Day 311: November 7th – North to Queenstown

Sunny, cool, and calm

              It’s simply incredible that one beautiful day follows another throughout the majority of our journey through Australia and New Zealand.  In a land where rain is the rule and sun the exception, we’ve been blessed with bright sunny skies an inordinate amount of time.  Much of today will be spent travelling in the coach, so Sharon and I got up early and took a look around Lake TeAnau, hoping for a new avian species.  While not new, the Tui was kind enough to come down to a tree right near us and serenade us with the sweet melodic song that Tui’s sing.

    

         The Chaffinches and more Scaup showed up, but these are becoming so common as to raise little ambition on my part to photograph the unless in perfect light.  Both of these species were unfortunately in the shadows and although I did spend some time trying to wait them out, the end product was far from “blog worthy”.  A similar situation arose a few Black-billed gulls flew into the shadows of the early slightly overcast morning.  Finally, a Welcome swallow landed on a piling nearby and since these are not so easy to get decent shots of,  I did my best to capture images which were good enough to use in identification.  Man,  I wish more of these little guys would be willing to come in a bit closer to make the images published in the blog all “museum quality”.

       Soon, we were on the road again, this time heading for Queenstown, three hours north of our overnight digs in Te Anau.  Along the way, we got a good idea of how this verdant land is used for grazing lambs, cattle, deer, and even a non-native deer from Europe known as the Wapiti.   For a while in the past decades, these deer had established a wild population and were becoming feral.  A massive program to recapture the wapiti and begin to establish wapiti farms  has begun to thrive.

       The default farm, however, was naturally the sheep farms where the sheep are raised for wool production and the lamb exported throughout the world as a meat product.  

       Birding was tough as we sped by the fields at 80 to 100 KPH.  Many a Australasian harrier was spotted only to fly on by without so much as a misfire from the Nikon.  Other smaller black and white birds  not only eluded the camera, but were so fleeting as to keep us from getting a good enough look to firm up an id on the birds.  Later, at a rest stop, however, we were able to carefully study these birds and get some fuzzy distant pix.  We found that these were an introduced species known as the “Spur-winged plover” and talking to our Kiwi coach driver also found out that there is not much love for these intruders.  If the locals are out hunting ducks and spur-wing happens by….well, there will be one less plover.

       We finally arrived at the town of Queenstown and toured the waterfront where we made note of several species which we will pursue with the camera tomorrow morning.  It’s a lovely town and really has a nice laid-back feeling to it.  Can’t wait to explore it further tomorrow.