Week 13: Habitat

One of my favourite garden birds to photograph is the Kotare.

With the restrictions of lockdown and walking local,

I’ve been spending my early mornings at the Panmure Basin and Tamaki Estuary.

When the waters are low in the basin, and they've been exceptionally low this last week,

the mudflats are exposed.

It brings the Kotare out en masse. 

There are also hundreds and hundreds of crabs, 

which are what the Kotare are hunting for.

The antics of the crabs are quite extraordinary. 

Any movement from above sends them scurrying into their burrows 

in an almost synchronised dance.

It looks like the mudflats are heaving ... and then they go still.

A few minutes later the mudlfats start glistening and moving again 

as the crabs pop out of their holes. It’s more than fascinating to watch.

One of my other regular walking destinations, 

out of bounds at the moment due to ‘walking local’ restrictions, is Churchill Park.  

It has a creek running through it and is another favourite habitat of the Kotare.

A year ago, on one of my regular walks there, 

I heard noises inside a tree trunk and wasn’t at all sure what was making them.

So I sat underneath a nearby palm tree to wait and watch.

Imagine my amazement when Mom and Dad Kotare 

started flying back and forth bringing food

to what was obviously their nest inside the tree trunk 

It had been the babies I’d heard inside the tree trunk and,

each time a skink was dropped down to them,

the cacaphony escalated until they’d devoured it.

I wasn’t close enough to get the clarity I wanted

but these were the images I managed to capture.

It was such a special moment.

"We are not responsible for what our eyes are seeing.  

We are responsible for how we perceive what we are seeing."
~ Gabrielle Bernstein