In December 2018, there was a Black noddy kicking around the Hauraki Gulf. These birds are a subtropical/tropical species, and in Aotearoa the only place they breed is in the Kermadec island group. I was lucky to catch up with this bird a few times – first while leading a pelagic trip in early December, and then again towards the middle of the month while doing seabird surveys around the Marotere/Chickens islands. Both times, it was foraging with a melee of White-fronted terns, Red-billed gulls, Fairy prions and Fluttering shearwaters over big schools of kahawai and trevally. I managed to catch a shot of it snapping up a tiny larval fish the first time we saw it, which was a nice complement to the dietary studies we’ve been doing on seabirds that associate with fish schools.