Farewell Spit Eco Tours Blog

I recently found this link with lots of information about the migration of godwits.

Some of E7s cousins from Farewell Spit were also implanted with transmitters.

This flock of South Island Pied oystercatchers roost on the beach in Collingwood at high tide

Last night on TV One there was a very interesting segment on close up about the effects of a sea wall on the migratory waders, have a look here to see it.

This morning our tour group spied the first flock of Godwits for the summer.

Very thin and tired looking they were too having just flown nonstop from Alaska in 10 days.

Their main focus for the next wee while is food and rest.

The Gannets are returning to the Spit end colony and are gathering nesting material to start the next breeding season.

They collect kelp and seaweed from the beach along with other debris soon there will be thousands of them jostling for the best position on the conical shelly banks 2 km. or so beyond the Lighthouse.

One of the local school bus drivers and local school caretaker Bill Climo found a Giant Petrel wandering on the roadside at Puponga near the beginning of Farewell Spit recently.

Luckily our office in the main street of Collingwood is a Petrel station so he dropped in to show us the big bird on his way to the home of one of our local ornithologists who takes in wounded or un-well birds. Sadly this one didn’t make it and an autopsy was held and it was discovered that it had a virus in it’s gut.

We took their photo and put it on the website here.

Unfortunately we were too far away to revive it with our Petrel pump.

Last year transmitters were implanted into female Godwits to track their migration to Alaska.

This year the researchers are fitting them to male birds in the firth of Thames on the North Island here you can see the video shown on TVNZ last night.

Whilst returning along the beach the other night a Skua was spied chasing a White fronted Tern.

Now the purpose of this was not to eat the Tern but to make it regurgitate the fish it had recently caught and was happily digesting as the sun set into the sea.

Quite a dramatic aerobatic performance ensued with the Tern almost looping the loop as it evaded the Skua. Eventually though, the inevitable happened and the Tern threw up the fish, the Skua swallowing it before it had fallen ten metres.

We do not see many Skuas but they are very dramatic when they appear.

A group of six Wrybill posed for their photograph about halfway along the ocean beach on Farewell Spit.

The wrybill are only seen from the bus a handful of times in a season. those who came out on a rather bleak day were rewarded with a rare sighting.

Compare the size with that of the oystercatcher in the right of the picture.

The annual Swan count has just been done and there are about 9900 of them on the intertidal plain of the Spit. The Black Swan originally came from Australia, probably blown over in storms. Then in the 1860s  more  were introduced as game birds. They thrive on the Spit as there seems to be an unending supply of zostera (Eelgrass) for them to eat. Last year there were about 6000 Swan and there have been up to 14000 in the past.