graham's blog (#birds)

I Saw Some Puffins

2026-07-03T14:30:00.000Z

Yesterday, I got to see some puffins in person for the first time ever!

Eastern Egg Rock Island is a 7-acre rock that sticks up to 20ft out above sea level, and it has been designated a protected habitat for puffins since 1973, thanks to the National Audoban's Project Puffin. It is the furthest point south where Atlantic Puffins breed in North America.

Visiting Port Clyde that morning for breakfast, we went to the herring gut coastal science center to see the brand new touch tank that had been installed. They had a room with several tanks for horseshoe crabs, sea urchins, a flounder, a jackknife clam, and a calico lobster^[1]. It was maybe the most lethal touch tank area I've ever seen^[2]. We spoke with the head of the center, Sally, who mentioned that she had heard a rumor that there might already be puffins this year on Eastern Egg Rock Island. Normally, "they don't arrive until July," but it just-barely being July and having heard such a promising rumor, we had to check it out.

The mouth of the St. George river has hundreds, maybe thousands, of lobster traps in it that are checked regularly by amateur lobstermen. We spent much of our voyage navigating the sailboat between the buoys of these traps^[3], which ranged from bright neon colors bobbing above the surface to completely-indistinguishable-from-sea-water colors bobbing just below the surface. While keeping our eyes peeled for the second category of buoy, we spotted a couple seals and a few porpoises along the way.

We read from Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of North America to prepare for any upcoming sightings. Puffins are in a family of birds called auks. In this same family are Guillemots and Razorbills, which both happened to also exist in this part of Maine and even around this particular island. All three are roughly the same size of black and white birds, with the bills and feet being the main differentiators.

About a mile away from Eastern Egg Rock Island, we could see flocks of seabirds flying over the island, and a large ferry-boat that looked promising: a ferry-boat full of tourists doesn't go to "the island where the puffins might be" unless there's something interesting to see. During the approach, we passed the binoculars around to see if anyone could spot a puffin. We had some close calls, some "I'm not sure, but maybe"s, and then eventually we all became sure at once that there were puffins and that we were seeing them.

While circling the island a few hundred feet away, I took the binoculars and lined them up with my phone camera to take some shoddy telescopic lens pictures. For being on a boat that was rocking around from waves, holding a phone in one hand and binoculars in the other, the fact that I was able to get any non-blurry photos of anything is kind of wild.

By our third or fourth lap of the island, it was clear that there were plenty of puffins on rocks, in the water, and soaring around. We had times where they were flying directly toward our boat or only a dozen feet off the bow in the water. The constant thrum of squawks of the other seabirds around the island kept us from being able to hear any puffin-specific sounds, but the sight alone was well worth it.

This trip to Maine had not been planned around puffin-sighting, but I'm so grateful to have gotten the opportunity.

Even rarer than a "blue lobster", which they also had a specimen of at the center's touch tank, the calico lobster is anywhere from a 1-in-30-million to 1-in-50-million occurrence depending on who you ask. Either way, that's even rarer than seeing a puffin. It was a big day for seeing creatures! ↩︎
It makes sense in hindsight that the creatures in a touch tank need to be fed and may not all be vegetarian, but when we arrived to learn the lobster had killed a clam that had just been placed in there a minute prior, it was surprising! Similarly, a starfish needed to be separated from a crab that was looking at it feistily. Thankfully, we were all adults who understood the circle of life just fine. ↩︎
Because of the specifics of the wind direction, we were motoring the sailboat, which meant that running over any lobster trap would very likely get the thick rope and/or metal chain connecting the trap to the buoy to wrap around the propeller and necessarily cause a bad time for everything involved. Some traps are one-buoy-to-one-cage, while others are 10-cages-along-a-chain-connecting-two-buoys. The former is easier to dodge and lower stakes in the worst case. ↩︎

