Banded Dotterels (tuturiwhatu), G7, 100-400

Our dotterels are back. I have really mixed feelings about this.

These are the declining Banded Dotterel (Tuturiwhatu) which NZ wide has a declining population of under 50,000 birds. This is a quite different situation from the state of the New Zealand Dotterel population.

I posted a quite nice image from the end of the last season: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4356903

The birds left shortly after I took those photos but I doubt the chicks survived - being so close to a residential area they will almost certainly have been killed by domestic cats.

And this season, those birds closest to residential areas are already suffering - recently one cat may have killed 5 birds (there were only 9 at the nesting site). Yet thoughtless people think it is cute to take their cats down to the beach to watch the sunset which habituates cats into visiting the beach.

Dogs are also perceived as a problem, but while it often looks like a dog is chasing the birds, in reality, the birds are usually leading the dog away from the nest. Dog owners seem unaware that they can be prosecuted for allowing the dogs to chase dotterels.

Even the birds that are far away from residential areas are threatened - some breed on a very exposed gravel coastal dune area, which has lots of driftwood; hedgehogs come down to the beach to forage for insects under the rotting wood, and also predate on the dotterel eggs if available.

And well intentioned people cause a lot of damage - for example, one well meaning neighbour daily walks all over the beach with her dog off lead, picking up rubbish. She would never even see a dotterel nest even if she walked through one.

This year it seems the most successful nesting area is the one furthest from our village, so last Sunday afternoon I threw the G7 and 100-400 and a monopod into a small backpack and cycled (into a strong headwind) about 45min down the coastal gravel road.

These guys are hard to see, you generally have to sit for quite a while until you spot them. They are quite territorial so they are most often visible while chasing each other.

A rahui has been put in place to prevent people from entering the nesting area, and with some fencing this may help a little. There is a fairly active team of volunteers monitoring and trapping.

I like m4/3 because it is so lightweight - the equivalent gear in FF would both cost more and not fit in a small backpack, and for this kind of casual bird photography the G7 and 100-400 is a great combination, even though the bokeh on the 100-400 tends to be a bit harsh (if not downright weird in some situations).

Anyway - these guys are very cute.

Dotterel on a Raoulia mat.

Male in breeding plumage

Female in breeding plumage

Nice birds. They are similar to our Semipalmated Plowers in Canada.

Best, AIK

Semipalmated Plower in the marsh

Another Semipalmated Plower

hindesite wrote:

Our dotterels are back. I have really mixed feelings about this.

These are the declining Banded Dotterel (Tuturiwhatu) which NZ wide has a declining population of under 50,000 birds. This is a quite different situation from the state of the New Zealand Dotterel population.

I posted a quite nice image from the end of the last season: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4356903

The birds left shortly after I took those photos but I doubt the chicks survived - being so close to a residential area they will almost certainly have been killed by domestic cats.

And this season, those birds closest to residential areas are already suffering - recently one cat may have killed 5 birds (there were only 9 at the nesting site). Yet thoughtless people think it is cute to take their cats down to the beach to watch the sunset which habituates cats into visiting the beach.

Dogs are also perceived as a problem, but while it often looks like a dog is chasing the birds, in reality, the birds are usually leading the dog away from the nest. Dog owners seem unaware that they can be prosecuted for allowing the dogs to chase dotterels.

Even the birds that are far away from residential areas are threatened - some breed on a very exposed gravel coastal dune area, which has lots of driftwood; hedgehogs come down to the beach to forage for insects under the rotting wood, and also predate on the dotterel eggs if available.

And well intentioned people cause a lot of damage - for example, one well meaning neighbour daily walks all over the beach with her dog off lead, picking up rubbish. She would never even see a dotterel nest even if she walked through one.

This year it seems the most successful nesting area is the one furthest from our village, so last Sunday afternoon I threw the G7 and 100-400 and a monopod into a small backpack and cycled (into a strong headwind) about 45min down the coastal gravel road.

These guys are hard to see, you generally have to sit for quite a while until you spot them. They are quite territorial so they are most often visible while chasing each other.

A rahui has been put in place to prevent people from entering the nesting area, and with some fencing this may help a little. There is a fairly active team of volunteers monitoring and trapping.

I like m4/3 because it is so lightweight - the equivalent gear in FF would both cost more and not fit in a small backpack, and for this kind of casual bird photography the G7 and 100-400 is a great combination, even though the bokeh on the 100-400 tends to be a bit harsh (if not downright weird in some situations).

