Yesterday we took a trip out to the Gannet Colony.\u00a0 Gannets are sea birds, related to boobies and cormorants (which they call shags in NZ).\u00a0 To get there, we got on a trailer hitched to the back of a tractor, and went out along a beach for 9km.\u00a0 The beach was rather narrow, with the ocean on one side and tall, steep, crumbly cliffs on the other.\u00a0 In places, parts of the cliffs had fallen down and blocked the beach, so the tractor, with us in tow, went out into the ocean, splashing and slipping.\u00a0 It was crazy fun.<\/p>\n
You can only do this trip at low tide. At high tide the water is too deep and there isn’t enough beach for the tractors to go on. At one point the tractor even got stuck, and at another the driver had to get out with a pickaxe and break up a meter tall boulder so we could get through.<\/p>\n
Then at the end we hiked up to the colony, with hundreds of birds.\u00a0 Apparently this is one of the largest gannet colonies in the world.\u00a0 If you’ve seen the movie “Winged Migration” (which you should!) gannets are the birds that dive into the water like arrows.\u00a0 But there was no diving going on yesterday, mostly raising chicks.\u00a0 This is near the end of the brooding season, and the chicks were teenagers getting ready to fly.\u00a0 On their first flight, they take off for Australia.\u00a0 The trip is so dangerous that 70 percent or more of them will not make it back to NZ to have their own chicks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday we took a trip out to the Gannet Colony.\u00a0 Gannets are sea birds, related to boobies and cormorants (which they call shags in NZ).\u00a0 To get there, we got on a trailer hitched to the back of a tractor, and went out along a beach for 9km.\u00a0 The beach was rather narrow, with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}