Muddy fledgling

I went for a slow walk along one of the monitoring lines in the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary looking for possible kākāriki karaka nests. We knew there were plenty of our birds there, but had never found any nests. I heard what sounded like nest arrival chatter (the chatter a male will make when he arrives at his nest with a stomach full of food), and two very dirty fledglings tumbled down out of the tree. I could not see the nest hole through thick foliage, but clearly they'd just exited their nest. I'd just watched a nest fledge.

One in particular was completely covered in mud. It had rained the previous night, and I suspect the nest wasn't as watertight as the birds would have liked. The fledglings wanted out of there, but one in particular was trying very hard to fly, and failing. It was not going to fly until its feathers were a lot cleaner. I would like to have somehow captured it and given it a bath, but that wasn't an option. Hopefully the mud would dry out and flake off as it flapped its wings. The dad had departed with the other fledgling (flight training) and would likely return to continue feeding the muddy bird giving it the energy to shake off that mud. I departed and left them to it.

Eyeball focus - and shooting RAW

I was starting to get the hang of the new camera gear. The depth of field at 600mm was soooo tight, it was rather unforgiving. Only a few centimetres of the photo could be in tight focus. This meant I had to always try to focus on the bird's eyeball. If eyes are in focus, then the shot is in focus. If the wings or shoulder are in perfect focus, but the eye isn't, then most viewers would instinctively regard the shot as out-of-focus (the same applies to photographs of people). Focusing on the eyeball of a small bird in deep shade with a 600mm lens from 6-12m away where the bird is likely to move within a few seconds is not easy. (Some birds kindly stay put for a minute or two though.)

Another major point. Today is the day I started shooting RAW. I'm not sure why I didn't earlier. I wanted the convenience of jpeg I guess. RAW provides plenty of options in post-processing that are difficult if you've shot jpeg, such as white balance adjustments, decent de-noising etc.

These three all have eyeballs pretty much in focus (the first one less so), all wide open (f6.3), 1/640s and ISO in the 9000 - 15000 range. I also like the soft, mostly-round bokeh delivered by this lens.

Kākāriki karaka mugshots

A 600mm lens makes small-bird mugshots possible. Here's a mugshot session with V-S again (see 27th November post).

Pūtangitangi - paradise shelduck

It's not uncommon to find a pair of pūtangitangi with their ducklings when coming down the fence line on the western side of the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary. The ducklings are pretty fast, one must run ahead of them to avoid chasing them a long way down the track. The parents will likely hop/fly ahead trying to distract the human(s) from their babies, and once we're well past the ducklings the parents will circle back around to their offspring and resume whatever it is they were doing before the disturbance.

The cuteness of the ducklings is legendary.

Kākāriki karaka with the new camera

Needless to say, I was keen to test my new gear on my LGFs (Little Green Friends) in the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary. Here is what I got on my first trip in. One of my favourite LGFs agreed to a portrait session and put on quite a show while preening. His name is V-S (from his violet-silver leg-band combination).

The new camera was everything I'd hoped it would be. (Edit: I haven't touched the D5200 since.) I found 600mm much more useful than 300mm (crop sensor), and the quality from the lens on a full-frame sensor meant I could crop further and retain image quality. There is a lot to learn, this camera delivered the goods with minimal intervention but small birds in deep forest shade are not easy, and better quality images and a higher keeper rate should be possible through an understanding of the multitude of settings.

A new camera

While I'd been happy enough over the last couple of years photographing birds in the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary with my crop sensor Nikon D5200 and 70-300mm lens, I wanted more reach and better image quality. It was time for an upgrade. I settled on a Nikon Z6ii (mirrorless) and Nikkor Z FX 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR. I wanted full frame, and although I considered DSLR, I decided that the future was mirrorless. I didn't want or need 45Mpx; the 24Mpx of the Z6 or Z6ii was sufficient. I also liked the CFExpress cards for their superior speed over SD.

When I started thinking about an upgrade there was no optimum lens for the mirrorless Z mount system for birds (perhaps the 100-400mm with 1.4x teleconverter, or perhaps one of the frightfully expensive primes, e.g., 400mm or 600mm with teleconverter), but I'd heard through the rumour mill that the 180-600mm was in development so waited. The pre-release reviews were very positive so I pulled the trigger.

I received the gear on 22nd November, had a quick glance through the 900 page instruction manual (yes, the new gear is severely complicated c.f. the film SLR days) and headed outside my house today for the first test on birds.

Fortunately there was a family of warou (welcome swallows) on the roof and then a bit later they moved onto the overflow pipe from the upstairs bathroom. Four fledglings were being fed by a parent. I snapped a few hundred photos. Feeding visits were every minute or two, so in that way much easier than photographing kākāriki karaka (where the parents visit every hour or two). The parent would grab a small bug on the wing, circle around then deposit it in a hungry mouth. I watched and photographed probably ten feeding visits. After the first few visits I noticed that the fledglings were all watching carefully as they eagerly awaited their parent to come in with a snack, and I could work out where the parent was likely to land (left of the fledglings, right of the fledglings, or in the middle somewhere) by watching which way the fledglings were facing through the viewfinder (the parent of course was in the air behind me), then I'd quickly adjust composition so I had the parent in the frame when it landed. The fledglings in unison moved their gaping mouths left or right as the parent (presumably) circled around or zigzagged back and forth. Most sequences were a chaotic mess of feathers and off-focused movement. But this one (below) worked like a charm. Almost. I'd ideally have a bit more to the right so I could get all the wing feathers, and also taken the shot a tenth of a second earlier so the parent was clearly airborne above the drain pipe, but then of course the wings may have been in a poorer position etc etc. Such is wildlife photography. I don't think anyone has ever got a 'perfect' shot. Needless to say I was happy with the results of my first shoot with my new gear.

Note on warou. The appeared in New Zealand as rare vagrants from Australia prior to about 1950, but since then their population has grown rapidly. They're a self-introduced native bird. They've benefited greatly from humans clearing land and building structures (which inadvertently assist their nesting).

A failed kākāriki karaka nest

Sometimes things don't work out as well as we'd like. In the summer of 2022/2023 a pair of kākāriki karaka had a nest on a hillock above the aviaries. This nest was lower down than most (four metres off the ground) and we had hopes for watching hungry nestlings being fed at the nest entrance without the need for binoculars. Unfortunately the female likely had a cloacal prolapse, she disappeared one day in March 2023 and was never seen again. Over the next two weeks the male made repeated attempts to call her off her nest, it was distressing to see his distress. Eventually he gave up and re-paired.

Given this nest hole was accessible I managed to photograph (with my mobile phone on April 17th) the nest through the entrance. This photo shows at least seven unhatched eggs. They'd been scattered a bit by a kākāriki karaka unrelated to the nest, normally one would expect the eggs to be in a clutch for incubation. By this time the nest had been abandoned for several weeks.

Skip forward a season to November 2023, and other kākāriki karaka are showing signs of interest in this nest cavity. Bits of old eggshell have been discovered on the ground under the nest entrance over the last few months (scattered and broken during nest prospecting or nest preparation). Here, an intact (but old) egg has been rolled towards the nest entrance (photo from Nov 1st). Next time I went past this tree the egg was gone.