Possible Yellow Billed Spoonbill

[ndrinnan]

Hello everyone.

I spend a lot of time on different sections of the Ngaruroro River in Hawke's Bay (a couple of hours a day) and I wanted to report an unusual bird I saw yesterday (at least for the area). No photograph unfortunately. At first I thought it was a gannet which I have seen once cruising up the river, it was of a similar size. What struck me was the beak, it had a distinctive rounded end to it. It also flew very distinctively, when it turned its head to check something out, its body appears to almost rotate a bit with it in an almost helicopter like fashion. I looked up spoonbill images and I recall that the beak was pale in colour, not black. It looked a lot more like the yellow billed spoonbill than the royal spoonbill.

It was lovely to observe it, I was hoping it would wheel around but no such luck.

Perhaps there was rain in Australia that drove it this way?