Rare film of New Zealand dabchicks-weweia courting

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 137

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Here we continue our romance with our delightful little grebe the dabchick. Early in February (late summer), we posted a clip of a dabchick pair busy feeding a youngster.

Dabchicks with youngster -13 February 2017

It is now late autumn, and here is the evidence with this surly weather system storming across Kapiti Island around 9am this morning.

South end of Kapiti Island bearing the brunt

For three months  the wetland birds have been hanging around in adolescent flocks but they are now beginning to pair off. Dabchicks are notoriously secretive. They can’t walk on land  and usually fly only when agitated. 

White tailed dabchick at Ratanui wetland

They do so at night, close to the water and over short distances but are very poor fliers so we don’t really know how they move around, only that they do. They are also underwater a great deal and we lose sight of them then as well.

So we were delighted to shoot this footage of the courtship of these delightful little grebes. It was early morning and at a distance, so the light is very poor, but it gives a clear idea of the intimate dance undertaken in the process of pairing up.

We’ve set this to one of John Mayall’s jaunty tune’s, Let’s Work Together; which shows clearly how this pas de dieux is an intimately, improvised and playful dance. This is not the behaviour of the conditioned automata so dearly beloved by the scientific imagination. It is as if the two birds are listening to the same soundtrack, so attuned are they to each other.

The dance is led off by the female (she is on the left, slightly smaller and more colourful), who takes all the risk in initiating the cavort, but she soon has the male hooked and takes off to continue underwater, where we can’t follow.

The closer we observe our fellow creatures the more clearly we  see the similarities, not the difference.

Track we were listening to while posting this was the Marseillaise from 1792! 

Enfants, que l'Honneur, la Patrie

Fassent l'objet de tous nos vœux!

Ayons toujours l'âme nourrie

Des feux qu'ils inspirent tous deux. (bis)

Soyons unis! Tout est possible;

Nos vils ennemis tomberont,

Alors les Français cesseront

De chanter ce refrain terrible:

So Viva La France, for once again setting the standard!!!

France - the balloons go up!!

Jill Studd’s Blog

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