Caring About a Royal Family

2024-12-08T23:45:00.000Z

In college, I spent a summer doing an independent study on how to make a robot bird that could fly. I watched documentaries, I did wikipedia deep-dives, I learned musculoskeletal structures and how they varied across species, I studied the modes of flight among differently sized and shaped birds, and I looked at the state of the art in ornithopter-design at private robotics companies. I learned that the reason predatory raptors like vultures are often depicted circling overhead in cartoons was to do with the ways that they used static soaring from thermal gradiants to gain altitude without using much of their own energy. I also learned that the bird with the largest wingspan in the world^[1], the albatross, used dynamic soaring to build speed from taking advantage of the boundary of wind gradients. I planned to use slope soaring as a means to achieve lift, since my college had a gradual slope with a prevailing wind, and because it seemed to have the least amoung of moving parts.^[2]

As soon as I learned about the albatross, I was compelled: it's a bird that has trouble taking off compared to other flight-ful birds with smaller wingspans. For this reason, albatrosses tend to live in areas with high prevailing wind-speeds -- often islands with sharp inclines at the coast. I read that one of the main areas in the world that has both albatrosses and everyday human populations is New Zealand. Since then, I've always wanted to go and see one. When we were planning our trip to Aotearoa New Zealand, seeing wild albatrosses was one of the things on my list that I had to do.^[3]

To understand why albatrosses are viewable at the tip of the Otago Peninsula, it helps to understand the history of the area. Per previous posts, Aotearoa was and is a sanctuary for birds because of how and when it was formed geologically. The Māori established the Pukekura pā^[4] on the hilltop at the end of the Otago peninsula in the mid 1600s. Skipping forward a few centuries, Dunedin^[5] was founded by Scottish colonists in the mid 1800s. After gold was discovered in 1861 at Gabriel's Gully, ~80km west of Dunedin, the ensuing gold rush exploded the population. By 1874, Dunedin was the city with the largest population in New Zealand. In the 1880s, fears rose that the Russian government might attack New Zealand at any moment.^[6] With Dunedin as a major target that needed defending, the Pukekura pā was torn down and the peninsula tip was cleared of any remaining trees to make way for Fort Taiaroa, along with an Armstrong Disappearing Gun inside it.

The first albatrosses seen in the area were in the late 1910s. Wildlife experts believe that the clearing of forests and removal of any predators, combined with human-led displacement of albatrosses at other islands nearby to New Zealand is what led them to begin nesting by Fort Taiaroa. Dr. Lance Richdale^[7] was the man credited for helping establish protection for the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head. Part of these efforts eventually included the Royal Albatross Centre and turning the entire Taiaroa Head area into a predator-free zone. Doing so has made it an area where a number of other endangered bird species can roost safely.

The life of a northern royal albatross like the ones I saw starts when two albatrosses mate^[8] and lay an egg. The chick is taken care of by its parents, who alternate staying with the chick to protect it. As it reaches adolescency, chicks will begin the 1000km/day journey over the Pacific Ocean towards the West Coast of Chile. Along the way, these albatrosses also use slope soaring off of the ocean waves themselves as a way to further conserve energy. They drink salt water and their bodies process the excess salt out of it, leading to the remainder coming out the tube-shaped nostrils, down the beak, and off the curved tip as waste. The tubular nostrils are also able to smell their prey from great distances. For Northern Royals, their diet is 80% squid, but generally any small ocean animal near the surface is fair game. They'll make the return trip to Aotearoa and begin mating before continuing to do this commute back and forth pretty much every year for the rest of their lives.

I can't describe how nice it was to finally get to see the albatrosses in real life after all this time. When we first arrived at the viewing area of the Centre -- a small windowed building on the top of the hill -- we could see about three birds sitting by their nests in the grass below. I made quiet peace with the fact that this would be all we got to see of them, and through the binoculars it was really neat to see their feathers and bills as they looked around. But the real highlight for me was when, out of nowhere, we spotted a pair of albatrosses repeatedly soaring by before they too landed to begin nesting. It was exhilarating to see them actually flying in real life.

