Blimey. We did three very short beach patrols today. Thom Conroy and I did the mouth of the Manawatu Estuary to the Foxton Surf Club (2 km, taking about 3 hours, as we collected and removed all birds to the dunes). Ian Saville helped with the end of that patrol, then did a quicker 1 km north of the surf club, doing ID and a count but leaving the birds there. To the south, Kyle Morrison and Sarah Jamieson went to Waiterere Beach (8 km south of the Manawatu Estuary) and headed north, only managing 1.5 km but, as you will see below, this poor performance was not through them being slackers. They also removed their birds. So in total we covered a paltry 4.5 km of beach, yet found 1790 dead seabirds (398 birds/km). They were strewn across the tide wrack, under the tide wrack, above the tide wrack, up on the dunes, under logs, buried under 30 cm of sand with just a wingtip showing... The big waves had obviously moved a lot of sand around and it is anybody's guess how many birds were buried without trace. The Waiterere stretch had more birds than the Foxton one - 796 from 1.5 km.
Totals:
Foxton Est-Surf club
Distance (km) - 2
Broad-billed Prion - 647
Antarctic Prion - 5
Salvin's Prion - 21
Fairy Prion - 46
Slender-billed Prion - 1
prion wings - 4
Diving petrel - 8
Unid petrel/shearwater wings - 1
TOTAL - 733
Birds/km - 367
Foxton Surf club N
Distance (km) - 1
Broad-billed Prion - 253
Salvin's Prion - 2
Fairy Prion - 3
Diving petrel - 2
TOTAL - 260
Birds/km - 260
Waiterere Beach
Distance (km) - 1.5
Broad-billed Prion - 730
Salvin's Prion - 15
Fairy Prion - 36
Diving petrel - 4
TOTAL - 796
Birds/km - 531
TOTAL
Distance (km) - 4.5
Broad-billed Prion - 1631
Antarctic Prion - 13
Salvin's Prion - 38
Fairy Prion - 85
Slender-billed Prion - 4
prion wings - 4
Diving petrel - 14
Unid petrel/shearwater wings - 1
TOTAL - 1790
Birds/km - 398
This is, from memory, considerably more Broad-billed Prions than were recorded in the OSNZ Beach Patrol scheme for the wrecks of 1961 and 1974 (or thereabouts), but from just 4.5 km of coast. If these numbers are indicative of numbers along the entire Kapiti-Wanganui coast (~100 km) then we could be talking about 30-40,000 birds visible on the surface just along this section. If the best part of 2000 birds were handed in to bird carers, then these numbers of dead birds seem reasonable, as far more birds must die than are found alive and handed in. Hopefully other patrols are being done in this spell of nice weather and some distances and bird numbers can be reported. It's interesting that no Fairy Prions actually seem to have been handed in to the Massey Vets this week. Maybe they never made it to the beaches alive.
Astounding stuff.
