Matata Nest - Continued

Checked yesterday and there are now four eggs in the nest. Fantastic. Jan Doak visited and took some photos of one of our Matata from the boardwalk.

Hugh Crawford Bush Explore

What a way to spend the afternoon. The red line shows our explore in the Hugh Crawford Reserve up the stream bed past the waterfalls. Wonderful regenerating bush with large Totara, Taraire, Rimu, Nikau and all one would expect in a local bush. Sadly almost no birds. Plenty of Alseuosmia Banksii of all different shapes and sizes. All this right by our home.

Matata Nest

Over the past days I have observed a pair of Matata carrying pieces of rush back to one spot in the Oioi within a few metres of our boardwalk. Fantastic. They must be nesting. Over past years there have been quite a few nesting. This is the first time we have found a nest.
Today I took a look and found that already there are two eggs settled into the deep rush cup. Hopefully there are more eggs to come.

 The nest is high up in the rushes about 1.2m above the water.

RAT!!

An infra red camera is a bit like a fish finder. We were happy fishing without one. Got a good fish finder and found there were hardly any fish. We were happy that we had very few rats if any after years of baiting and trapping. We bought a camera and yesterday found a rat!!

Today we caught one in the Doc 200 trap

Spotless Crake

We knew we had Spotless Crake in our wetland. We have often heard these elusive little rail like birds but just could not catch a glimpse of one.
We bough a  camera with a motion sensor that can take video. We set it up in the wetland and bingo!!! We have a Crake family. Not a great video but it is proof. With the camera we have seen two chicks with the parent