My peregrinations were taking me along the Hobbs Beach Track and away from the island’s wooded section, where my target passerines lurked. I retraced, peered into the empty little penguin nest boxes on my way and headed uphill to the trees. I didn’t get that far before my next lifer, not a passerine, but a duck.
Even New Zealand‘s mobile waterfowl had a hard time against the coming of Man. Most of them could fly but their principal predator, the swamp harrier, hunted from the air. It was more effective to freeze and let camouflage do the work. This is futile in the face of a dog, cat or a mustelid. What’s one of those? It’s a stoat, weasel or ferret. They’re all totally alien to the country and they’re not exactly pets gone wild. Nor are they farm animals.
Even bigger idiots introduced them to do this and, as with the Queensland cane toad, that’s about the last thing the creatures did, preferring instead to go for sitting ducks – literally. So the brown teal is now critically endangered; there are fewer than 1,000 in the entire world. They’re as good as extinct. There’s really no way back from that low a number.
Oh, some people – very fine people – try but the future history is written. Rising populations of all the world’s endangered species does not fit with 7 billion human beings, doubling every 50 years and doubling its per capita resources grab even faster. Something will have to give, some choice will have to be made. A crunch, environmental not credit, will come and the smart money is on Homo sapiens to muscle its way to the top of the pile. We’ll sacrifice the lot before being the last to go down.
So, while it could, my life list went up by one with a pair of brown teal lurking on the edge of a pool in New Zealand’s biggest zoo. I didn’t feel guilty about ticking them, nor any of the other survivors, in those circumstances. There wouldn’t be another chance.
And the ducks were where they were supposed to be. A few centuries earlier I’d have been tripping over them. Just like our ospreys, red kites and sea eagles, and California’s condors, all of which are also on my life list. They look like success stories now but the spectre of the crunch looms for them too. ⇐ ⇒
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Eight years since my last sighting, at Louth in Lincolnshire, and with only three other records before that (all around the same period), this little gem is rare indeed. Yesterday’s bird behind the Stratford Hide was perfect for spotting its striking supercilium, but even more its two wing bars and black-and-white pattern to the tertials. I was glad it had hung around through the cold snap because more…
Another book that reiterates The Long Emergency‘s telling of the abrupt Younger Dryas climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert writes that 12,800 years ago the warming from the last Ice Age suddenly chilled for another 1,200 years. Then in a decade the temperature rose by 10 degrees plus. When the system switches, it switches fast.
Just before all this sea levels had been rising by one foot per decade. Catastrophic it wasn’t at the time but more…
This is a bit of a crappy photograph taken on my iPhone, which is not a patch on the old Nokia (that I’m selling on eBay – hint, hint!) but it records my 115th species for the town. The list now overtakes my tally for Cupertino in California.
Apart from the great crested grebe, locally the highlight was finally catching up with one of the black redstarts that have been reported round Portishead Pier and the beach below the Royal Hotel. For me it was a brief glimpse of one of the males for my first sighting since about this time last year. The species is a bit of a town speciality: five of my seven UK records cram into the last two years.
Ever wonder how injured birds come about? Here’s a clue. This afternoon at Portbury Wharf this sequence of pictures shows one possibility. Apologies for the quality: the action was fast and I only had my phone.
The very prosaic great crested grebe brought up my hundred for the local nature reserve. Prosaic yet pretty, especially in breeding plumage, the species is also new for my car-free list, according to the fading Birdstack.
Not so. The website’s demise has forced all my records on to an Excel spreadsheet (OpenOffice actually) and from this I can calculate that the grebe is as high up as number 36. A walk way back in 1996 down the Itchen Way from Winchester to Eastleigh was responsible but I knew I’d also seen plenty during my residence within binocular distance of Upton Warren.
The Lyndhurst Hotel marked the start of the Strzelecki Track and the tarmac ended not far down it. A sign in the road-train area told of conditions for sections of the route – all open when I was there. So the way was clear to Mount Hopeless, the Moomba oil fields and southern Queensland. Hundreds of kilometres of dirt roads plied by monster trucks bowling through the heart of Australia. Directly north the same traffic ran up the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to more…
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