Swamp
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Wed 19 Dec 2012 09:57
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To get a break from slaving away on the boat I've
popped out to a very nice local swamp to get a few pictures of native
birds. NZ was once, before the arrival of humans, the land of birds. The
Maoris drove about 35 species extinct, tragically including all the moas, and
another ten or eleven have gone since Europeans arrived. But there are still
about 300 species left, many of them endemic.
Here is a male Paradise Shelduck Tadorna
variegata with a couple of chicks.
 And here is his mate.
 These are big ducks, the size of a small goose (NZ
has no native geese). They're endemic, and locally common.
Elsewhere in the swamp were several Pukeko
Porphyrio porphyrio. As you can see it's closely related to our
Moorhen, but much bigger, like a large chicken on stilts:
 And here is another showing his lovely blue-purple
chest:
 These are interesting birds, found also in
Australia South Africa and South America, because they are known to have arrived
in NZ under their own steam - twice. The second time was about a thousand
years ago, but the same bird arrived for the first time about 10 million years
ago, lost the ability to fly and evolved into the famous Takahe Porphyrio
hochstetteri.
Also flitting about the swamp was this Welcome
Swallow Hirundo neoxena:
 These are interesting because they arrived in New
Zealand from Australia only in 1922 and didn't start breeding until the 1950s. A
surprising number of birds have self-introduced in this way since Europeans
arrived, perhaps because of the sweeping habitat changes wrought by modern
society.
But perhaps most interesting was the swamp itself.
Here it is:
 As you can see, it's just on the edge of town. In
fact it's entirely man-made. It's main purpose is as a waste water treatment
system. You can see in the picture a line of small disturbances in the water
surface. This is water arriving from the sewage treatment plant. It flows by
gravity through a series of several large ponds in the swamp. These act as giant
filters, leaving clean pure water to flow back through the mangroves into the
sea. And the whole thing is a nature reserve. NZ doesn't entirely deserve it's
'green' reputation - but on this sort of thing it does.
(I bet this is the first ever Blog entry about the
Whangarei Waste Water Plant).
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