Birds, moths, geckos, skinks, orchids! (to name a few). All up on @iNaturalistNZ and openly licensed. Provisional CMKMStephens elsewhere set up for sinking ship
A BIG tick on my wishlist, the South Island Lichen Moth (Declana egregia).
Check your $100 bill the next time you have one for some mysterious reason people 💸💸
Until such time as I do move entirely, this is still a place to scream Fucking @metlinkwgtn , with cancelled commuter trains at peak time on the HVL, with bus replacements that don't exist, on a day pouring with rain.
@Invertebratist Colin Miskelly and Annemieke were mostly pulling from burrows, a couple were picked up hanging around in the surface (prospecting burrows, looking for a fight, etc)
and here's some Fairy Prions and band checking.
Apart from maybe some documentation with photos I'm not sure I did anything useful though. I did hold/restrain a Fairy Prion briefly - it wasn't happy about it - not the little claws in 3rd photo.
I've realised I forgot about the NI Mātātā / Fernbirds.
Having been translocated several years ago now, the island is FULL of them. Peeping (verbally, visually) at you at all times, in all places.
@shaunryan I'm certainly a weevil enthusiast, but I've only seen 55 species...and there are 100s of them in NZ alone: https://t.co/HlrP2WuitW)
perhaps even an Honorary Associate Weevil Cadet through a bit of field work on Mana and elsewhere.
For the pit trap monitoring, it's due to the weevils again, ie, how do lizards and invertebrates fare after the flax weevils have annihilated all the flaxes they liked to live in? I've never handled so many lizards before, but great experience.
Northern grass skink
No trip to Mana Island is complete without coastal jumping spiders.
These are 'Marpissa marina', though almost certainly a complex of different species across the country.
I had to wait perfectly still above the spider's lookout pebble, as they kept going down among the rocks.
My 'big' score for the weekend was finally getting some photos of Hutton's Speargrass Weevil (Lyperobius huttoni)
These were translocated from Te Kopahou Reserve on on the Wellington south coast. I've never managed to find them there, nor on Mana until now.
Overall, and without having any intent of groping them, the birds were a bit hard to get shots of - unusual. Usually I come away with a zillion kākāriki photos.
Here's some of the better Yellow-crowned kākāriki photos.
On the 2nd night I hadn't been tasked to anything, so I went out to the cliffs for the artificial burrow monitoring - checking occupation and bands of Fairy Prions/tītī wainui and Diving Petrels/kuaka.
Here's a Diving Petrel
To round off the geckos and skinks, a side goal on the island was to get some more shots of the McGregor's Skink - a big one that likes sunny beaches, and is relict to just some offshore islands.
and this was achieved.