a blog about #birds

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…

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…

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…