Ranging from wingspans of 2.5–3.5m (8.2–11.5ft) depending on species. ↩︎
I unfortunately bit off more than I could chew with that project, and never got to a completed flight attempt before running out of time in the class. The knowledge has stayed with me, though. ↩︎
Others included in no particular order: 1. See kiwis, 2. Ride the TranzAlpine train, 3. See Hobbiton, and 4. Go to Milford Sound. All of these are pretty standard tourist things to do there, so there's a lot of readily-made itineraries built around them. ↩︎
In this case, a settlement on a hill defended by palisade walls and barriers, though there are various other meanings and usages in other contexts. You can read more about this history of this particular one at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03036758.1978.10429379 ↩︎
Dunedin is actually Scottish Gaelic for "Edinburgh," and many of the street names and placements were just borrowed directly from the layout of Edinburgh. ↩︎
There was never any attack. ↩︎
The wildlife experts on our tour at the centre showed us a delightful number of photos of Richdale being bitten/mouthed by the bills of albatross on his clothing or hands over the years. ↩︎
Usually for life. There tends to be a whole unique language of both sounds and ways that albatross pairs like to squawk and click-clack their bills together that helps them find each other year after year. That being said, there are records of one member of a pair dying or not coming back to the area during breeding season and then the other moving on to find a new mate. The oldest on record was named Grandma and wound up mating with three different birds across her 60+ year lifespan, including one at the age of 62 in 2021 before she passed. ↩︎

The World's Littlest Penguins

2024-12-06T05:10:00.000Z

When I was planning this trip, I kept asking friends who had been to Aotearoa New Zealand for input on what to do. One of those suggestions was to "see the little blue penguins who come ashore around dusk on the East coast of the Southern Island." We had a few days in Kaikōura and a few more in Dunedin planned, so as soon as we arrived at the former, we began asking around for details on where to find the penguins.

The locals told us that there was a Coast Guard station that was open to the public and that if you went there around dusk, that's where some penguins usually arrived each night. While traveling, we had been sticking to a pretty early bedtime (8 or 9pm) because we also tended to have early mornings, but springtime in the southern hemisphere meant that the sun was rising earlier and setting later, meaning civil twilight wasn't usually until 8:30.

We bravely stayed up late and drove the car in the dark for the first time^[1] to go to the coast guard station at dusk. It was a very small building^[2] by a beach with some areas to park nearby. There were some other cars next to ours with people watching the sunset. I donned our binoculars and began scanning the shore as we stepped onto the beach. No penguins, just waves.

We stuck around as it got chilly and darker, and we realized there was another beach on the other side of the coast guard station, which had a number of shallow rocks and tide pools because the tide was going out. A man wearing a camera with a large, telephoto lens showed up and asked if we had ever seen the penguins before. He mentioned that his tour guide told him this was the area where they usually came ashore in the evenings. We were reinvigorated because he looked seriously ready to see some penguins, so we perservered through the boredom and the cold for another hour or so.

Eventually, scanning the same area became tiring. We were just barely able to hear the chirps of oystercatchers or terns as they walked around or flew over the rocks. It was cold and late, and we couldn't tell if we heard anything nor whether the new shadows that appeared as the tide went out were actually penguins or just more rocks. We resolved to go home and try again later in the trip, but we didn't have high hopes from that night's failed search. To give us more of a guarantee, my partner looked online and was able to book some of the last spots in a viewing tour near Dunedin that said that it would refund you if you saw fewer than four penguins.

It was raining when we arrived in Dunedin. Beyond the Otago Harbour at the edge of downtown, and more specifically beyond the Otakou penninsula, is the open and vast Pacific Ocean^[3], which means two things: prevailing winds and frequent light rain.

From Wikipedia:

Dunedin has relatively low rainfall in comparison to many of New Zealand's cities, with usually only between 600 and 750 millimetres (30 in) recorded per year. However, wet weather is frequent, since much of this rainfall occurs in drizzle or light rain and heavy rain is relatively rare. Dunedin is one of the cloudiest major centres in the country, recording approximately 1,850 hours of bright sunshine per annum.

In summary, you can think of Dunedin as generally having the climate of Seattle. It has a long water-feature connecting the heart of the city to the open ocean, and it has frequent wet weather and clouds. Thankfully, the rainstorm of the day had finished before our tour began. We drove out to the end of the Otago peninsula and arrived at the conservency where the penguin-viewing would happen.

