Bird-watching is a highlight of all our trips — especially this one, where we expected to see many birds we had never seen before, as well as those we saw in our prior trip to New Zealand and Australia.
We took with us The Hand Guide to the Birds of New Zealand and information about various wildlife tours. New Zealand has many nature reserves (like U.S. National Wildlife Refuges) set aside to protect endangered birds, animals and plants. Guided tours are available for each one, and are sometimes the only way to visit one. We toured as many nature reserves as our schedule and the weather allowed.
In some ways, birding in New Zealand is ridiculously easy, because there are relatively few species. For example, there is just one kind of sparrow (House sparrow), one swallow (Welcome swallow), one warbler (Grey warbler), one large accipiter (Australian harrier). There are three kinds of gulls — the little one with the black bill and legs (Black-billed gull), the little one with the bright red bill and legs (Red-billed gull) and the big one (Black-backed gull) — no problem deciding which one you're looking at.
The seabirds are a different story. There are 11 kinds of albatrosses, 13 shearwaters and 36 petrels! We wouldn't have seen any of those, much less known which one, without the guided tours.
The rare birds are very rare. Again, we wouldn't have seen and identified any of those without the guided tours of nature reserves. An exception: We found and identified our 499th life bird (New Zealand dotterel) all by ourselves — an especially satisfying experience.
The trip met our bird-watching expectations. In a bit more than seven weeks, we saw 77 different species of birds, 39 of them for the first time. Here are photos of about half of them.
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