As Seen Through the Camera Lens: Traveling to Document the Wildlife of New Zealand and Australia
A recent assignment took me back to two of my most beloved travel destinations, Australia and New Zealand, in order to document some of the endangered local wildlife in need of greater conservation efforts. After the long flight from Oregon drained so much of my energy, we landed in Sydney and immediately traveled out to our first area of focus. The goal of our travel was to photograph the mountain pygmy possum, the Christmas Island flying fox and the woylie, also known as the brush-tailed bettong.

We began our travels by heading to Western Australia in search of the woylie with the understanding that capturing a photograph of these Macropods in the wild would be quite a tall order. Arriving at our campsite, we planned out a course of action for the next few days by outlining the areas we all felt would be most likely to yield a sighting of this endangered species. In a rare turn of events, I stumbled across the dome-shaped nest of a woylie on just our second day at the site, capturing photos of several woylies using their tails to carry the materials used in building their shelters.

While the trip was off to an auspicious start, our efforts to sight a mountain pygmy possum were not so easily accomplished. We spent a solid three weeks at several different campsites before we saw any hint of one, and it was another two days of perching in the brush before I was able to get a halfway decent shot. Already behind schedule and needing to travel to Christmas Island, it would have to do.

With their impressive size and habit of being active during the day, the Christmas Island flying foxes were a bit easier to track down than the mountain pygmy possum that had given us so much trouble. We traveled all over the island to get an idea of their flight patterns and daily habits in order to determine the best angle for photographing them in flight and at rest, and I had to test several different lenses to ensure a crisp in-flight image. We actually found a perch just above their habitat that was not intrusive in any way, and I was able to capture some of the best shots of the trip from this angle.

With the Australian part of the travel assignment complete, we were able to set off for New Zealand to document some of the rarest species of birds, some of which are down to less than 150 in total. We traveled directly from Christmas Island to New Zealand, hoping that we would have as much success there as we did in Australia. Unfortunately, our hesitancy to risk disrupting the habitat of critically endangered species and the fact that sightings are so rare to begin with made it nearly impossible for us to capture what we had hoped. Ultimately, we traveled back to the US with just a few shots of the Kakapo taken from one of the island sanctuaries dedicated to its preservation.