Dabchick-weweia sighted beside Expressway diggings

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 64

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Our dune lake idyll has now put on her summer coat and with this

very dry summer now moving into autumn it remains one of the few areas the expressway consortium hasn't started digging out. They aren’t far away however as these images show. 

Expressway view north -March 1

Expressway view north -pan March 1

What they also show is just how radically our landscape is going to be transformed.

Expressway bridging -view South Feb 26

We are continuing to monitor the area however and this late in the season the Wharemauku creek is full of inanga, while two broods of ducklings are now thriving, with the goose fathered brood about ready to fledge.

Inanga - approx 2 inches

Fledging female putangitangi

We have also been keeping a close eye on the paradise duck-putangitangi family at the local public pond. They appeared to lose one youngster and then the Dad, about whom we feared the worst disappeared. He was very lame and looking  a lot older than his youthful spouse. This family began to wander about two weeks ago and then disappeared altogether sometime last week. The youngsters hadn't gone into moult yet, but we think we’ve located them anyway, down at the Ratanui wetland, around four kilometres away. Here a group of around twenty fledglings are congregating, some of them, still in mid moult – which is about what ours should be doing.

More exciting was the discovery of this solitary Dabchick down at Ratanui close to the expressway workings where we located a Kotoku in November. 

Dabchick near expressway diggings -February 28

These little glebes are a threatened NZ species and we are beginning to learn why. They live in pairs and they aren't very resilient. A pair raised one chick at the Waikanae River Lagoon,  early this season. But they kick them out of home early  and this may be that youngster looking a little lost and forlorn. They know this wetland because we saw a fledgling down her two years ago. However we haven't seen the pair for a while. This dabchick is on its own and trying to pal up with a couple of scaup who weren't fussed abotu it hanging around.

Like our spotting of the Kotuku defore Christmas  we are only 30 metres away from the expressway diggings, in what is still the breeding season.

Track we were listening to while posting this -Our own Howard Morrison Quartet -Live   but here are the original words to this Maori lament from the first world war...  Pö atarau  

Pö atarau 

E moea iho nei 

E haere ana 

Koe ki pämamao 

Haere rä 

Ka hoki mai anö 

Ki i te tau 

E tangi atu nei                  

On a moonlit night 

I see in a dream 

You going away

To a distant land 

Farewell, 

But return again 

To your loved one, 

Weeping here

Jill Studd's Blog

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