get to our motel in Omarama before everyone had gone home for the night. We still managed to drop in on a Yellow-eyed Penguin colony at Oamaru though and luckily for us, the first two birds returned from the sea in the 10 minutes that we were there!

Dipping on the Black Stilts at Twizel

From Omarama we were planning to go up to Mount Cook after bagging the rare Black Stilts at Twizel. After a fruitless search through some likely habitat and around the electrified fence of their little reserve we had to admit defeat. Being New Year the reserve was closed and so we dipped on the stilt but that was the only birding failure of our holiday and the whole trip served up 16 new birds for my New Zealand list.

Ted enjoys the stunning views of Mount Cook

As we headed up the valley to Mount Cook the rain began and just got worse. By the time we got to Mount Cook Village for lunch, visibility was only a few metres and if I hadn't been there with Simon a few years back, I wouldn't have believed that New Zealand's biggest mountain was apparently right in front of us in the gloom. That was the only bad weather for our entire trip though and by the time we were back on the road towards Christchurch things were bright again. We stayed in Christchurch for our final night. Sadly much of the city centre remains shut down after the massive quake they had there a few months back and a large aftershock on Boxing Day which did even more damage. They still have several small shocks a day but although there were 3 or 4 while we were there, they were too small to feel.

Earthquake damage in Christchurch

Back at work now but England's stunning Ashes triumph has taken the edge off the despair and things are generally very good.

New Zealand (Part I)

After Christmas, Emily and I popped over to New Zealand briefly for a helter-skelter 6 day road-trip of the South Island. So atlases at the ready and lets go...

Crossing the Canterbury Plains towards the hills

Arthur's Pass NP

Kea

The first day saw us head west out of Christchurch and up and over Arthur's Pass to the West Coast where we turned south spending the night at Franz Josef after walking to the base of the glacier there. Being summer there wasn't a great deal of snow about but recent heavy rains meant the rivers were full and spectacular. Arthur's Pass had actually been closed the day before due to flooding but no such problems for us with the sun well and truly out. Much of the West Coast is covered by thick native rain-forest which is wonderful to walk about in and is home to some of those elusive Kiwis.

Franz Josef Glacier

Temperate rain-forest by the Fox Glacier

On day 2 we continued south and up the Haast Pass into Otago where we stayed the night in Queenstown after crossing the Crown Ranges. Queenstown is the adventure sports centre of the world and so is full of bums and other nutters who enjoy putting their lives in danger for a thrill. It is also home to the Black-billed Gull which is endemic to New Zealand and, although fairly common there, it's apparently about the rarest gull in the world going by global numbers.

Queenstown

Black-billed Gull

New Zealand Scaup

After failing utterly to make my fortune in the Arrow River and ensuring a necessary return to work after our break, we travelled east to Dunedin where we saw in the New Year at GMT + 13 hours which means we were among the very first into 2011.

Panning for gold in Arrowtown

Happy days!

It's a very good time to be in Australia!