Fun With Friends: Photos #3 & #4 From Marion Drolsbach
Just a reminder in case you’ve missed instalments #1 and #2, but this post series is featuring photos taken by Marion Drolsbach when she visited NZ late last year.
Marion is a book translator and we e-met when she translated The Heir of Night into Dutch. She is also a keen photographer and the photos were taken at the mouth of one of Canterbury’s many braided rivers.
As mentioned last time, I particularly love the bird life we saw that day –  and today’s little guy is one of NZ’s most endangered birds, the wrybill plover or ngutuparore. Its most distinctive feature is the “wry” or laterally-curved bill, which always bends to the right. I understand it is the only bird in the world with such a bill – if you enlarge, you should see the bend.
The wrybill is a wading bird and lives and breeds in the shingle braids of Canterbury’s rivers, which makes it particularly vulnerable to NZ’s introduced predators (e.g. cats, dogs, mustelids, and rats) – and of course the collateral damage of humans themselves.
I love seeing them in lagoons and riverbeds in exactly the way Marion has captured in these photos. Yet in addition to the intensification of adjoining land and water use, the transition of rivermouth communities from holiday homes to permanent residents (as people seek cheaper places to live) also means a proliferation of dogs and particularly cats (which are allowed to roam more freely) so I fear the pressure on these unique and already endangered birds is only going to increase.
Despite that gloomy note, I hope you enjoy your encounter with ngutuparore.
Nice to see these guys. The top photo is a male with his black brow band. Along with the mammalian predators including hedgehogs, black-backed gulls have proliferated on the lower rivers where habitat loss from willow and brush-weeds already had them struggling to find nest sites. Climate change might be there next big challenge with the big spring floods from snow-melt coming earlier.
Anyone wanting to know more or seeking to help these little guys survive into the future could start with https://braidedrivers.org/
Thank you for your comment, Graeme, and the link to Braided Rivers. Sadly, I think you’re right about climate change.