Faces of Melanesia

Well it has been a busy first half of 2014...hence the lack of updates here. So more recently I was on a trip from Auckland to Norfolk Island, then through Vanuatu, the Solomons and some of the outer islands of Papua New Guinea, ending in Cairns. We left Auckland, after the inauguration of the ship as the MV National Geographic Orion, then spent a day in the Bay of Islands on 22 March, before a day at sea and arrival into Norfolk Island. The day at sea was a little quiet, but netted within a few minutes in the early morning white-necked petrel, black-winged petrel, Kermadec petrel and red-tailed tropicbird - all within NZ waters!

Norfolk Island was great as usual, with lovely sunny weather and nice to catch up with some of the places I have spent a fair bit of time at over the years. Got most of the land birds, but didn't see a parakeet. As we left, we headed around Phillip Island and great to see the revegetation going on there and got great views of boobies, etc.

This was my first visit to Vanuatu, and wow what a place. Of course with a few birds on the list to see at sea, we spent a lot of time on deck between islands. Haven't yet really figured out if I saw any Vanuatu petrel, but I know we saw a number of white-naped types in Vanuatu, and I photographed a few, so need to go back through the images. We had an awesome afternoon on Tanna - what an incredible experience looking down into that volcano! Also saw land-diving on Pentecoste and wow - that just blew my mind. We also got quite a few collared petrel, including a good number of magnificent petrel, but unfortunately none super close. There was a small dark petrel seen and I got photographs, and at one stage it seemed it might be a Fiji petrel, but I need to do some more work on that one also.

Solomons were great - a few nice land birds like buff-headed coucal and midget flowerpecker, and we were so lucky to be in Honiara just a couple of days before the massive storms that really did some damage there. Really felt for the people of Honiara.

On the way through from the Solomons towards Bougainville and Buka we had sightings of both Heinroth's shearwater and Beck's petrel. Two mega birds that have been on my 'want to see' list for some time. Reasonable views of both, but no really decent photos unfortunately.

That storm then built and built behind us as we headed south-west towards Cairns, and eventually formed into Cyclone Ita, which changed plans for us a little and we headed into Cairns a few days early. Had some nice time around Cairns to get up to some of the rainforest and got reacquainted with a few Aussie birds, before I flew home, leaving Cairns just as the Cyclone hit. The Cyclone then bounced across the Tasman and ended up making my first week at home, away on holiday, a very very damp one! Oh well!