In November 2019 I was lucky to again spend some days working with Fairy Terns / Tara iti at Waipu. I managed another good collection of images illustrating behaviours and have been working through processing these with the aim of publishing a couple of posts to share them. Images from my post on the homemade groundpod were also from this trip up North.

The latest edition of New Zealand Geographic has an excellent article, Fallen from Grace, by Kate Evans with outstanding photography by Richie Robinson. I thought the timing was good to share some of my recent photos from the last breeding season.

This photo shows the young male that I photographed in 2018 diving for a fish. Last time I saw him he was a bachelor male but this season had found a mate so was active courtship feeding which was great to see.

This sequence was captured with the Nikon D850 with battery pack at 9 frames/second and then stitched in Photoshop after batch processing the RAW files in Lightroom. Lens was the Nikon 500mm f5.6PF.