This guys name is Herman, he may be Herman the 5th or 6th but just easier to call him Herman. He would visit us at Freshwater Basin in Milford Sound every season. He spent the rest of the year chasing the ladies up the coast at Okarito lagoon.
He is a Kotuku/white heron (egreta alba modesta) in NZ they are quite rare, they only breed at Okarito and the population is about 200 individuals. In Maori tradition it is good luck if you see one.
A local artist made an awesome painting of this photo, I can see if I can get a digital image of it if anyone is interested. Let me know in the comments.
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These dudes are called Bullers Mollymawks (thalassarche bulleri) they are quite large birds. They were once thought to be albatross but have ended up with their own family. They are quite aggressive when you are fishing and quite fearless.
Staunch fellow waiting to steal my bait.
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New Zealand was once a paradise for birds, with no native predators they flourished, truly an isolated population of avian-dinosaurs. Many species of birds enjoyed being ground dwelling because life was so easy. A lot of them lost the ability to fly at all.
We had 6 foot Moa running around and Haast eagles big enough to pick them up. That would have been quite exciting to see.
While the Haast eagle went extinct around the 1400s after the Maori hunted the Moa to extinction a lot of the birds remained happy. When Captain Cook arrived he described the dawn chorus as deafening. Unfortunately just shy of 250 years later there is not much of a dawn chorus at Ship Cove, one of the places he landed.
The bird population has been decimated by habitat destruction, wild domestic cats and stoats, which were introduced to deal with the introduced rabbit problem. The stoats found the bird population much more naive than the rabbits. All of these problems were introduced by humans in the name of progress.
Now days a lot of people are really trying to sort this situation out and make the best of what we have left, there is a lot of debate about the best methods but at least we are trying. Hopefully one day we will be able to control the predator population enough to reintroduce birds from sanctuary islands and have their populations increase naturally.
It's just a shame we didn't care a little earlier, I wonder what people will look back upon in 100 years time that we are doing right now and think the same of us?
Anyway thats getting a bit deep. Thanks for reading and here's a goodbye from Herman.
