I’ve spent a week under the stars, camping in a pōhutukawa clearing on a seabird island. Wind was constant, an endless river through the canopy. Hushing leaves and groaning trunk-creaks filled the night with noise, overlaid with the wild laughter of thousands of seabirds. I drift between sleep and wakefulness on nights like these. It’s the easiest thing in the world to fall asleep, content in the nocturnal rhythms of the island, safe and snug in a sleeping bag. Tired from a day scrambling over soft burrowed slopes, reaching into the rich earth to discover who is nesting beneath. But my ears are wide open to all the sounds of the night, and part of me wants to be awake to appreciate them. To lie with eyes open under the starry sky and drink it all in, because it’s all such a brief taste of the wild world. To watch the swift shadows against the stars.

I’m back home and I have lots of photos to wade through! I may have gone a bit overboard this past trip, visiting a new island (Korapuki, in the Mercury islands), so there’s a lot of images to dig into. It’s also the start of my busy season, with lots of island trips lined up to do fieldwork for my PhD. The blog is going to take a back seat for a while although I will try to post regularly on Sunday. Keep an eye out for more seabird stories soon!