Golden Bay Big Day 2018
Posted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 5:49 am
Local birder Paddy Gillooly, who runs the tourism and wader birding trips out onto Farewell Spit here in Golden Bay (http://www.farewellspit.com) has proposed the idea of a Golden Bay Big Day, provisionally the weekend 3rd and 4th November. A small team of local birders (including myself) did a Big Day here in Golden Bay on Labour Weekend 3 years ago. We only did a daylight hours day (about 9 hours- no nocturnals) and ticked 59 species just by driving around the Bay. Our Big Day also did not include a run out onto Farewell Spit, where we could have potentially picked up another 6-10 species. For birders, Golden Bay is ideal because of the proximity of native and beech forest, scrub, farmland, lakes, ponds, gravel roads, coastal and estuaries, plus Farewell Spit and other nearby wader roosting areas (Tomatea Point and Rototai). If you were really hardcore, you could also hike part way up the Heaphy and tick Takahe and Great Spotted Kiwi! I have lived here in Golden Bay and birded the local area extensively since 2009, and I would provide everybody with my Golden Bay location guide. The Big Day proposal would be to run the day from noon on Saturday 3rd November thru to noon Sunday 4th, ending in Collingwood for a species count, team ticks and refreshments. Paddy would run dedicated birding trips out onto the Spit on both days, depending on the tides. Running it from noon till noon would give people the chance to get over into Golden Bay on Saturday morning, an easy 2 hour drive from Nelson airport. To keep this Big Day consistent with other NZ regions, the rules would follow the excellent summary posted by Russell Cannings elsewhere on the Birding NZ site. Before Paddy and I proceed any further with planning the event, would anybody be keen to come over and have a crack at it? As I mentioned above, the current best tally is 59 species, some of you top birders should be able to push that out to 70 and above. Cheers all, Ken George.