Put a drone up and any self-respecting black-backed gull in the vicinity will be there within moments, pecking and hollering and generally bullying the strange, buzzing interloper.
“Black-backs are always the hardest,” says oceans photographer Richard Robinson—he’s been 12 miles off the coast, he says, with no birds in sight, but as soon as the drone goes up, “there’ll be a black-back on it almost immediately”.
So when we asked him to document the gulls at Wellington’s Southern Landfill, he knew aerials would be a battle.
As our cover story explains (page 34), the tip is a buffet for hundreds of black-backed gulls; every time Robinson attempted to fly his drone, he’d get only a metre or so before the birds rose as one to protect their patch. He called the office, despairing. Brace for no aerials, he warned us.
But he persevered, backing way off, waiting for the gulls to momentarily settle, then whisking the drone up at top speed. “Got the shot, and down before they spotted it,” he says. And got a selfie for good measure on the way back down.
