Readers’ wildlife photos

Thanks to several readers for sending in “emergency photos”.  We can keep going for several days now.

Today’s bird photos come from a Kiwi, David Riddell. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

New Zealand is known as a land of birds, but that’s mainly because we have hardly any land mammals.  There are relatively few bird species here, but one group that is really well represented is the oceanic birds.  In particular, 17 albatross species have been recorded in the New Zealand region, of which 12 breed here, and seven are endemic (i.e., they breed only here, though they may range widely through the southern oceans).  Here are some of the birds I’ve encountered over the past several years; many of them are seriously threatened, largely as a result of encounters with trawlers and longliners, though efforts are being made to remedy this.

Gibson’s albatross (Diomedea antipodensis gibsoni) has slightly complicated taxonomy. It’s a subspecies of the Antipodean albatross, which was split from the snowy (wandering) albatross (D. exulans) in 1992.  They breed only on the Auckland Islands, far to the south of the New Zealand mainland (nowhere near Auckland city!) but are commonly seen around the mainland, especially in winter:

Another shot of Gibson’s albatross, flying:

Many of the smaller albatrosses belong to the genus Thalassarche, and are known in New Zealand as mollymawks, the name deriving from an old Dutch word meaning foolish gull. They are characterised by being entirely black across the upper wings and back.  This is a Campbell mollymawk (T. impavida), which breeds only on the Campbell Islands.  They are very similar to the black-browed mollymawk, but have a bright yellow (rather than dark) eye, and are darker under the wing.  Black-brows also breed on Campbell Island, and hybrids occur, but are rare:

The one in the front is a Buller’s mollymawk (T. bulleri), which breed widely in the New Zealand region, though nowhere else. At the back is a white-capped mollymawk (T. cauta steadi), most of which breed on the Auckland Islands. The nominate subspecies breeds on islands off Tasmania:

Salvin’s mollymawk (T. salvini) is a close relative of the white-capped, but is darker on the head and neck, with a dark spot on the bill tip. Breed on the Bounty and Snares Islands.

Here’s another Buller’s mollymawk, very happy to be fed some fresh blue cod in the Chatham Islands!

One of the highlights of a trip to the Chatham Islands last year was a visit to the Pyramid, a conical rock stack 1.7 ha in area, rising to 174 metres above sea level, the only breeding ground of the Chatham mollymawk (T. eremita). Most had left by the time we arrived in March, but there were still a few around:

JAC: Here’s a photo from Wikipedia; the Pyramid is the small island in the distance to the left:

Most Antipodean albatrosses (D. a. antipodensis) breed on the Antipodes Islands, but in recent years one pair has bred on Pitt Island, in the Chathams, which is where we saw this one. They’re smaller and on average darker than Gibson’s albatrosses, though not all are as dark as this one. Pitt Island is the remotest inhabited island in New Zealand (population: 38), but it does have a really nice lodge you can stay at:

While at the Chathams we were very happy to come across a flock of subantarctic shearwaters (Puffinus elegans) near their main breeding ground in the group at the Star Keys. Maybe not the greatest photo, but they’re very rarely photographed at sea, and somehow I managed to snap this while bouncing along at speed in the lodge owner’s jet boat:

Giant petrels are big, ugly predators/scavengers that hang around colonies of seabirds and marine mammals. This is the Northern Giant Petrel (Macronectes halli).  Mature southern giants tend to have more white on them but the only sure way to tell them apart is by the colour of the bill tip – brownish on northern, greenish on southern.  Having looked at hundreds of bill tips I’ve yet to find a green one!:

On a trip off the North Island west coast one winter’s day in 2018 I was hoping to see a few prion species – the prions are small, bluish petrels and I’ve often found several species storm-wrecked on beaches, but the only one I’d ever seen alive at sea was fairy prion (Pachyptila turtur). With a cold drizzle blowing horizontally it looked like once again we would see nothing but this species, though there were hundreds of them…

Then just as the boat skipper was making noises about heading home, suddenly there were two slender-billed prions (Pachyptila belcheri) right by the boat! They’re quite widespread globally (though not a New Zealand breeding species) but they’re very hard to positively identify at sea and again are rarely photographed, so it made all the hard work and discomfort of the day worthwhile:

The white-faced storm petrel (Pelagodroma marina) looks tiny on the open ocean but is common off the north-eastern North Island coast. Until 2003 it was thought to be the only storm petrel breeding in the area:

Then in January of that year a New Zealand storm petrel (Fregetta maoriana) was sighted off the Mercury Islands – the first record of the species, which had been presumed extinct, since the 19^th century. Several more were seen in November near Little Barrier Island which confirmed the identification, incredible though it seemed, and my wife, daughter and I were able to get on a boat heading out to try and find more, on the second day of 2004. We saw three.  My camera that day was rubbish, and I still don’t have any satisfactory photos but at least this shot (taken a few years later) has some drama to it.  The breeding ground turned out to be Little Barrier, which was cleared of cats (sorry Jerry!) in 1980, and Pacific rats in 2004.  The storm petrel population has since boomed, and they are now quite common off the north-eastern coast:

As well as albatrosses, New Zealand is a global centre of penguin diversity. Six species breed here (four of them endemic), and eight others are vagrants.  I don’t have any decent pictures of the native ones, but this young Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) created a national stir when it turned up on a beach near the capital, Wellington – the local media dubbed it Happy Feet!  We happened to be passing (while on the way to see another bird) so stopped to see it before it was retrieved by the Dept of Conservation, nursed back to health and released in the open ocean.  It had a radio tag attached, which stopped working after a couple of days; some think the bird was snaffled by a passing orca, but I prefer to think the tag dropped off: