Burrowscoping
Seabird science is glamorous. I spend a lot of time lying down, face-first in the mud, with my arm in a hole in the ground. Like so: At the moment,…
The Miracle Bird
On the 20th of September I had one of those moments. One of those moments of pure joy and excitement at seeing a new species of bird for the first…
Get distracted
Photography is about focus. I'm not apologising for that pun. Obviously images being sharp is a good start. But to get good, sharp images, it's also important to be concentrated…
Burgess impressions
A few weeks ago I was supremely fortunate to spend a few nights on Burgess Island in the Mokohinau group to help out with seabird research. We were thwarted by…
Thoughts on Birds in Flight
Can you tell this blog was written today, in a bit of a hurry? Usually I have a buffer of blog posts that are scheduled to run - at the…
Tools of the Trade
This year so far has been nothing short of amazing. My research takes me to wild and wonderful places on a regular basis - being a biologist definitely suits my…
Eastern Rockhopper penguins, Auckland Island
Choosing photos for competitions
The New Zealand Geographic Photographer of the Year competition closes this week. Which means for the past month, I've been trawling through my galleries from the past year and agonising.…
Western Springs
Western Springs is very close to where I live in Auckland. It's a big park with a (kinda nasty in places...although not too nasty because there's eels in there) lake…
Motuihe
I spent last weekend on Motuihe looking for penguins. Because my own fieldwork isn't tiring enough, obviously. The great thing about helping out with other people's fieldwork is there's no…
Levitating fantails
The last three weeks weeks have been hectic and I've only just realised that I hadn't written a blog for today. So here's two photos I took this morning! Fantails…
The Ethics of Wildlife Photography
This week BirdsNZ - the Ornithological Society of New Zealand - released a set of guidelines for bird photography. It's a really good document that covers the welfare of both…
Smartphone Photography
I've been taking a lot of photos with my phone this year. Partly because the quality of images out of an iPhone 5 vastly surpass that of the 4, and…
Tawharanui – take two!
Our last trip to Tawharanui wasn't too successful in finding any Grey-faced petrels. Which is not surprising, given that it was the middle of the pre-breeding exodus, when all the…
Pest Free Kaipatiki – First steps
Predator Free 2050 is a big goal for New Zealand. How do we get rid of the worst introduced pests at a national scale? Pest eradication on isolated islands is…
More Albatross
Today's post is just a bunch more photos from my trip with Monarch Wildlife Cruises, because everyone needs a weekly dose of seabirds! Also because I'm quite busy at the…