We were given a brief explanation about the penguin's habitat and lifecycle from the wildlife experts. The Little Blue Penguin^[4] is the world's smallest penguin, at a height of up to about a foot when fully grown. Starting at dawn, they swim out to the ocean, and eat small fish and invertebrates all day. At dusk, they arrive back home and usually call out to each other to cooperatively land on shore at similar times to help avoid predators. This was where and when we would get to see them.

The viewing platform was an elevated structure built by the conservancy so that penguins could waddle under it and get to their burrows, and so that tourists like us could safely view them from afar. In the blustery dusk wind facing shore, we stood as the sun set and our guides made hot coffee and tea to drink while we waited. They told us the same thing that the man with the telephoto lens in Kaikōura said: you're more likely to hear them before you see them, due to how hidden they are in the water because of their feathers. Below, you can see video of one group waddling up while another group lands in the background:

Penguins arriving on shore Link to the uncompressed video

When landing, a "raft" of anywhere from a dozen to several dozen penguins will all launch out of the water together and land on the beach, where they'll then waddle up the shore to get to their respective burrows. We were told that seals tend not to eat penguins unless the seal is juvenile. These penguins have such incredibly tiny and dense feathers that seals quickly learn to stay away from such a terrible and dry mouthfeel. Their number main predators tend to be gulls, eagles, seals, orcas, and sharks out at sea. At dusk, the same mustelids and other negative human-related animals I've mentioned before for the nighttime. Thankfully, as part of this conservancy's work, they created an almost entirely predator-free zone for the penguins.

Another reason for landing at night time is that the penguins have poor eyesight that can get even worse in bright light like sun or the flash of cameras. Before being led out to the platform, we were all instructed to test our phones in both camera and video modes to avoid any flash photography. The platform itself had some LED lights that shed constant, diffuse light on the penguins as they made their way to their burrows. According to the guides, these lights had been scientifically tested with this penguin population to see if they'd be less likely to return to their burrows if the light was on near them, and it had no effect on their behavior and was deemed safe. This meant that even after dusk, we were able to take nicely-lit photos of the penguins for about an hour before the lights turned off and we were encouraged back up the stairs to the parking lot.

As the first penguins came in, while everyone else was focused on capturing photos or videos of them as they made landfall or began waddling, I had an area near the side of the platform mostly all to myself when the penguins came waddling past the platform. The walls of the platform were metal railings with thin black nylon strings connecting the railing to the floor. This meant that you could pretty easily get a clear photo of the penguins in between the strings, while still respecting the distances for wildlife safety.

It's hard to get photos of them standing still at all. Even when they're not waddling, the heads are moving, they're preening their feathers, or they're otherwise trying to shake off the water from their recent swim. This was the best and closest photo of any I was able to take.

Over the course of the night, we easily saw about 150 little blue penguins. There were penguins who would happily just chill close to the platform, penguins who would go home to their burrows to tend to their young, penguins who launched themselves onto the shore only to dive back into the ocean again and repeat that process a few times.

As we were leaving, we had to walk up an elevated wooden path and some stairs. Every minute or so of walking, we would stop as the people just ahead of us gently told the penguins who had wound up on the elvated path to keep going and not block the way. We didn't take any pictures since the LED lights were off and we were just walking by the glow of dim red lights, but that was probably actually the closest we got all night. Our guides also recommended to check under your car before leaving, just in case.

I'm so glad that we listened to my friend's suggestion. These penguins were delightful, and as cold as it was out there at the beginning, we were warmed by the adrenaline of seeing the cutest little dudes surf onto the rocks and then waddle up the beach while squawking the whole time. I'd say the entire thing was well worth it, and I'm thankful we found a wildlife center that would allow us the opportunity to safely take photos of them too.

