The end of a long day of census blocks, walking in lines over lumpy, orifice-infested vegetation. Wind riffling up the slopes of the southern end of Antipodes island, tossing golden tussocks with a chill sou-wester. Add to that a few thousand Kuia / Grey petrels returning from the sea, and low golden light in a rare patch of clarity, and you have something that is still fizzing in my blood several months later.
The team let me off the hook for the last set of census lines (there were only three left in the section and four of us) and tent-setup so that I could revel in the sunset and make some images. I think I took more photographs that evening than I have in one session for a very long time (maybe ever?). I was shooting at 20 frames a second with birds strafing past on the wind, barrelling just over my head on a steep ferny slope, plunging into burrows and calling, calling, calling in the air. It was an experience I’ll never forget, and I hope these images have done some justice to it. We rarely got good evening light, so I was determined to make the most of it.
Grey petrels are fat little footballs on titanium wings, gloriously beautiful in a way that their name doesn’t do justice to. I’ve wanted to see them and photograph them for a long time, and distant at-sea sightings had been my sum of experience of them up until this trip. While part of me was disappointed that I hadn’t carried my 80-400mm lens to the end of the island, the 28-200mm was more than perfect for this scenario with the birds coming so close, and gave me wider options that I actually ended up preferring.
This image actually ended up being my favourite from the session, because it captured the number of birds in the air, the starkness of the light (although not so much the warmth), and the vista. Looking out towards the ocean gave me such a sense of the distances that these birds travel to forage and then return to this island and this steep slope, to tuck themselves into the tussock to burrow and breed.
Yes, the title of this blog is shamelessly borrowed from Sir Terry Pratchett’s novel by the same name. I have enjoyed working my way through all the Discworld books in order over the course of my PhD fieldwork – they’ve kept me company on many long nights waiting for birds to return to their colonies, and I am so grateful for them.
How about a slow-mo video to top it off? I tried to snatch some video recordings on my phone while a) clinging to ferns so that I didn’t fall down the slope and b) trying to avoid having my head taken off by grey petrels going…very very fast.
