Caught Courting; Day Seventeen

On 26 March 2020 New Zealand entered lockdown, except for essential services. That followed a few days of rapidly increasing numbers of new cases per day; from 11 on 17 March to 50 on the day the decision was made. The numbers increased to over 80, and then plateaued (more or less) until 04 April when almost 90 new cases were diagnosed. Since then the number o new cases per day has fallen almost as steeply as it went up so that in the 24 hours to 0900 today only 29 new cases were diagnosed. Better even than that number is that only a small number of cases appear to be from community contagion. The remainder are from known overseas travel even if by a circuitous route.

We are today 17 days into a nationwide lockdown, and still waiting to know whether we have prevented community spread by being in lockdown. 

The birds (which feature again in my blips today) were more obvious than before in the trees surrounding the path through the Arch Hill Reserve where I took a walk after doing the supermarket run as our designated shopper. This is local to where I stay. And there is room to pass others with a 2m gap at all times. But there were many fewer than I would have expected on a normal sunny warm Saturday morning. 

This tui was courting; the other tui in the ritual was all puffed up and making much more noise. Branches obscured that one more than this, and I failed to get a clear shot. I'm pleased with how well this photo has turned out.

As I am with the photo of the Tauhou (also known as white-eye or silver eye). That photo required a lot more adjustment due to the sever underexposure of the bird in front of the bright sky. I had made a major adjustment to the ISO before I found that at least a half dozen tui were in one small tree surrounded space.