Pāuatahanui Wildlife Reserve, October 2025

I stop by Pāuatahanui on the way home, taking advantage of the rental car and fulfilling a long-held wish-list wander. I take the long lens and wander through the boardwalk and marsh grasses and rushland and saltmarsh ribbonwood. The wind is bordering on gale, but the skies are clear.

The Thompson Family Hide by the South Basin is full of tētē | brown teal, young poaka | pied stilt, and pūtangitangi | paradise shellduck.  I watch the poaka frollic in the shallows, fishing and leaping and preening. And I snap as the tētē turns it’s red orb eyes my way.

As I wander to the furthest hide at the mouth of the Pāuatahanui Stream, I hear mātātā | fernbird – dozens of them. I pause for a while, playing a response on Bird Nerd, and am rewarded with fleeting glimpses of mātātā flitting in and out of the grasses. In the wind and given their cryptic nature, I don’t get a chance to snap any of these gorgeous manu | birds. That would often frustrate me – today it’s just delightful.

The tide is far enough out at the Rotary Hide that the range of cormorants and kakīānau are out of reasonable camera range.

The hides themselves are things of beauty. Camoflauged in green, built like a solid medieval fort, tidy on the inside with door catches that testify to the prevailing wind conditions here. 

I wander the north track, spotting only tūī | parsonbird, and resolve not to walk this end again.

Pāuatahanui is 4.34 kilometres, 90 minutes lapsed, 450 photographs.