New Zealand Wildlife Photography Tour

A couple of years ago I visited my peripatetic daughter Megan whilst she was working for Kaikoura Whale Watch company in New Zealand. Readers of her blog will know she is now in Iceland and showing no symptoms of itchy feet. She took a couple of weeks off and we went for a road trip around the country to photograph as much wildlife as we could find. And what an adventure it turned out to be. Armed with a little research done in her South Bay bach we headed off in search of the world's rarest penguin, nocturnal kiwis and huge sealions that chase you if get too close. We did and they did.  We had left it very late in the season and the further south we drove the more gnarly the weather got (it's an upside down world) and at the incredibly remote Mason Bay on Stewart Island (no roads, you walk or fly in landing on the beach) it was foul. I wanted to photograph kiwis probing for sandhoppers on the beach but the weather was so bad I settled for them in sheltered scrub behind the dunes. We drove north through snow-capped mountains and ancient old-growth forest and had a quick tour of North Island calling in to see friends and photograph a northern kiwi conservation project. By this time Megan had to be back at work and after a short stay back in Kaikoura photographing sperm whales, dusky dolphins and fur seals I took off back to North Island to visit the amazing Tiritiri Matangi Island. Some years ago New Zealand's Dept of Conservation realised that the eradication of the introduced predators that were causing mayhem amongst endemic species was going to be a long haul and in the short term surviving species of endemic, and often flightless and helpless, birds should be moved to predator-free island sanctuaries. Perhaps the best known and most successful of these has been Tiritiri Matangi off the far northeast coast. Most images of Takahe (not that there are that many - images or birds) are from here and the island is a paradise for several other endangered, endemic species like stitchbird, kokako, saddleback and little-spotted kiwi. Then, on route back to South Island a few hours photography of Whio (blue duck) on the lovely Manganui o te Ao river and a quick stop off in the mountains for the notorious and all too intelligent kea. For this I had the brainwave of covering all the vehicle's rubber trim with gaffer tape which took the birds seconds to remove. They do like rubber! 

When Dobry at Focus4Nature asked me if I would be interested in putting together a couple of wildlife photography tours I immediately thought of New Zealand and how easy it is travel around the country and how accessable and spectacular the wildlife. The tour we came up with; Aotearoa: the Unique Wildlife of New Zealand is now up on the F4N website. It's going to be a great trip!

 

 

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