A number of recent posts have celebrated the delights of Pūkorokoro/Miranda, especially the Arctic migrants. One of those Arctic migrants are the Pacific Golden Plover/Kuriri and I thought they deserved a post of their own.

I have photographed Pacific Golden plover/Kuriri a number of times previously but mostly as odd isolated individuals and once as a reflex flight shot of a jinking, landing bird that I didn’t recognise until reviewing my images. This was a good opportunity to photograph them as a group with some beginning to show the black belly feathers of their breeding plumage.

The distance they were at required all the reach I could muster so added my 1.4x teleconverter to my Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S to achieve a focal length of 1120mm at f9. Heat haze is a major issue with long focal lengths and these coastal estuarine habitats are especially a challenge with heating land and air passing over cool water. Fortunately we were early enough in the day to achieve usable images.

Premigration the birds seems to aggregate into species groups and the Pacific Golden plover/Kuriri were grouped at the edge of the main wrybill flock and would episodically launch into flight with them.

Being a slightly obsessed birds in flight photographer, my hope was for some flight images but things didn’t look promising as the birds seemed mostly concerned with resting between their foraging shifts. Heading down the pond to seek the shade of a hide as the heat rose I saw a small flock of smallish waders in flight that didn’t quite look like knots so photographed a burst as much to identify them as anything else.

One reviewing my images, I found to my pleasant surprise that they were Pacific Golden plover/Kuriri.

For more information on this long distance Arctic migrant see the NZ Birds online page for Pacific Golden Plover/Kuriri

Photos with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S.