A DAY ON AN ISLAND

MOTUROA ISLAND,

BAY OF ISLANDS

15 JANUARY 2001

C.J. and Carol Ralph

Perhaps we started our 24 hours at about 10 p.m. the night before, when Carol, after a day of relative (at least for her) inactivity, went for a run, as the night sky is quite bright and the track down the island smooth. She heard the Morepork, the little owl of New Zealand, as well as a female Brown Kiwi, just about 100 yards from the house. Or, it could have well started at about 3 a.m., when CJ got up to listen, and heard a couple of Moreporks and a kiwi, down in the 'bush' (forest) below the house. In any event, when we really got out of bed at the earliest dawn light, we had several species, to add to these two. It seemed the Tui, the native honeyeater, had been singing for an hour before dawn with its enthusiastic, horse, yet still melodic song. This bird is one of the great success stories, as 15 years ago we'd be hard pressed to find one in a day, we wound up today's effort having seen roughly 83!

While Carol got things organized, CJ zapped down to BBQ Beach below the house to see the sunrise, now at 6:25 a.m. As is his usual habit when on a beach, he 'fossicked' (looked for flotsam and jetsam) along the beach while also, of course, looking for birds. He snagged a good catch, a few clothes pegs (pins) for the collection of the myriad of types that wash ashore on the island, a couple of fence batons, a gunny sack, and a perfectly good pair of socks, all rolled up and a bit salty, dropped, no doubt from a passing yacht. Our local robin greeted along the trail. The 'robin' (the North Island Robin, to be exact) is a small flycatcher that used to be native to the area, but went extinct about 150 years ago. We've reintroduced it onto the island a few years ago, and it is doing very well.

We had a quick bite of breakfast, and then took off out across the central ridge of the island. The island is small, only 365 acres, but is sheltered within a bay, the Bay of Islands, containing several other islands,. The island's Maori name is "Moturoa," or Long Island. About two-thirds is a sheep farm, and the remainder has been, over the years, fenced off for native forest (bush) regeneration. We've been coming down here, usually in mid-winter (i.e., mid-summer) for 20 years... but more about that later. We went down to the wildlife area known as Ponga Valley, named by us for the tree ferns there. The restored forest, growing up around the old 'scrub' left behind, is very beautiful, and we add several more bird species, such as the Grey Warbler, the Silvereye, and the Chaffinch. The Chaffinch is one of the several introduced, foreign finches. We went down to one of the many bays around the island, called Pahutakawa Bay, named for the lovely, big Metrosideros tree that blooms a striking red against its rich, dark green leaves, with nectar-rich flowers around Christmas. Up on the hillside, we spotted a pair of magpies that was playing at chasing a Harrier. Moving up into the center of the island into the pond areas that have been put in over the last few years, we spotted a Brown Teal, another species reintroduced onto the island. It's a poor-flying and rare bird in New Zealand. This female had five young, showing that they're doing their part to continue. We have about 3-4 pair nesting each year... each pair staking out one of the scenic little ponds, it seems. At least it's a start!

In the paddock that we call Steep, we checked the slip (resulting from grazing a too-steep part), looking for the New Zealand Pipit. We found it there, having only recently colonized the island. It has bred near the bare earth, exposed during the ponds construction. Only a pair or two are here, the ground-foraging niche otherwise well fortified with the ubiquitous Skylark, flooding the air over the island with its lilting song from before dawn every day until the last light fades from the hills across the narrow Kent Passage, only 500 yards to the 'mainland' of New Zealand. Surprisingly, we see that the regrowing slip has a good assortment of other species, including flocks of Silvereyes and fantails on the bare ground, as well as goldfinch flocks. A very quiet morning, so that a guy on a boat 500 yards offshore could be heard conversing with his 'mate' (= friend).

In Ponga Hollow, another bush area, we found lots of perhaps our favorite bird of New Zealand, the 'friendly' Pied Fantails. They flit around you, just inches away, as you walk through the bush. Overhead, rockets the black, iridescent endemic honeyeater, the Tui. Despite its formidable claws (making me wear gloves when banding) it is really pretty much a chuckle-head, as it defends a Pohutukawa tree (related to Eucalyptus), from all comers. This defense is not just against other Tui, and the little Silvereye (who does like a snack of nectar), but even the House Sparrow (yes even there), who has no interest whatsoever in nectar! Up on the ridge we hear a single Ring-necked Pheasant, which turns out to be, surprisingly (as we usually hear several), the only one of the day.

