Farewell Spit Gannets

tony
April 14, 2019
birds / New Zealand

Australasian Gannet flying low over the smooth sand of Farewell Spit

In my last post on our Farewell Spit Tour I mentioned that the Gannet Tour visiting the colony at the tip of Farewell Spit was unavailable due to timing of tides. I had rationalised missing out on this by wondering what the point was of photographing more Gannets as I have gigabytes of images from Muriwai, Cape Kidnappers, the Hauraki Gulf and Bay of Plenty. The Farewell Spit Gannet colony is the third mainland colony in New Zealand with the remainder being on islands. The thing that makes this colony unique is that it is based on sand and the others are on rock substrate habitats.

This pair of Gannets approached at speed reminiscent of fighter jets low on a strafing run.

I had really enjoyed our Farewell Spit tour and had enjoyed seeing the variety of birds including some gannets passing by. When we finished up our stop at the lighthouse a bit early and Charles suggested we would take a brief detour “the wrong way” on heading home I got a bit excited as the chance of seeing the gannets was coinciding with some nice late afternoon light. We stopped on the northern side of the spit in line with the colony which we could just make out in the distance but with a northerly wind blowing the birds were flying into the wind directly toward us and passing close by. This gave some lovely opportunities for pictures and chances to photograph gannets skimming low over the sand and even dragging their wingtips on the smooth tide-washed beach.

A gannet chases it’s shadow low enough to use ground effect for increased lift.

When photographing birds at sea it’s always a buzz to capture a wing dragging image of an albatross, petrel or shearwater. It really captures their mastery of the air right at the interface with the water. I have never seen gannets flying so close to the sand in the way that birds in flight fly over the sea and never imagined a wing dragging image in that environment. I was excited to see a number of images illustrating this on my LCD. It was a real bonus to end the day with some unique images.

Despite only stopping for 10 minutes or so it was a really exciting and productive session witnessing and recording a behaviour that I had not seen before.

Photos with Nikon D500 and Nikon 500mm f5.6PF lens