Farewell Spit Eco Tours Blog

A Gnome Away from home 2009 was  rip roaring success.

Friday night quiz night posed the usual curley questions, Farewell spit featured in saturday’s entertainment and on sunday was the very first Gnome Run almost twenty participants tore around the course,  some running some walking.

The gnome tossing and bungee thrilled all participants and the crowd alike.

Takaka’s citizens band performed in the street as they have never been seen before.

Colin coke and Alan Swafford entertained with gnome flavoured busking before the street race.

Here are some of the pictures.

Farewell Spit Eco Tours stand at the recent ecofest in Nelson was well visited by people heading for Golden Bay in the near future. Elaine was the source of information and key point for enquiries and Paddy checked out t he electric bicycles on the neighbouring stand. Alan Kilgour from Golden Bay Promotions was on another nearby booth on Saturday and we shared one on Sunday when the weather came right.

In a few days Garden Gnomes from all over will be coming to Collingwood for the weekend. Our boys are waiting……..

We let her out of the office a while ago and Shelley the office chick found a Sunfish on Farewell Spit. These fish get stranded on the intertidal plain as the tide recedes. Sadly there is nothing we can do to save them all we can do is marvel we we find them.

This group of Godwits are resting on the ocean beach of Farewell spit having fed for the previous 6 hours or so on the vast flats exposed when the tide went out in Golden Bay. They are fuelling up ready for the flight to Korea where they will stop for two weeks or so, gorge themselves on marine food then fly to Alaska to begin the nesting part of the cycle.

Here is our " salute to old Collingwood buildings"

During the Winter we "had the builders in" they remodelled our office replaced the cladding on the facade and gave us a lovely long verandah.

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.

The Garden Gnomes from around the world and even Nelson are planning to converge on Collingwood near Farewell Spit in Golden Bay for the second "A Gnome away from Home weekend" in the last weekend of August.

Have a look at last year’s movie below.

For the last several days Whale spouts have been seen near Cape Farewell at the beginning of Farewell Spit.

Farewell Spit Eco Tours guides and clients have had a grandstand view from the clifftops and a pod of 4 were seen yesterday, we think they are Humpback Whales. They migrate at this time of year and it is a rare treat to have them hanging around our part of the world. Have a look here at one of the spouts just beyond a boiling school of fish.

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.