It seems like summer has finally arrived. The Pohutukawa are having an impressive year, flowering all over the place, attracting birds to the many trees in Medlands. Tūī and kākā are particularly interested in the delicious nectar in those stunning red flowers.
At the beginning of December the Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust organised the fifth consecutive annual Aotea Bird Count. This involves coordinating many volunteers getting up in the early hours of a Friday morning to go out and count birds by looking and listening. The Medlands transect, counted by OME members, runs along the main road, so the earlier we set out the better to avoid Aotea rush hour traffic. Who knew there was such thing! We have quite a variety of ecosystems, visible and audible from our counting stations, so we can list quite a number of birds here, though some of them are not native. The results will be analysed and can be seen on the AGBET website in the near future.
Later in the same month we had a royal visitor of the avian kind. A royal spoonbill graced us with its presence in the Oruawharo estuary at the southern end of the beach. It would have been pretty cool to have been able to add that to the data sheet for the bird count.
In other birdy news there are now two separate tōrea-pango/variable oyster catcher pairs on the beach with one chick each and a colony of tarāpunga/red billed gulls with chicks have also settled here. Kororā/little penguins are still coming and going each day and the NZ dotterels are surely going to nest soon. Please be mindful of all the feathered treasures along the shore when you are out and about enjoying the beach, sharing their space.