Anyway - these guys are very cute.

Thanks for your update on the Banded Dotterel and their plight.  I grew up in NZ where almost every household had a cat, many two.  Now living in Australia for 40 years I've seen what they can do to wild fauna, am heartened at the improving attitude in Australia to cat's destructive impact but continue to wonder why things don't appear to have changed in NZ. Or have they?

hindesite wrote:

MarkDavo wrote:

Thanks for your update on the Banded Dotterel and their plight. I grew up in NZ where almost every household had a cat, many two. Now living in Australia for 40 years I've seen what they can do to wild fauna, am heartened at the improving attitude in Australia to cat's destructive impact but continue to wonder why things don't appear to have changed in NZ. Or have they?

No, I don't think things have changed - we still seem to have a 2nd Amendment right to bear cats

We've made progress in some areas, particularly with fully fenced sanctuaries, (Zealandia, for example) and these have a really significant effect on the surrounding birdlife too - though might even be detrimental to dotterels since falcons are more prevalent.

Are the sancturaries privately owned?

If you love nature there is no better common denominator than Homo sapiens sapiens being responsible for countless extinctions. Not cats, not dogs not any so called invasive species that is not invasive at all. It invaded nothing, it was kidnapped and brought to a place. They just fend for themselves. In research I have seen in the UK cats are rarely responsible for killing birds and chicks. They to the surprise of the researchers and owners went for the easiest meal: the neighbours cats food....I wonder ow well this is researched in New Zealand because in general in ecology prejudice and subjectiveness runs amoc, objectivity and coming with solid evidence and facts is scarce.

A lot of species have come to many parts of the world with Homo sapiens sapiens as a vector. There is no objective reason to exclude this species as a vector. Just preference and to my mind an ultra conservative way of thinking in which all that was needs to remain and is better than everything that is new. Which reminds me a lot of how humans act when it comes to human immigrants...

Jorginho wrote:

If you love nature there is no better common denominator than Homo sapiens sapiens being responsible for countless extinctions. Not cats, not dogs not any so called invasive species that is not invasive at all. It invaded nothing, it was kidnapped and brought to a place. They just fend for themselves. In research I have seen in the UK cats are rarely responsible for killing birds and chicks. They to the surprise of the researchers and owners went for the easiest meal: the neighbours cats food....I wonder ow well this is researched in New Zealand because in general in ecology prejudice and subjectiveness runs amoc, objectivity and coming with solid evidence and facts is scarce.

A lot of species have come to many parts of the world with Homo sapiens sapiens as a vector. There is no objective reason to exclude this species as a vector. Just preference and to my mind an ultra conservative way of thinking in which all that was needs to remain and is better than everything that is new. Which reminds me a lot of how humans act when it comes to human immigrants...

Hi Jorginho, while Homo sapiens sapiens is a vector feral cats have taken to the Australian continent and preyed relentlessly on native fauna unaccustomed to such a capable hunter.

Overview of the impact of feral cats on Australian native fauna from the Australian Federal Environment Dept lays out the damage done by this animal, of which there are 25 million in Australia.

MarkDavo wrote:

Jorginho wrote:

If you love nature there is no better common denominator than Homo sapiens sapiens being responsible for countless extinctions. Not cats, not dogs not any so called invasive species that is not invasive at all. It invaded nothing, it was kidnapped and brought to a place. They just fend for themselves. In research I have seen in the UK cats are rarely responsible for killing birds and chicks. They to the surprise of the researchers and owners went for the easiest meal: the neighbours cats food....I wonder ow well this is researched in New Zealand because in general in ecology prejudice and subjectiveness runs amoc, objectivity and coming with solid evidence and facts is scarce.

A lot of species have come to many parts of the world with Homo sapiens sapiens as a vector. There is no objective reason to exclude this species as a vector. Just preference and to my mind an ultra conservative way of thinking in which all that was needs to remain and is better than everything that is new. Which reminds me a lot of how humans act when it comes to human immigrants...

Hi Jorginho, while Homo sapiens sapiens is a vector feral cats have taken to the Australian continent and preyed relentlessly on native fauna unaccustomed to such a capable hunter.

