For several years, I’ve been trying to record what happens underground during breeding season. The chosen burrow has either been inactive, the egg failed to hatch, or the camera filled with water. This year I’m optimistic: after a false start with one study burrow, when the sooties did not show up and a moulting penguin did, Burrow 8B is active and I’ve got a camera suspended at the side of the nesting chamber, about 300 mm underground and at the end of the metre-long access tunnel.
I missed egg-laying, but recorded hatching. This video shows the 5-day-old chick on the night of 27 January. If the chick survives to fledge in May and the camera goes the distance, I’ll be able to compile a video showing most of the season.
The IR lights have a faint red glow (850 nm) and the birds pay the camera no attention, except when it turns on for each session and makes a quiet whirring noise. They sometimes seem to notice that but within a second or two they are back to whatever they were doing. The chick is very quiet- turn up the sound to hear it, but not when the adult is calling at the start of the video!
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Hi Barry, really interesting observations via the camera. Hope the breeding attempt is successful.
My main reason for contacting you is because we put up a morepork nestbox that was occupied this spring. After fledgling, the youngster continued to use the box. I like to monitor things in the box with a camera. Where do I go for camera gear please?
Regards, Ralph
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Cheers Ralph. Complicated answer will follow by email.
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So great to see the birds doing their thing. Thank you so much for sharing this video.
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Thank you. Hopefully more to come. The chick is doing well as of today, imitating parent in preening behaviour, even stretching in the same way.
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Great news! I remember a lot of work being done at Kaikoura on the cliffs putting in tunnels for the sooty shearwaters to raise chicks that hopefully returned 5 years later to breed their own generation of shearwaters. I hope that was as successful as yours is turning out to be.
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From what I understand of sooty colonies at this latitude, any increase is incredibly slow. We believe we attracted the sooties in in 2012 but that may have been wrong. They might have been there all the time but just had a bad year when we first looked at the colony, giving the impression it was inactive. The number of occupied burrows each season is very much the same now, so it’s hard to say if there is any increase. That said, Jo Sim and her dog Rua found two satellite colonies, and a couple of months ago a trail cam showed a sooty on the ground a fair way from any known burrows. we had a good look there a couple of weeks ago but did not find anything.
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