It’s no secret that I love albatrosses. Being at sea, watching them in their element is hands down one of my favourite things. Aotearoa is a good place to be if you love albatrosses – we have a phenomenal diversity of species breeding on some of our offshore islands. Campbell albatross breed on only one island (Campbell island, surprise). I’ve been lucky to visit, and to see them circling in their thousands. Their distinguishing feature from Black-browed albatrosses, though, is their beautiful golden eye. You need to be up close to see it. They’re the only albatross that has this beautiful feature – all the others have dark eyes.

Bobbing around in a zodiac off North Cape trying to catch storm-petrels for a research project, we had a few albatross encounters. They got in the way, more often than not, of us trying to capture the tiny New Zealand storm petrels that were attracted to our berley (along with a gaggle of takoketai/Black petrels). This beautiful bird spent the better part of a morning with us, serenely paddling around, and then viciously going after any scraps of salmon berley that floated out of the bag. It gave me a great opportunity to see that beautiful golden eye right up close, and resulted in some of my favourite photographs of the trip.