Aviary (birds birds)

Birds birds birds

I went to Travis Wetlands (again) with obliging gentleman friend; remembered to take my camera this time. (incredihuge images under spoilers yo)

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Spoiler

Scaups are my favourite kind of duck. They dive and forage on the river/pond/swampbed! I was making frustrated noises for over twenty minutes trying to video them diving.

Little Shags/Little Pied Cormorants. Their plumage is quite variable, but you can always tell a shag by the way it rests with its wings outstretched as if it's airing them out.


Waxeyes aren't swamp birds, but the replanting around the wetlands features lots of cabbage trees. I saw a couple of flocks of these feeding on whatever fruit/seeds they could still scrounge in midwinter.


Probably my best photo I took that day. Pukekos/purple swamphens are a pretty common sight around Christchurch; they forage on grass so they were one of a handful of species that actively benefited from European settlement.


You look that sucker in the (sadly not-as-well-photographed) face and tell it its grandfather wasn't a dinosaur.

We went to the beach afterward! By which I mean we went to the pier because neither of us really wanted to trek a whole lot of sand everywhere for the rest of the day. For some reason I took, like, forty photos of the two types of gull that frequent the area.









Red-billed gulls are the smaller seabird. Southern black-backed gulls (aka Kelp Gulls, Domincan Gulls, or Karoro) look positively majestic by comparison, which is probably in part because they don't squabble over discarded food.





These two obliged me slowly inching towards them for ten minutes or so. I could hear a girl behind me asking her mother what kind of bird that was - I really should've clarified that it wasn't an albatross and I'm the kind to be easily fixated by otherwise-mundane things, but I had a photographic golden hour to be making the most of.


Burd feet


Uncomfortably close for everyone involved. The bright red spot on the underside is to encourage nestlings to tap it, invoking a regurgitatory reflex in the parent. Fish dinners!