This post accidentally went live the other day with no text! Whoops! We ended up having to depart Tawhiti Rahi a day early due to incoming weather and I wasn’t able to update the post in time. So here it is:

Thank you. Thank you to all of you who voted for this photograph in the New Zealand Geographic Photographer of the Year awards. You made my night, while I was out in the dark waiting for these very birds to return to Tawhiti Rahi. My PhD research meant I couldn’t attend the awards night in person, because it’s currently the middle of the breeding season for rako (and the three other species I study!), and I need to be out on islands collecting data. We managed to set up a video link to the awards night so I could be there (larger than life!), and hear applause all the way from Auckland to my perch on the cliff-edge of the island, exactly in the spot where I took this photo. This year we’ve all learned how well technology can bind us together even when we’re physically apart, and although it wasn’t the same as being present, it was special in a very unique way.

I spend my life studying these beautiful birds – rako, Buller’s shearwaters. For the past three years I’ve followed their lives throughout the breeding season, visiting the Poor Knights to monitor their behaviours and breeding success. Each year I spend about three and a half months cumulatively on Tawhiti Rahi, living next to these birds and getting covered in the same rich island dirt that they dig their burrows in. We trialled a GPS tracking study of rako in 2019 and learned just how far they’ll travel to feed their chicks. We were all set to repeat the study this year, when COVID struck and we had to cancel the rest of our field season. It was gutting. This photograph was taken the trip just before lockdown, when we spent a few days checking to see how many chicks were sitting in our study plots, waiting for their parents to return and feed them.

To me, this photo is about wonder. About hope. I am ceaselessly amazed by these birds and the way they live their lives. The sheer effort that goes into raising their single chick every year. The way that they depart on a huge figure-of-eight migration through the northern Pacific, circling Hawai’i before returning to Aotearoa. Their navigatory prowess and resilience amazes me. That is what I strive to capture in these photographs. Having this image reminded me that while we were barred from visiting the island to study them, the rako were going about their lives quite happily, feeding their chicks up to a fat fledging weight, and then departing on their thousands of kilometers of migration, navigating vast areas of ocean in an innate, instinctual way that we’ll never truly understand.

The fact that you voted for it means you were wowed too, that you understood the story and appreciated what it means to have these birds frozen in flight lines along the Milky Way. Or maybe you just like the intersection of astro-ornithological photography. Either way – thank you. To have so many people share in the story of these largely unseen, under-appreciated birds is why I do my best to document them, to share these aspects of their lives that are often invisible to us. I won’t be stopping any time soon.

-E