As we drove around the twisting gravel roads of the Otago peninsula, there seemed to be harriers around every corner, gliding along hillsides, playing high up in the wind currents, gleaning morsels from the short surface vegetation of the inlet edges.

Turning a corner in the looping track around Hooper’s Inlet, I saw one glide in to some vegetation at the bottom of a wooded slope, and disappear from view. When we arrived opposite this point, I scanned the spot carefully with binoculars, but could see no sign of the bird or a nest. I noted the spot and we carried on our way.

A couple of days later, I decided to have a closer or longer look. As I drove around the corner that brought the nest site into view, there was the harrier just landing again, but this time as I pulled up against the fence, there was a chick in view exercising its wings.

Get down out of sight, you idiot!

After a short while, adult and chick disappeared into the foliage, and I settled down to await developments. Eventually, I could again make out a chick, which seemed to be making feeding movements. Time passed, and the grey shape behind the vegetation resolved itself into two chicks.

Meanwhile, the adults appeared, gliding along the ridge above the nest, and I readied myself for the shot I was looking for, of an adult about to land in the nest. However, it didn’t happen – one bird flew off while the other landed in a tree some distance away. After a while, I noticed that it had gone, but I had not seen it fly off. All was revealed when the head of an adult bird appeared with the chicks – it had flown down to the ground and walked into the nest, presumably to avoid giving away its location with me sitting in my car watching.

There was more activity discernible behind the vegetation, some wing-flapping and other movements indicating feeding, and eventually, I had to revise numbers up again – there were three chicks in the nest!

Eventually, the adult flew up from the nest are with a large bone in its bill and flew off. There was no more activity visible, so I left after a while.

Several days later, I drove around Papanui Inlet on a cold and windy day, and when I arrived at the car park at the end of the track, I decided to sit and watch birds in the open area in front of me, rather than face the walk to Victory Beach.

There was a lot of birds on the sheep-grazed pasture in front of me – paradise shelducks, pukeko, spur-winged plovers and a small flock of starlings, but the stars were a pair of harriers which quartered the ground, using the wind superbly to hover, to glide around clumps of rushes and folds in the ground, to catch the wind and wheel away to a new area to hunt.

At the back of the pasture was a block of conifers, and one of the harrier’s favourite moves was to glide through the upper branches, head down, no doubt hoping to surprise an unwary rabbit. A place for a hide and a photo-opportunity!

It’s summer in December again! We have escaped from Britain during an interval in the unaccustomed snow and freezing temperatures, and now bask in the sunshine on the other side of the world – in Dunedin, New Zealand.

As soon as was decently possible, I drove out to the hills of the Otago Peninsula, which separates Dunedin’s long, dog-legged harbour, set in the remains of an ancient volcano, from the Pacific Ocean. The winding road along the top was just the same as I remembered it, showing vertiginous drops down to sandy beaches edging the ocean on one side, and winding across to spectacular views of Otago Harbour on the other.

As I turned off the ridge road onto the dirt track which dropped down to skirt huge shallow inlets filled with seawater and silt, I wondered how the wildlife had fared in the three years since my last visit. Driving around Hooper’s Inlet, I asked myself whether there would be any spoonbills around the next corner. Yes, there was! Half a dozen were striding through the shallow water, swishing their bills from side to side, white feathers ruffled by the wind and gleaming in the sun as they filtered the water for sustenance.  After a few more bends around the edge of the inlet, would there be a kingfisher on the power lines? Yes, there he was, scanning for insects the sparse vegetation which encroached on the silt at this point. Was he the same one that occupied this territory three years ago, or one of his children?

No matter, all was as it should be. Paradise shelducks grazed the meadows, harriers quartered the sides of the hills and the dune flats, black-winged stilts and spurred plovers patrolled the water’s edge and further out were the ducks, black swans and the occasional white-faced heron.

I made my way to a beach where I had watched blue penguins come out of the sea in the half light after sunset. These little penguins had some human friends who had provided them with nestboxes, and I wanted to see if they were still there.

Sure enough, there were the nestboxes, with little penguin footprints all around, and the inevitable trap with poison bait to protect them from predators. I wondered who provided the nestboxes for this little colony, and whether they felt that the penguins were thriving – there were about the same number of nestboxes as there had been three years ago.

I was thinking about things like this as I made my way back, walking along the sand beside the rocky cliff. Suddenly, a rock beside me lunged upwards with a loud “Grarrrff!!” and changed into a fur seal, considerably upset by my unintended close approach – to about a metre! Grateful that I had not been punished for my carelessness, I took his photograph as he regarded me reproachfully, and continued on my way.

When I finished making my bat detector – frequency division type, circuit by Tony Messina – I needed to test it. Unfortunately, our bats had all gone into hibernation, so first I built a pulse unit to give me a 40khz noise – that worked. Then I tried it out on running water from a tap – that worked as well. However, it all seemed rather unsatisfactory, and I wanted to know how well it worked on real bats, what it sounded like with real bats, how far away it could detect them.

Then I thought of Chester Zoo and its Twilight Zone! They have a big building in which they keep the lighting on at night, and off during the day. As you walk through the main room, making your way by means of very dim lighting, you can just make out the bats hanging around (literally!) the place, and occasionally fluttering from one roost to another.

When I got to the Zoo at opening time (10.00 am), I was disappointed to find that the Twilight Zone – now renamed the Fruit Bat Forest – was shut and wouldn’t open until 12.30 because the time shift of the lighting had been altered to enable work on lots of changes in the place. I didn’t mind too much – I always enjoy spending time at Chester Zoo.

I looked for my favourite animals – the Asian Short Clawed Otters – in their new enclosure, but they were sensibly keeping warm and out of sight. Most Zoo animals do not seem to see the public outside their enclosures or cages – I suppose that it must appear to them like wrap-around TV with the same boring programme on all the time. The otters often seemed to be interested in their audience, sometimes standing on their hind legs to inspect us and chattering to each other, no doubt about the peculiarities of the visitors of the day.

The tropical house held some inmates I had not seen before – poison dart frogs. I spent some time photographing them, trying to capture their amazing colours. Time passed quickly, and it did not seem very long before I was making my way into the Fruit Bat Forest. I switched on the bat detector before entering the main room, and held it carefully – the slightest movement of my hand on the box caused a loud series of clicks – then walked through the double set of plastic sheets into the bat’s room.

As I stood waiting for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, the detector produced small noises now and then, and at first, I wasn’t sure if it was caused my my hand moving on the box. The clicks did not seem to correlate with a bat flying past me, but I slowly realised that the noises were indeed caused by the bats, and that they did not need to be close by for their ultrasonic squeaks to be detected.

Then I noticed a member of staff filling feeders on some trees in the central area, so I pointed the detector towards them. When she finished and left, I was deafened by the racket that the detector produced – the bats which descended on the feeders were obviously screeching at each other ultrasonically as they competed for the food.

So, it works. Summer starts for me in two weeks time, when we leave for New Zealand, and I shall take the bat detector with me. We shall be staying with daughter Sue and her family in Dunedin, South Island, for six weeks. Long enough to find out whether any of New Zealand’s only native mammals are in the woods around Dunedin.