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I've been sorting out photos from a family trip we made around the South Island in 2010. We spent two nights at Milford Sound at the beginning of January and had one of those occassions where you experience four seasons in a day.  We arrived in the evening to heavy rain with a severe overnight storm which brought snow to the high country covering Mitre Peak and the other peaks around Milford Sound with a dusting of snow.  In the morning the storm broke up and cleared and we ended …

There are times when beauty slices me right open and I glimpse the great depths of my own being, soul light shining, some presence within that exists beyond the constraints of this single life.When I am still and quietI become aware of something inside methat transcends time and place. A presence, loving intelligencea point of clarity in the dark.Many different momentsin the field of existence woven togetherby a single thread.A continuum made up of many livespassing in and out of the plain of th …

I spotted this tui eating something in a dead tree in our shelter belt so zoomed in and took some photos though I couldn't quite make out at the time what it was catching. To my surprise, when I took the photos off the camera, I saw that it was catching wasps, what look like chinese paper wasps. Looking at the sequence of photos it caught and ate at least four wasps in the ten minutes or so that It took to take these photos. I knew that tui supplemented their diet with insects and have ofte …

One of my favourite locations for bird photography around New Plymouth is the Waiwhakaio river mouth. It's only a small wetland area but we get a good variety of birds here. Unfortunately the New Plymouth District Council are currently threatening to revoke the reserve status of some of this land and sell it off for housing development. Further urban encroachment will directly impact on the bird populations in this fragile area so if you live in New Plymouth I would encourage you to make a su …

I managed to get these stunning shots of some eastern rosella yesterday when they landed in the top of a golden elm just off the corner of our house. I heard them chattering away so raced upstairs with my camera and was able to get a clear view of this pair from our bedroom window.Eastern rosella have now become well established in Taranaki following their introduction in Auckland (around 1920) and in Wellington (around 1960).  We have been seeing them increasingly in our garden with a smal …