Following the recent BirdsNZ conference in New Plymouth we took the rest of the week to head home. The plan was to spend 3 days at Bushy Park and then travel home via Turangi in search of Whio/Blue Ducks.

Whio/Blue Duck are one of my (many) favourite birds. I find them beautiful and interesting in the way they thrive in rapidly flowing mountain rivers. Their habitat is a lovely place to spend time. The Tongariro river is now a reliable place to see them and we were rewarded by seeing at least 3 birds and having a chance to get some images during a brief stop.

It’s always a priority to get some nice sharp images but it can be interesting to try something different to try and get a sense of their habitat. Using a slow shutter speed can give a sense of motion to the flowing water but comes with the risk of blurring the bird due to camera shake with a long telephoto or subject movement. As with pan blur flight images it is high risk, low yield.

Circumstances weren’t ideal with no clear views and limited opportunities but it was again a situation where the “recall settings” function of the Nikon Z9 allows a quick and easy one button switch from settings for motion freezing to slow shutter. Using the slow shutter speeds required with a 560mm telephoto would be impossible without the amazing vibration reduction now available.

Photos with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 400mm f4.5 VR S with 1.4x teleconverter