Auswildlife.com

Most of the information on this site is designed for those who are self-sufficient and want to do their own touring and wildlife watching. There are however advantages to taking organised tours when visiting unfamiliar countries. By taking a tour, you benefit from local knowledge and make the most effecient use of your time. Organised tours are especially good when they are not too regimented and allow you to spend time doing what you like most (I am assuming that this relates to photography, since you found this site!).  A few such tours are on offer in Australia.

I am going to post links to various eco-tours as I get the chance. This one is especially for those who want to check out bird-watching tours.  This link will take you to a number of tour operators as well as some other handy resources. I know and can personally recommend Fine Feather Tours and for longer trips it’s hard to go past Klau’s tours at Kirrama Tours.  Both are listed in this great website.

There are many more bird images in the Library, entered from the Library Home Page

Ulva Island is small island nestled in a bay near Oban, Stewart Island, New Zealand. If you are in Oban, you can catch a water taxi across and spend a day there. Plenty of endemic birds for photographers and nature lovers! A picture is a thousand words…

Zoos and wildlife parks are great places to see lots of interesting birds and animals. Some are even photogenic! In Singapore, check out:

The Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. You can catch a bus to the Zoo and a train and then bus to the Bird Park.

The Zoo has an excellent range of species from South-East Asia but like all zoos, there are the perennial favorites – hippos etc.  Some are great for photography but often it’s a matter of timing and sheer luck to get varoius subjects in the right situations for a photo.  Nice Orang-Utan exhibit!

The Bird Park has many species from the local area – SE Asia, and also from Africa and South America. There is one very large walk-through aviary with a waterfall (!) and much to see in there. If you keep records with your images, then as you photograph varoius species in the Park it’s worth writing down their names from the id signage. I did it in a half-hearted sort of way and it took me a week of searching the www to work out what the rest of them were!

Perhaphs I should have called this little anecdote “the Kiwi” because that is essentially what it is about!  Understandably, it one of those birds that is high on the list to see/photograph in New Zealand, but there are some problems. You might expect that, since all three species are exceedingly rare.  Nevertheless I encountered more problems that I had anticipated, primarly because one is not allowed to use flash on them! I am not sure what scientific evidence there is to support this idea, since in all my years of photographing birds and other animals, I have never seen any of them react to a flash! ….and I have seen plenty of postcard shots of Kiwis taken with flash.

But in any case all of that aside – for the greater unwashed, heathen public like us, it seems to be the rule, and so you won’t be able to photograph them in a wildlife park or if you go with a guide to check out wild ones at night.  You might be able to pay a wildlife park some quantity of money to arrange a session but I didn’t go down that path!

I decided to play by the rules and go for some daylight shots of a wild Kiwi…in natural habitat!  So how does one do that? Well, I will save you some time and effort and tell you all about it here.

The best  place (the only place, so I am told) to see them in daylight is Stewart Island, at the extreme south of the South Island.  The main settlement there is Oban and while there might be some Kiwis that hang around the town area, I certainly didn’t see any sign of them. So that was trip number one to the Island with no Kiwis! For trip two, I decided on a more radical approach! I booked a seat on a light aircraft and flew from Invercargill on the mainland, direct to Mason Bay on the far side of the Island. We landed on the beach and with not much effort, we walked up to the DoC Hut behind the beach (you see it as you circle to land, so no prizes for finding it).  The Hut is reasonably sparten with two main sections, a ‘living room’ with wood heater, and a few bedrooms in the other section – bunks with plastic covered mattresses.  You need to take your own sleeping bag etc and food, stove and of course, I had some camera gear…together with clothes and other essentials the pack weighed just over 20kg!!!  A slight overkill, but you never what you may see, hey? Geting there was day one.

Day two – I dragged out a 300mm lens, small tripod and NO flash (!!!) and went for a walk along the track that leads inland. In times past it was a road, and so it is quite well formed as it pushes through a great deal of very dense shrubbery about 8 to 10m tall. I walked about 500m and stopped to take in the scenery…. “so this might be good Kiwi habitat…..?” I thought. At that moment, a Kiwi walked out of the undergrowth and came snorting up to my shoes,  inspected them carefully and then started shuffling along the path. (Their nostrils open near the end of the beak and so they detect their food by smell… snorting in the process!). I spent a heart-pounding three minutes trying to get far enough away to fit the bird in the picture with the 300mm lens. Success! So there we go. Easy really! I saw a bird in the same place the next day as well. No flash that day either!

The walking track actually leads up to an old farm house that DoC appear to have taken over as storage. While I was there I met some deer hunters and we discussed Kiwis at length. They showed me an area immediately behind the old farm house – a large area of dense hummock grasses where once an airstrip had been built. A few drums still mark the edges of it. In this area, they see Kiwis quite often. I lurked around there for two days but never saw any in that area. Plenty of diggings etc, so they do feed in the area, so it’s worth staking out.  I did however hear them calling!

So to answer a  question that might have just crossed your mind; yes they shoot deer in this area, in relative proximity to the walking track where ‘trampers’ (known as hikers or walkers to non-NZ folk) wander past! It seems to be quite safe, although the guys I met stressed that if you walk around the old airstrip, you should wear a high visibility veste. You can buy them at all the outdoors stores.  I really like the NZ’s approach to safety! In Australia the various parks authorities would have a heart attack if they had that situation in their parks! In NZ, you are expected to use your brain and take your own initiative to do things safely. Good on them!

So having taken my pictures, I decided to set out to do the southern walking track. Not a good idea with 20+kg on your back. I will say no more! Don’t try it with 20kg or even if you have minimal gear or doubt your fittness…just don’t do it! I am not sure about the northern tracks, but on the whole, I believe they are easier. The smart thing to do is to fly back out.

While you are there, you should also get a water taxi out to Ulva Island. It’s a great place to see/photograph a variety of endemic NZ birds. You should keep at least a full day aside for that!  The Water Taxi that I used….Stewart Island Water Taxis (Ian)

The airline that flys to Mason Bay from Invercargill: Stewart Island Flights

You should register to use the DoC (Department of Conservation) Huts: DoC.

Places to stay at Oban – they range from ridiculously expensive to very reasonable! You might start with the DoC brochures that can be sent to you via snail mail (email them at the above link). The internet advertised accommodation tends to be in the higher price range if you want some luxury.

UPDATE:  I just recently re-visited this area and shock-horror – the little tea house has closed down! Now there is a somewhat sterile-looking cafe  near the top of the range that dispenses food and beverages with not a bird in sight! I’m sure if you walk around the area you will still see some wildlife, but that really great little bird observation area is gone! ….
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Just to the north of Townsville, you will find a turnoff that takes you to the top of the range and there you will find the small village of Paluma. This is a great little stop where you can photograph some of the local bird species while sitting at the tables with tea or coffee! Be careful driving up the range as the road is narrow and winding. When you get to the top, the tea house is well marked on the left-hand side of the road. The birds that you should see there include Macleay’s Honeyeater (shown here), Victoria’s Riflebird and sometimes you might see white-cheeked honeyeaters. There are many more birds than that, of course and I think the local bird list stands at about 256.  Paluma Range Tea House.