Having previously seen New Zealand Sea Lions at Enderby Island I was keen to and try and find some on the mainland. They are the world’s rarest Sea Lion and under significant threat so any sign of establishment of mainland colonies is encouraging. The Catlins are known as a regular haunt so we headed to see if we could find New Zealand Sea Lions at Surat Bay.

Surat Bay is named after the sailing ship that was wrecked there on New Years Day 1874, fortunately with no loss of life. It lies to the east of the Catlins estuary and is a long wide beach. Clumps of kelp camouflage resting Sea Lions which can be hard to spot if not moving. The kelp also harbours beach hoppers which were attracting White-faced Herons who were using their trick of twitching a foot to scare prey into moving and revealing themselves. I have seen New Zealand Dotterels using this same technique on beach hoppers.

We saw a Sami (sub-adult male) Sea Lion moving in the distance and heading toward him we almost tripped over a beautiful female resting with her head on a pillow of kelp. The  Sami had moved up into the flax on the dunes by the time we got to the end of the bay but we found another 2 resting together before heading back along the beach to where we had found the female. She was resting contently so we kept our distance to avoid disturbing her. 

Surat Bay is very close to Pounawea and worth exploring on a trip to the Catlins.

First 2 photos with Nikon D810 and Nikon 24-120mm f4VR lens. Second 2 photos with Nikon D500 and Nikon 300mm f4 PF lens with TC14 teleconverter