Midnight Collective: January 2018

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 151

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Well, before we get to the nesting grebes lets consider the nesting New Zealanders of the moment.

The happy couple

For those who haven’t yet caught up with it, our 37 year old PM Jacinda Ardern has gone and got herself pregnant. Three months into her reign and already three months gone. Is it a boy? Is it a Girl? well no-one yet knows though comment of the moment goes to Partner Clarke who said -First we buy the house, then we have the baby, then we get… at which point he was deftly stopped by his canny wife to be, before their wedding plans were let slip.

Best moment so far? Jacinda being congratulated at Ratana Pa -
where the name Waru was proposed for her youngster.

The whole country (well most of it), was and is, agog at the news and what is most charming about all this was all those youngish Dads who were proffering their opinions in print about what the three of them are in for now.

But now here’s our quick note about a crested grebe pair spotted in Kaiapoi near Christchurch during a recent stay. It’s been a queer summer again when, after weeks of no rain, we now have the turbulent blustery opposite. Christchurch set new records for an extended rainless period, then in January the rain began and when everything should be parched, it has turned the Canterbury Plains green.

Kaiapoi Wetland

We visited this wetland close to where we were staying, soon after dawn in steady soaking drizzle so couldn’t get publishable images, but for an hour watched a captivating courtship display by an Australasian Crested Grebe pair.

These birds are extinct in the North Island and rare now in the South Island and listed as vulnerable.

We had never sighted them before so it took a while to twig to what was going on, especially as they were over on the far side of the lake. At that distance, through that gloom, they look a little like oddball geese, yet behave like dabchicks although three times the size. This is the giveaway. They have the same endearing facility to fluff themselves up off the water, then if you watch closely you’ll catch the sight of their legs flailing up out of the water behind. They can’t walk on land and while their webbed feet look something like scaup (who do come out on the bank), they are very light loose, black skin covered appendages that come into their own in jetting them around underwater.

And this was the other giveaway as they disappeared beneath the surface. Yet this pair, rather late in the season as it now is, appeared to be enamoured of each other. The male was especially attentive in following the female about. She is a little smaller, and maintained what came across as an annoyed here-we-go-again stoicism. Though she didn’t make a run for it or fight him off until suddenly they engaged in a chipping beak to beak display which looked for all the world like a serious spat, but was the opposite, putting the seal on things, as he went off feeding, yet coming back to her every time he surfaced.

That appeared to be the limit to their conjugal behaviour, because there didn’t seem to be a nest but a couple of days ago we got the news that they had indeed set up a nest and were incubating three eggs.