Birds, moths, geckos, skinks, orchids! (to name a few). All up on @iNaturalistNZ and openly licensed. Provisional CMKMStephens elsewhere set up for sinking ship
Lower Hutt City, New Zealand
Joined July 2014
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A BIG tick on my wishlist, the South Island Lichen Moth (Declana egregia).
Check your $100 bill the next time you have one for some mysterious reason people 馃捀馃捀
Until such time as I do move entirely, this is still a place to scream Fucking @metlinkwgtn , with cancelled commuter trains at peak time on the HVL, with bus replacements that don't exist, on a day pouring with rain.
I've realised I forgot about the NI M膩t膩t膩 / Fernbirds.
Having been translocated several years ago now, the island is FULL of them. Peeping (verbally, visually) at you at all times, in all places.
Botanically, the best thing was probably finally getting to see Cook Strait M膩hoe (Melicytus orarius) in its prolific full flower.
No trip to Mana Island is complete without coastal jumping spiders.
These are 'Marpissa marina', though almost certainly a complex of different species across the country.
I had to wait perfectly still above the spider's lookout pebble, as they kept going down among the rocks.
My 'big' score for the weekend was finally getting some photos of Hutton's Speargrass Weevil (Lyperobius huttoni)
These were translocated from Te Kopahou Reserve on on the Wellington south coast. I've never managed to find them there, nor on Mana until now.
Overall, and without having any intent of groping them, the birds were a bit hard to get shots of - unusual. Usually I come away with a zillion k膩k膩riki photos.
Here's some of the better Yellow-crowned k膩k膩riki photos.
and here's some Fairy Prions and band checking.
Apart from maybe some documentation with photos I'm not sure I did anything useful though. I did hold/restrain a Fairy Prion briefly - it wasn't happy about it - not the little claws in 3rd photo.
On the 2nd night I hadn't been tasked to anything, so I went out to the cliffs for the artificial burrow monitoring - checking occupation and bands of Fairy Prions/t墨t墨 wainui and Diving Petrels/kuaka.
Here's a Diving Petrel
To round off the geckos and skinks, a side goal on the island was to get some more shots of the McGregor's Skink - a big one that likes sunny beaches, and is relict to just some offshore islands.
and this was achieved.
Moving on, not in the pitfalls but continuing with the herpetofauna, the flax loving Gold-striped geckos were still all over the place by night...
