Fun With Friends: Photos #6 & #7 From Marion Drolsbach
Marion Drolsbach, translator extraordinaire 🙂
I think Photo #6 might be my favourite in the series of photos taken by Marion Drolsbach when she was in Aotearoa-New Zealand last year.
Marion, as those who’ve been following will know, is a book translator (English to Dutch) and we first met when she was translating The Heir of Night into Dutch.
The photos were taken at the mouth of a Canterbury braided river, and the Telimbras, in The Wall of Night series, is also a braided river. (Hmm, wonder where that worldbuilding influence came from?! 😉 )
Photos #6 and #7 both show a tern flying. The rivermouth is home to both blackfronted (tarapirohe) and whitefronted terns (tara.) I believe this is tarapirohe, the blackfronted tern, but am by no means certain. All the terns look fabulous in the air, and Marion’s photos really capture that.
The blackfronted terns are endangered, chiefly from human-introduced predators. But since the braided rivers are the only place they breed, efforts to turn endangerment around have to be concentrated in that environment. Relocation is not an option.
The whitefronted terms numbers are also decreasing, but not to the same extent as tarapirohe so are not classified as endangered.
To read some of my reflections on predators, picked up in the comments, check out post #3 (and photos #3 and #4) on Ngutuparore, the wrybilled plover.
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