MR 2000

 

What is in a number?  For a listing birder, numbers seem to be everything, but in reality, it is deeply personal, because in the end, it does not really matter if you have seen 8000 species of birds or 1.  I feel sorry for those who have only noticed a few species as they have missed much.  I am not going to stamp my birding number on my gravestone, or maybe I should?

One of the projects of this trip to New Zealand we are currently on was to get my "World Life List" number currently at 1934, to the next milestone-2000. Does it matter... not really, is this a high number....not really,, but during a month long stay in scenic New Zealand, it gave us something to do.  After getting a single tick in Hawaii for a red avadavat I needed, I was not really much closer, 

Birds in New Zealand....there are not a lot of numbers here, many are nearly extinct, the land is full of introduced European species, but I figured with a score of some seabird species, I should just about be able to do it.  My 1000th bird happened on Kauai, it could have been one of the now almost extinct birds, but I think it ended up being an established exotic like a shama, but to be honest with list splits, lumps, added species and countable exotics and provisional birds during my big year in 2016, I am not sure which one now it actually was.  

Today was my seabird day out of Kaikoura on the South Island, my number was at 1990 as the day unfolded, but it really as it would turn out was not.  In the end I had two pretenders and one actual MR 2000.

The problem(s). While I was counting today, I noticed things had changed on the list since I was last doing Southern Hemisphere seabirds in 2019. An early bird today, I saw a wandering albatross, well I saw many, but I have seen many of this species or so I thought.  

As it would turn out, on the list I use, the "wandering albatross" is no more.  It has been split into three species, Tristan, Snowy, and the Antipodean Albatross.  This one is an Antipodean Albatross and since I have seen Tristans and the Snowy in the South Atlantic, it was actually a two-fer I was seeing today and with other birds I saw had pushed up my list 2 birds I did not expect to be able to count.  With other seabirds I had seen, I thought this put me at the precipice of 2000.  I then saw my first pretender for the crown of the big 2000.

I counted a pintado petrel.  A cute little petrel that was surrounding the boat, it could be 2000.  I counted it as a lifer right away in the morning, BUT as I would later learn, the Cape Petrels I had seen off South Africa were renamed the Pintado Petrel....sigh.  I got a photo but had to subtract one I had already counted. 

The bird I had first thought was Mr 2000 was a great one.  The Westland petrel, we saw two today.  Everyone else on the boat saw maybe one, the guy next to me was only looking for that bird on this boat, and with flesh-footed shearwaters around which basically look the same except the Flesh-footed has a yellow bill while the Westland has a big black splotch on the end, they can be hard to confirm a sighting of.  A New Zealand waters-only seabird, I was happy, but well it did not last.  You can see Flesh-foots on the US west coast in fall pelegics.  I saw my lifer out of Half Moon Bay with the infamous Debbie Shearwater.

Flesh footed shearwater today, note all yellow bill

Westland petrel, note black on bill.  We also saw one (this one?) on the water a little later

I was happy, what a quality bird for the big number but no....this was just a pretender, due to the Pintado petrel deal.

So, we ended up circling some rocks and I nabbed another lifer, a spotted shag, a handsome cormorant, only found here as well.

spotted shag

I submitted my list and expected to see the big 2000 on top but it was only at 1999.  Dang!  I checked my list and then again, but noticed one of the 5 species of albatross was saw, a white capped albatross was not there.  Sigh, they had rearranged these species again and somehow, I had not noticed it, so I had that bird.  The Salvin's was new but not both, and as such, I was a bird short, and the boat was back on the trailer.  Sheez.

We went back to our RV, and I did some looking.  I do not need many easy-to-get land birds here now.  The South Island is not that rich in species, BUT I saw a place that on the map, looked easy enough to look for South Island Robins.  The North Island version was hard to find for us.  At noon, we went out to give it a go, and what looked like a nice forest with trails was a overgrown woods with no parking a construction crew and big trucks.  We jammed two RVs into a driveway to nowhere and went looking.  We saw a shining-bronze cuckoo, which I had seen but not photographed and got some nice shots.  This is a really hard bird to see if it stays silent and even so, hard to find as it matches foliage of the bush 

It was a bonus bird on a random piece of woods.  We walked some more and no robin.  We ran into a crew of guys doing something, maybe spraying...hard to know.  We turned around and were halfway back to our campers when robins came out and one almost landed on me.

So, there he or she is, a South Island Robin, Mr 2000!

It has been fun pretty much birding the old-fashioned way with a field guide a pair of bins and my camera.  We cleaned up most of the tough endemics on the North Island with little help from anyone.  Sometimes going to the right spots helps but even then, finding birds involved climbing thousands of feet, and patience.  We will bring more tales of New Zealand as I have internet and stamina to write.  At least one trip goal has been accomplished.

Keep biding, from the land of tomorrow...because it is tomorrow in New Zealand

Olaf