I recently spent two weeks travelling around the South Island, sightseeing and photographing some of the fantastic landscapes and wildlife found there. I now have a few late nights ahead culling thousands of photos. All going well, over the next couple of weeks I should have some nice shots of crested grebes, yellow-eyed penguins, rare skinks and stunning scenery to upload.
When photographing wetland birds I like to get right in there with them. The birds are often more relaxed about a person in/on the water than they are about someone approaching on land, and it opens up many lighting, background and shooting angle options. I knew I would be visiting areas known to have the invasive freshwater diatom Didymosphenia geminata (didymo) so I had to take some simple but important precautions to prevent spreading it to other waterways. Waders, camo nets, tripods and anything else coming in contact with freshwater all needed to be treated. To find out more about didymo and for information about cleaning equipment when moving between waterways see Biosecurity New Zealand. I decided to use a 5% detergent solution. It only takes a drop of contaminated water to spread this organism, so imagine the risk a flooded tripod could pose! We definitely don’t want this nasty getting to the North Island if at all possible, so I stripped everything as soon as I got home, gave an extra good detergent soak and left it all to dry thoroughly. It really wasn’t a major inconvenience (a big chilly bin came in handy) and I intend to continue checking and cleaning my gear for this and other unwanted organisms wherever I go.