We came out of the bottom of the bush, and walked down to Pohutukawa Beach. By now, it had turned sunny and warm.....no new birds, but lots of sea pegs and mangroves seeds washed down from the estuaries surrounding the bay. The sheep find them delicious, but none do more than sprout on the sandy shores of our island. Leaving the beach, we climbed up Mistake Paddock to the top of the island.

Here, we met Paul and Enid Asquith. They brought news that they had flushed a pair of Grey Duck off one of the ponds. This is a relative transient to the island that breeds in some years. The Asquiths are shareholders on the island; he is the chair of the wildlife committee, while Enid is an avid botanist. Together, with various visiting botanists and Carol, they have identified hundreds of species of plants on the island, including many that are quite rare elsewhere. For a change, the Asquiths visited us in California last year, and we toured eastern Oregon and northern California and had a great time discovering new plants and birds together.

Together we went down the other major wildlife area on the island, the one that we call Trout Valley. Carol spotted the bulky disorganized nest of a Tui, quite in keeping with its somewhat disorganized appearance.... and certainly its behavior. The valley is named for the native 'trout', a species of freshwater fish that breeds, or spends part of its youth in the sea, returning for most of its life in the fresh water. At the bottom of the valley, as we passed by a cliff, a quite-startling, sudden, harsh, buzzing call came out of a bank near us. It was the nest of the New Zealand Kingfisher, filled with young, and the odor that only a kingfisher nest the world over can have.

From here, we decided to move along the coast of the island to the east. At Orchid Bay (all the bays are named to help keep track of sightings of rare plants and penguins for Carol's surveys) we noted some shags (cormorants) offshore, making their way around the island. The coast is indented by many nice little beaches, but also by shear, rocky cliffs in places, making it a bit of a rock scramble. We came up through Broad Valley, followed by a robin, 3 feet away, ever hopeful that our boots would stir up some insects. We obliged as best we could, replacing in part, the Moa that used to roam these islands, stirring up insects with their big feet.

As the day was getting on, we hoofed it back to the house, put some lunch together, and went down to the tin dingy, and rowed out to our boat. As we rowed out, a New Zealand Dotterel on the beach called out, and flew up the beach. They had been absent for a few days. This is a very rare species in NZ, only a few thousand nesting along the northern beaches, an unfortunate choice for summer breeding, as that's when the folks in boats and swimming togs (suits) also like to visit, and perhaps breed, on the sandy beaches. Despite that coincidence, several nest annually on the island each year.

Out on the ocean, the day still quite calm, as is often the case in this sheltered bay. The four of us motored along the south coast of the island, picking up a flock of Paradise Ducks. They are a beautiful small goose, unique to NZ, with flashy plumage in the female. We encountered a bit of a sea breeze as we came around the small islets known as the Black Rocks at the end of the island. These several outposts of the island, breaking the force of any swells from the northeast, the open infinity of the South Pacific, are the home of many seabirds. The rocks' isolation and near-vertical sides make them ideal for nesting seabirds, and we find two kinds of gulls and two terns nesting here. Two of the species are common, in the many hundreds. As we circled around the vertical, implacable basaltic columns, out into an unusually placid sea, we saw out about a mile, the white plumes of what seemed to be surfacing dolphins. Moving closer, they revealed themselves as the explosions of a flock of some 50 large, gorgeous yellow and white Australasian Gannets, plunging into the water in search of their prey of small fish. A few individuals often come cruising by the island, but rarely have we seen such a large flock. CJ has hopes of someday organizing a system of decoys and tape recordings on an islet bare of nesting seabirds, and try to entice them into starting a colony here.

As we moved out, we came upon a line of flotsam, extending many miles, with bits of debris and foam... floating along this line was the occasional individual of the delightful White-fronted Storm-Petrel. These have the behavior that we usually miss on our petrels off California.. they would dance along, landing on one foot, then the other, looking for food on the surface of the water. Their lightness of wing and foot brings a similar lightness to one's heart and mind. A special treat was a flock of some 20 of these storm-petrels at one point on the flotsam line, more than any of us had seen in a day, let alone at one place!

In deeper water we began to see several dozen Fluttering Shearwaters, rocketing competently along the surface of the water, with one wing down, then the other, as they looked for smaller fish. These weren't the ten thousand that we had out here a couple of weeks ago when the seas offshore were much rougher, but still a good number to see. Amongst them were the large, dark Flesh-footed Shearwaters, plowing through their smaller, more effervescent, Fluttering cousins.

