Fun With Friends: Photo #5 from Marion Drolsbach
Woo-hoo! We’re onto Instalment #5 of the photos taken by Marion Drolsbach when she was in Aotearoa-New Zealand 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.
This photo shows the shingle bank between the river mouth, which is effectively a lagoon, or hapua, and the sea — with plenty of black-backed gull action in between.
As Graeme Ure indicated in his comment on the preceding post—which featured ngutuparore, the wrybilled plover—black-backed gulls can be a problem for other bird species, most particularly the endangered ones, because of their predatory habits.
Nonetheless, they’re spectacular in their own right in the coastal environment, especially on a stormy day (which this wasn’t) when it’s very clear that flying is their “jam.”
The sea is the Pacific Ocean, by the way, for anyone who may be wondering, also known as Te Moananui A Kiwa (the great ocean of Kiwa) — and there’s pretty much nothing else between this strip of shingle and Antarctica.
~*~