Ducklings!

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 24

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

 We thought we were off the mark in trying to anticipate a pukeko nest this time of year, but it turns out we weren’t so far adrift of the mark.

Parera-cross female duck with 10 chicks -June 13 2014 

Taking a detour down to the dune lake late this morning we found these chicks with their parera-cross mum, having just come out onto the banks of the newly forming lake to sun themselves. (Mum is primarily mallard, but the colour on her wing gives away the parera running through her veins)

There are ten live chicks here basking yet this is very perplexing. It takes around 20-22 days for her chicks to hatch, which means she began sitting on the nest in the third week of May – pretty normal if you live in upstate New York or Norwich England but not in Raumati Beach NZ at this time of the year. We had a run of pretty chilly frosts around this time so it must have been touch and go keeping her eggs warm through these long nights. And she will be hungry after a long fast and there isn’t a lot of food on this lake yet  (otherwise the others would be down here feeding). And then we saw the resident black cat snooping around the back of the blackberry so the prospects for the longevity of her brood do not look good…though the top predator – the pukeko- have moved house further up the creek which should give them a little time at least.

Yet what is a big plus, is that it finally identifies this area of  blackberry as a key nesting area for these animals. (When they are out on the water it is very difficult to pinpoint where they’ve come out from.)

What has added  to our perplexity however, is this further brood of black swan cygnets, spotted with parents at one of the domestic ponds in the town.

Black swan pair with cygnets -June 13 2014

 These will be a month old now yet are still a very late autumn brood. They should fare better because they are being hand fed by the local residents and anyone else who happens to be going passed. They are proving irresistible to motorists, with cars stopping to ogle and take photographs.

What no-one is stopping to watch however is the sight across the road at the airport where the airport company is in the process of ripping out the last significant local stand of raupo. 

Removal of raupo stand Kapiti airport

These would have previously been home to fernbird, spotless crake and bittern. This is very symptomatic of what's going on in the country at the moment, with the entire airport perimeter now headed for ‘warehouse’ development and environmental legislation powerless to stop it.

Track we were listening to while posting this -Helen Reddy -Summer of '71

We're out of our mescaline minds

  talkin bout we met travellin behind

And diggin we're three of a kind

havin such a good time

Jill Studd's blog

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