A belated Happy New Year to all.
Its summer in New Zealand and although the weather has been rather changeable with some tropical heavy rain that's caused some tragic earth slips and flooding there have still been sunny & warm (mid 20's) days at the beach.
Our little band of loyal volunteers completed the January bait pulse around the Shoal and Ngataringa estuaries in Auckland. It's our tenth year having started in 2016. It was not surprising that the predator control boxes revealed an active rodent month. Until residential trapping takes place our coastal lines to protect terrestrial and coastal shorebirds will keep seeing reinvasion.
Our early intervention to protect an NZ dotterel nest with one egg was successful with one juvenile now fledged. The design of the nest cover with modifications certainly protected the nest from Australasian hawks (Kahu) and Southern black backed gulls. High westerly and south-westerly winds between 50 and 90 kilometers per hour did not dislodge the shelter following modifications to the legs of the shelter.
Our bar -tailed godwit flock of just under two hundred birds has settled down following a rather unpredictable season as far as their roosting habits. They are coloring up especially the males ahead of their 10'000 km flight to China in March on route to Alaska to breed.
I would like to thank those people that contacted me concerned that the godwit had been absent from their familiar roosting sites. Now they appear to be back to moving between the two estuaries as in previous years.