It’s nearly May! I don’t know where this year is sneaking off to, but it’s going pretty fast. I thought I’d pull together a few photos to illustrate what I’ve been getting up to so far – spoiler alert, it’s mainly seabird fieldwork.

In January I helped out with a project on Australasian gannets – dietary and GPS tracking studies. This was awesome fun, very hot, and I came away with lots of neat gannet photos (like I needed any more?), new fieldwork skills, and a few new scars. Gannets are big, angry birds, and I love them.

After the gannet work I had an actual proper holiday for a week, during which I photographed…more birds! This time it was a Reef Heron – a bird I’ve been trying to find and photograph pretty unsuccessfully for a few years, so this was a nice start to the week. It was great to have some r&r, hang out with my family, and swim in the sea.

Since then it’s been fieldwork fieldwork fieldwork. I’ve been mainly working on the Poor Knights islands, preparing for GPS tracking of rako Buller’s shearwaters, then deploying the GPS units, and then retrieving them! My favourite part was definitely checking burrow occupancy in February – seeing how many of the burrows that had incubating birds in December had successfully turned out chicks!

I did have time to make a few trips to Muriwai this season – not to grab gannets, just to admire them! I have more photos of Australasian gannets than any other species of bird – but there are always new scenes to see and new images to make. I had a wonderful evening being wind blasted with Rikki, enjoying the sunset and the birds.

I was also very lucky to do a week of New Zealand storm petrel work on Te Hauturu-o-Toi Little Barrier Island. Spotlighting at night, scrambling all over the island during the day to deploy camera-traps and photograph the prolific birdlife. My favourite memories are lying in the grass, staring up at the stars as the air begins to gather an autumn chill. Cook’s petrels beeping overhead, the silent shadows of Black petrels, furry frenetic flight of bats, and the flickering of New Zealand storm petrels as they fly through the spotlight. Falling asleep to the sound of kiwi calling, and waking up to a chorus of korimako, kōkako and kākā.

In the middle of March I hopped on board a boat to take part in a False Killer Whale survey, and do a bit of seabird surveying at the same time. This comic by Tom Gauld sums up our achievements in finding what we were looking for, and my workhorse lens (the 80-400mm) decided to give up the ghost half way through, but it was a great trip! Taking photos of seabirds with only manual focus is…challenging. I don’t want to say futile because I still managed to get some nice photos, but…yeah it’s pretty futile.

Since then it has been nothing but night work. My days have been backwards, getting up late in the day to get ready for a night of work, going to bed after sunrise, rinse and repeat. It’s been tough but very successful!

Now our northern seabird season is pretty well over for me until July, so I’m heading to the Chathams to spend a bit of time at Taiko Camp, like I did in November last year. Many things to catch up on for the blog! Once I get back, we’ll work through the adventures of last year.