Notable vagrants to look out for?

[smeerkat]

Hi all! I'm planning to visit NZ for four months starting in October this year. I'm an avid birder, and I want to come well prepared. Aside from booking a few tours, I've been going through wikipedia's List of NZ birds and adding them to a flashcard app so I can practice recognizing them all. First by photos, later I'll add calls and songs.

I've made a great start on all the endemic birds and added a lot of introduced ones too (many already very familiar to me as a Dutchman, I didn't realize so many of our common birds were brought over there).

Next up is vagrants, but there's just so many of them and it seems like a lot have just been recorded a handful of times over the past decades. Hardly worth studying for.

What are some more regularly visiting vagrants that I should definitely know how to recognize?

Looking forward to an amazing birding experience by the end of the year!

[Neil Fitzgerald]

Welcome to BirdingNZ!
One thing you could do is look at nzbirdsonline and filter for vagrants under conservation status. https://www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/conservation?q=Vagrant

That will bring up some you will certainly not see, like the rose-crowned fruit dove, but also those you could have a good chance of finding if you go to the right place, like plumed whistling duck, and a bunch in between. Reading those NZbirdsonline pages will soon give you an idea of which is which, and search on this forum will help you get the latest on sightings.
Good luck.

[smeerkat]

Excellent, thanks a lot!