Godwits gathering

This morning I was able to get my 38th Sunday Sunrise for 2014. Despite being tired from all the driving over the last couple of days, I spontaneously awoke more than a half hour before the sun was due to rise. Because it was an incoming tide, I hoped to find patterns in the mudflats to set off against the dawn sky.

On my way along Erceg's Way (the pedestrian path which runs almost the full length of Snells Beach), I stopped repeatedly to take photos of those patterns, colours in the sky, and water, and the birds. Five minutes before this, I had taken a photo which included a half dozen birds in the shallow incoming water. They looked like Kuaka (Bartailed Godwits). But suddenly they were gone.

I carried on along the path. As the glow from sun began to increase rapidly, I saw more kuaka landing just out from where I was. In the wrong shoes for entering the water, I ended up too far away from them to get a photo of the birds in detail. Instead, I chose to get this shot of a gathering of the Godwits to share breakfast off the shore of Snells Beach.

A little word of explanation to anyone wanting to look at the series of Sunday sunrises for this year. Two or three blips are NOT a sunrise. There is a link in those chosen blips to the sunrise photo which I had taken, and put into blipfolio instead.