Skip to main content

Albatross

Over the past few years a small group of guys has periodically chartered a boat in Moeraki and headed out about 10 km offshore to fish for blue cod. I have sometimes gone with them. We each pay $100, leave the Moeraki wharf at about 7 am and return at lunchtime with a total of about 40 kg of fillets. Rods and reels and bait are supplied, help is given removing fish from hooks and the fish are filleted on board. It's a food gathering exercise, pure and simple, but the fishing is not the only reason I tag along. That far from shore, the bird life is astonishing.


There are the usual red billed and black backed gulls, of course and also terns, petrels and prions. But what I go to see are the albatrosses. As we head out from shore they begin to follow in their ones and twos. There are the little albatrosses, the New Zealand White Capped Mollymawks, with a wingspan of a mere 2 metres. We chug out to sea doing perhaps 12 knots, and these glide past a twice that speed, rest on the water, wait for us to get a kilometre or so in front, then glide past again in a game akin to leapfrog.



 When the fish begin to arrive, numbers increase until it is not uncommon to have 40 or 50 of them around the boat. The fish are filleted on board and the skeleton complete with  head and guts is tossed overboard where it is swallowed whole by one of the birds after a keen contest to reach it and take it.


As numbers gather the mollymawks get bolder. They sit at the end of the lines and will try and snatch fish from the hooks before they can be landed.


Soon the big girls and boys arrive; the Royal Albatrosses with their 3 metre wingspans


They glide in with a mastery of skill that amounts to genius. With barely a flap they sweep past at 3 or 4 times the windspeed using their great feet as rudders and aerilons.


They sit quietly with the mollymawks, waiting for the fish carcases


They are fearless in approaching the boat and seem to have procedures well sussed. They leave hooks well alone, seeming to know that the tidbit of bait on offer is nothing compared to the prize that awaits. Then, when the real bounty is on offer they show no respect for man or machine.


We return when we have filled our quota, and as we near shore the numbers begin to decline, so that the last kilometre or two back to land is in the company of the (seemingly) tiny gulls.

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
:-)'Love how it is not only about fish and food but this bird community as well.
Kelvin Wright said…
I think the boat owner is missing a whole market. He should set up trips for photographers and/or bird watchers. Some fish waste to keep the birds near the boat and he'd have some pretty happy customers. He could charge the same as a fishing trip and it would be less work for him.
Kate said…
Marvelous images. I highjacked them when you posted on FB. They have been admired on the Ornithological Society FB page for a while now...

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old