We came back in towards the island and anchored in the lee of the small complex of islets we call Crater Rim, sheltered in almost all winds. There, we had lunch, enjoying the view of the colony of Red-billed Gulls and White-fronted Terns on the islets that rim the little bay. While the water is only 20 feet deep here, just a few yards away, outside of the rim, it drops off to more than 100 feet, making for good fishing upon occasion, for both us and the seabirds. It was on these islets that we had the first sign, some 20 years ago, of nesting petrels, with odoriferous burrows turning up here and there. It was only after we had eliminated rats from the main island in 1993 that we began finding borrows, and now have probably many pairs nesting on the steep wooded slopes of the main island. It turned out that it wasn't one of the shearwaters nesting there, but the Grey-faced Petrel, nothing like the dainty storm-petrel, but a bird larger than most shearwaters.

Leaving Crater Rim, we motored around the north side of the island, hugging the shore, looking for any birds that we might have missed. We came alongside Alcatraz, so named 25 years ago because it looked like it... how kiwis (New Zealanders) knew about that island in San Francisco Bay says a lot for cross-cultural exchange! We found shags nesting on the island; they had just colonized it about four years ago. They are nesting in a group of large, cliff-hanging trees. It's a mixed colony of three species of shags (Pied, Little Black, and Little), no species having more than a few members. They're a good addition to the breeding birds of the island, part of the increase of birdlife we've enjoyed over the past years.

We motored back, moored the boat on a buoy and rowed ashore. After a brief respite, Carol and CJ walked through the Orchard area in the central valley of the island. Here we have an assortment of native and introduced plants, a live stream, a large pond, all surrounded by paddocks, that conspire to give the richest diversity of bird life on the island. Although mid-afternoon, we weren't disappointed as a Greenfinch, a bird introduced to the country from Europe, but very uncommon on the island, appeared briefly in a Monterey (!) Pine tree. The Banded Rails, a native bird reintroduced onto the island a few years ago, were not in evidence here, as only a few pairs are on the limited marsh habitat on the island. A few days later, however, an adult with some young did appear in the orchard.

We went down to BBQ Bay again, trying to find a live penguin. We checked the nest box, nestled in the bank above the water under a forest canopy, that Carol got for a Christmas present a couple of years ago, but the odor (odure, as they say here) indicated a successfully-fledged young's droppings; and indeed the box was empty. We went along to beach to a natural crevice at the base of a cliff, and did find a molting adult. They come ashore, hole up, don't eat, and probably feel all scratchy for a few weeks. It's no fun to change feathers in this species! This year we made another half dozen penguin boxes and put them out on beaches around the island. Hopefully, we'll get some more takers to augment the dozen or so pairs that Carol has censused each year.

In a bid to pick up the elusive Hedge Sparrow as the evening came on, we walked along the northern shore of the island, along Alcatraz beach. Although we had seen a few of this very uncommon breeder over the past couple of weeks, none were apparent today. We climbed up into the valley we've named Secret Camp ... It was a camp during WWII, when the island was fortified with army troops, cement bunkers and two massive gun emplacements. This small valley was on the steep north face where only sheep ventured until we found it several years ago, and several of us islanders have installed a trail. On the way back, we found a small flock of the other Americans on the island, the turkeys. Several flocks roam the pastures of the island, and provide the occasional good meal for us. The island usually had 75-150 over the years, but were reduced to only six birds a couple of years ago, but now up to about 20 birds.

On the chance of picking up the rail, CJ returned to the Orchard and lurked there until dark. No rails appeared, but lots of the Eastern Rosellas, a beautiful Australian colonist and flocks of Silvereyes, or White-eyes, as they are called elsewhere. This species apparently introduced itself into New Zealand within historical times, and now, being an edge-adapted species, is quite abundant. One species that had eluded us all day was the Spur-winged Plover, or Lapwing. Also a self-introduced bird from Australia, its raucous cries and aggressive manner endear it not to some folks, but we enjoy its cheerful demeanor and lively disposition. As dusk settled on the hills of the island, the pair that had been frequenting the island, but unaccountably gone for the day, came in for the night onto the hill above the orchard, and gave their eerie cries.

Thus ended the day... the longest day we've had for a bird-a-thon, as it was summer. We were delighted at the final tally of 48 species, more than we expected.

Thanks again for helping us out.