Recently a last minute change in plans saw us spending a couple of days at Pūkorokoro/Miranda and then at Te Puru north of Thames. We had some great weather and took a picnic on a beach walk from Te Puru to Waiomu where the Waiomu Beach Cafe is a great place for a coffee (and pie, pastry…etc!).
The receding tide was perfect with plenty of beach to walk on and plenty of habitat for birds foraging for food. Most plentiful seemed to be Kōtare/Kingfishers who had dropped down from the trees onto the rocks to search the shallows exposed by the receding tide for prey. Being visual hunters with excellent eyesight they are difficult to approach, even obliquely. As a result there were plenty of opportunities for flight shots as they flushed while we negotiated the rocky shore.
The Nikon Z9 with Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S did a good job of locking focus and tracking these small fast birds against the sea background so I had a few shots worth editing.
My favourite image from the walk was this final one and there was a nice lesson from it. If the priority had been photography, I would have looked for a rock that was being used as a hunting perch and found a place to conceal my silhouette against some rocks and waited for a bird to return to the perch. In this situation of photographing while walking it was pretty much all opportunistic photography.
I saw a bird on a rock and used the shade of a tree cast on the beach to slowly approach while concealing most of my shape behind an intervening rock., Getting as close as I could I began to photograph the Kōtare which was smallish in frame but close enough to make an image similar to the one at the top of this post. Because I was in shade and standing still, another Kōtare, apparently unaware of me, flew in and landed on the rock I had been using as partial cover between me and the bird I was photographing. Because my camera was up it took little movement to reframe on the much closer bird and get a sequence of nice images. Yet another example of being still and unobtrusive (even in relatively plain sight) and allowing the birds to approach you.
Photo with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S.
