Tītitipounamu - rifleman

The smallest bird in New Zealand is also rather elusive. They are insectivorous, they feed from the ground to the canopy, and are sometimes seen 'walking' up tree trunks snacking on bugs. They weigh 6 grams, and seem to be programmed to move every second.  Even when not moving they seem to flick their wings every half second. To date I'd had one barely passable photo of this tiny bird taken from a distance. I wanted more and better, so spent four hours walking a 1.6km section of monitoring line in the upper regions of the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary.

Tītitipounamu have a very high pitched chirp, it's around 20kHz and often ultrasonic, so many people (particularly as they age) are unable to hear them. I can still hear them, but suspect my days of hearing their zit zit zit are drawing to a close.

Today I saw plenty of tītitipounamu. In fact they were the dominant bird. I stopped every 100m or so and if I heard their tiny peeps I waited. When I saw some I soon realised the only way to photograph them was to spray and pray. Point towards them, as soon as something looks vaguely focused press the shutter on burst mode until there doesn't appear to be any birds remaining in the viewfinder. I took close to 1000 shots, many contained no birds, and deleted about two thirds on first pass. Still, I ended up with 20-30 I'm happy with so that was a good outcome. My target list is now complete, and I have enough birds for my 2025 calendar.

I wanted to post 25 pics but managed to shrink it down a little. First off, females with wings in.

Next up, a male front and back with wings both in and out.

A female being rather photogenic.

The third photo here (below) would have been my favourite of the lot if it had been in focus...... aarrgghhh.... She was just too fast for my camera's Expeed 6 processor. An Expeed 7 may be needed. Tool blaming....

Finally, although technically it's not great (foliage between me and the subject for starters), it was my favourite sequence as it tells a story. A very short story on the human time-scale. I initially saw the female (on the left), so started shooting in burst mode. Then a male (with a beak full of crane fly) entered the scene. Four consecutive images (at 8 frames per second) cover the action: male arrives with crane fly, hops up the branch, offers the crane fly, female rejects it/him and departs upwards. So that action sequence / soap opera took a total of half a second. I had no idea it was happening other than I saw a flash of crane fly in the viewfinder. Note that the male goes from wings out to wings in in under 1/8 second. The female also goes from perched to airborne a full body length away in under 1/8 second. Eventually (i.e., a second later) the male presumably decided to not let the tasty meal go to waste and I guess he ate it himself.