That being said, due to some technical details I get into in the footnotes, I'm also going to include another species as I continue my endemic birds of Aotearoa photos. Here's the red-billed gull, its chick, and its egg, photographed nearby to where I saw the penguins:

It was already difficult to drive on the other side of the road in the daylight, so we'd generally been trying to get all of our driving done before nightfall for fear that it'd be even more difficult then. ↩︎
When you're an isolated island nation the size of Colorado, there's only so much of a coast guard presence you need to be properly prepared. This may be another instance where US subconscious assumptions about things^[5] were not aligned with reality. ↩︎
The next body of land you reach if you follow the same latitude to the East is the West Coast of Chile. If you follow the same latitude to the West, the first body of land that you would reach is the East Coast of Argentina. Aotearoa is South of all of Asia, Africa, and Australia, which makes it exposed to oceanic elements. ↩︎
Technically, there were two subspecies of Little Blue Penguin: the Little Penguin (endemic to the rest of Aotearoa) and the Little Blue Penguin (endemic to Australia and the Otago peninsula). Pretty recently, (in 2015 and 2016) new studies of mitochondrial DNA showed a clearer delineation between the two subspecies, and it seems like they may be officially reclassified as different species within our lifetime. ↩︎
Like "how much military spending is reasonable for a country?" ↩︎

Listening on Hikes

2024-12-03T04:40:00.000Z

I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some seals. It turned out this was a "maybe view the seals from the boat you take to get to beach number one, so that you can hike up over hills through a forest to beach number two" situation, but thankfully we had prepared for that just in case with extra food and water.

We passed by Split Apple Rock in the ferry, and I began thinking about how many photos I had already taken of birds, only a few days into the trip. I realized that I had documented about two bird species per day^[1], so I took my phone off of airplane mode for the first time outside of a hotel and spent a not-insignificant amount of my roaming data budget for the trip downloading Cornell Lab's Merlin Bird Identification App along with the New Zealand-specific bird pack. With this on my phone, I knew that even without service, I would be able to take pictures or recordings of birds and look them up in real time.

As we landed, I immediately got to do so: there were several weka running around the beach, harassing tourists. Weka are flightless birds and more importantly, opportunistic scamps: they know that humans have food in their backpacks for hikes, and they know that humans leave backpacks on the ground to take cute photos for Instagram or whatever. While the humans are away from their backpacks, the weka will run over and either try to drag the pack away if it's little or unzip the pack and take what's inside if it's big. They're surprisingly fast runners and incredibly quiet.

Several times on our hike, a weka would pop out of a bush that we didn't realize it was in and frighten us in the process. We could be standing around eating a snack and then turn around and find a weka behind us a minute later that we didn't hear approach. I got to see two of them fighting over a piece of lettuce they found at the beach. I managed to capture a video of the chase and of one of them squawking as it ran away:

(Note: if you're reading this on an RSS feed reader, and it doesn't support video or audio html tags, you may need to go to my actual website to be able to see and hear them. To do so on inoreader, I just scroll all the way to the bottom and then keep scrolling and it loads the actual page)

Weka chase Link to the uncompressed video

Continuing up the trail, we gained elevation quickly, and I kept noticing about every 90 seconds or so that the calls of the birds would change as we rounded bends. In the past, I haven't really tried to look for birds as I'm hiking, but with this new-to-me Merlin "pokedex-but-with-real-animals" app, I found myself stopping to see where along the path I could go to get better recordings, and then using that triangulation to figure out what tree the bird was in. This meant a lot more stops as I started hearing new bird calls.

A silvereye | tauhou, a eurasian blackbird, and a common chaffinch Direct link to audio file

The app was fascinating: I could see a recording of multiple birds and the app would show which ones were which along with the timestamp of the recording. In the above recording of three birds, the short, high-pitched "ee"s in the background are the silvereye | tauhou, the melodical chirp that comes in secondly and sounds like it's posing a question is the eurasian blackbird, and then the third, repetative sotcatto chirping is the common chaffinch. I began to be able to place these calls among the others as the hike went on, which made identification easier.

As I started to focus more on the sounds of the birds and the rest of the forest that I was hearing, I also began to think about my interaction with those things online. I really enjoy reading blogposts about travel that friends do to foreign countries or even journeys they take around their cities. That said, it's one thing to get to read about them and see the pictures along the way, but I realized that I have very little idea for what the sounds of those places are, despite audio capturing being similarly easy as picture or video. In the forest of Abel Tasman National Park, I found myself in a soundscape, not only of generic forest with a beach on the periphery, but of specifically this place with these birds making their calls.

