Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 35
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
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| Dune lake August 4 2014 |
After two days of
reasonable rain the dune lake is now around half full, though still a good month
behind previous years.
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| Dune Lake July 25 2013 |
But we are now back in business as over the last few
days the birds have begun to return in numbers. These are
limited to mallard ducks and mostly males who are engaging in a great deal
of argy bargy. Mallards tend to associate in male
groups of four to six birds before pairing off and as with humans the arrival
of a female can create havoc in a group. So there is quite a lot of squaring
off going on. They are also taking to the air in pursuit of females or as a
paired up couple, fleeing another pursuing male.
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| On the charge - Mallards at the dune lake |
In the midst of all this,
another female has emerged from the blackberry with a brood of ducklings. She
has only three and with kahu swooping low over this end of the lake once again,
it looks ominously like she might have lost some.
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| Mallard female with chicks |
However, the 2014 breeding
season is shaping up as very different from previous years when we have
had black swan (kikianau), teal (tete), scaup (papango) and shoveller ducks all
regularly sighted at the lake by this time, with some pairs going on to breed in
September/October.
There has been a lot of
survey activity from the expressway down here, though not especially at the lake
end so perhaps the low winter rainfall and early nestingi, accounts for this change in character.
We mentioned in a previous
post that based on the survey posts placed around the lake, we suspected the
expressway to have been moved westwards. This appears now, not to be the case,
although the survey lines indicate that a major excavation and re-landscaping of
this area, right up to the housing estates, is being planned.
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