So they either adapt or die. There are no resitrictions to nature other than adapt or not. This souds like " it is not fair". "Being fair" has never been a part of nature. It is just a human view on nature. It is also not fair when a full grown lion kills defenseless cubs. That is a very possible human view on a male lion killing 6 little kittens. But now morals are out of the window and the same ecologist tell me not to interfere...

Also: most newcomers do not succeed at all. In New Zealand there are more than 20000 known immigrants since the arrival of men. Less than 2000 have succeeded. The rest are not capable to survive. We could say the opposite and that the ones that came first are too competitive and weed them out. One is not better than the other objectively.

Overview of the impact of feral cats on Australian native fauna from the Australian Federal Environment Dept lays out the damage done by this animal, of which there are 25 million in Australia.

I know these kind of arcticles and have read hundreds o them.

What has happened before people can just write this scietifi nonsense is a brainwash over decades (ever since 1958) where books for scholars are not objective at all. The wording is valueladen, double standards run amoc and it is biased. What we would like is that scientists are impartial and use impartial wording. So native and nonnative is where it starts, invasive is another one. "Pest" is going further down the line away from science and it continues.

The species you mention, these cats are native. They are born there in Australia by now, for many generations. They do well, so they are adapted too and very there is nothing to distinguish these cats from any other animal in Australia nor wood any ecologist be able too. They need to look at the history to assess it because behaviour etc is not a way to distinguish these from any other animal.

I can start a whol e diatribe but in short I am disgusted with the ease Aistralians and New Zealanders, among others, are themselves immigrants but are going to great lentghts as a society to prevent other human immigrants to enter ""their" country and kill animals that in their view do not belong by the millons too. Do these people change their ways? Are they abandoning their sheep that have changed millions of hectares? Not in general. Do they stop with their agricultural endeavours that have done the same? No. Do they stop using poison on their crops that kill millions of native insects and other animals? No. Do they stop emitting Co2 or are they front runner, when climate change is changing habitats worldwide not just Australia? Far from it: per capita you are the number one polluter.

It is much easier, as with humans, to point your finger to someone or something else than start with the main reason of what you seem to hold dear to your heart: yourself and your own way of living.

I do not mean you as a person, I mean Australia as a society.

From a logical, natural point of view it is pretty simple: nature does not know a concept of nativity. It has no meaning. There are no rights of any creature because it came somewhere first or because it developpend locally either. it is very simple: you are fit enough or you are not. And if not you extirpate or become extinct.

To shw just one double standard: when a native animal kills the cubs of other natives it is fine. i should as a humannot interfere. Fairness I am told does not apply to nature. My human morals don't either. Until it is a nonnative animal. Now it is unfair because the native animal is naive to the new predator and ha sno way of defending itself etcetc. As if a lion cub has any defenses against a full grown male. But now human morals ARE valid..Etc.

My grudge is anyway more with ecology and ecologists....they are SO unscientific. Here is from Berkeley what science can and science can't do. Easy to see how ecology (in this case) fails in three out of four points!

Invasion ecology is highly unscientific

In short:

- Science can't make moral  judgements (go figure!)
- Science does not make aesthetic judgements (read soem books on biology)
- Science does not tell you how to use its findings (eradication is mentioned continuously!)

Thanks Mel, very much appreciated. I should have looked into my bird book before posting. Hmmmmm..... getting old and careless......... What threw me off is that Semipalmated has that red eye ring too in the summer and into the fall, then they lose it for the winter months. However, the beak should have been an immediate giveaway.

Best, AIK

MelRuh wrote:

Your images are very nice , but the birds are actually another member of the plover family, Killdeer. They have a red eye, two black bands and are considerably larger than Semi-palmated Plovers.

Here are a couple of Semi-palmated, one in breeding plumage, an adult in winter plumage, and a juvenile.

regards

Lovely shots - thanks for sharing!

In Europe, our Dotterels (Eudromias morinellus) winter in North Africa and fly to highland regions in Northern Europe to breed - In Lancashire where I live they usually stop-over around May 1st on Pendle Hill on their way to Scotland.

The interesting thing about our Dotterels is that the female has the brighter plumage while the males are quite dull. Are yours the same?

This is my best to date (Just realised it's 2006!)

Dotterel on Pendle Hill

Mike

Very nice images. Where in NZ was this ?

I saw and photographed this bird in the Lake Tekapo area last October. I saw enough of them to make me think they were common.

Peter