Tomtit chirping Direct link to audio file

It's helpful that the Merlin app stores the recordings locally by default. I kept using it to try to record birds as I got closer to them. In some cases, like the tomtit^[2], I was able to find it and get a nice recording, but it flew away before I could capture a picture.

Gray gerygone | riroriro chirping Direct link to audio file

Whenever possible, I'd try to whistle the call back while I was looking for various birds. I don't know if I did a good enough job replicating any of the bird calls for them to be drawn to my whistling, but at the very least, it helped my ear to keep focused on the bird call. That being said, the call of the tūī^[3] is so elaborate that I gave up pretty immediately.

I kept hearing that call as one I didn't recognize and saying "who are you??" under my breath.^[4] I tried recording a few times, but I found that the other birds were too loud to be able to hear anything over them. Eventually, I was able to find where the tūī was singing from and got any picture at all before it flew off. This wasn't the last tūī I'd see on the trip, thankfully, but none of the others were as photogenic, nor were any of them in quiet enough settings for recording:

Once we had reached the peak of the hill that we were ascending, we stopped briefly for our packed lunch and a "random" weka sighting as we unwrapped our food. Then we started to hear new sounds echoing off the valley below us as we made our descent.

New Zealand bellbird chirping Direct link to audio file

This one was beautiful and made a lot more sense once I learned the name: it was reminiscent of hearing the church bells go off across a town or a city. I never got to see it, but its sound continued to bounce around the valley every few minutes throughout the afternoon.

Continuing on, soon enough, we began to hear a new call that was easy for me to parrot^[5] with my whistling. We were down at a sort of in-between-beaches beach that was pretty close to where we were going when the sound began to be directly in front of us, and there was a new bird -- a kākā, perched on a branch high above the trail:

I was able to get a little bit closer, and snapped this next photo. But then a New Zealand pigeon | kererū^[6] arrived from behind us and the kākā was very upset and began dive-bombing it, so we made our exit to avoid getting caught up in the crossfire.

The uniqueness of there being so many birds to observe in a new place was enough of a distraction for me to lose track of the tiredness from hiking. I'm curious to go try to try some hikes now that I'm home, both in parks and beyond the city. When there's built-in stops because you're excited by something, that's a far different feeling for me from stopping because you're running up against a personal limitation. And maybe the motivation factor isn't the hike itself as much as the opportunity to go do that fun thing of cataloging birds again? Only time will tell.

This post has contained several endemic-to-New Zealand birds (weka, tauhou, tomtit, tūī, riroriro, New Zealand bellbird, kākā, kererū) already, but I also wanted to include one more that I found later on when we arrived at the beach at the end of our hike. Alternating walking around in the sand and washing themselves in the small stream of river water that was running directly down the beach and into the ocean were a pair of variable oystercatchers. One of them was sitting comfortably in the wind by tucking its bill behind a wing while the other walked about:

I managed to stick to this rate for all 18 days of the trip, winding up with 36 identified species, despite Merlin having trouble identifying some bird calls and despite me having trouble identifying some birds I couldn't take pictures of because we were driving past them so quickly. ↩︎
Among birds that I didn't know of at the start of the trip, the tomtit is the top of my list. I love when a bird is "blorby," which the tomtit is 100%, and I also love when it kind of looks like they're wearing balaclavas over their heads because of the coloring of their feathers. ↩︎
Link to a video of the tūī doing its calls. ↩︎
I did this again later on a smaller hike later that day when I heard this bird call that I've described as "unknown cackler". I tried looking it up on Merlin but got no results. After all, as nice as Merlin is for identifying, it currently only boasts being able to identify 30-40% of birds on Aotearoa. If you know what bird this is, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. ↩︎
heh heh ↩︎
Because of what I assume is island gigantism, New Zealand Pigeons are about 2x-3x the size of US city pigeons and you tend to hear them before you see them because of the sounds of their flapping wings through the foliage. ↩︎