Summer Spoonbill

The lower reaches of the Leith Stream are confined between ugly concrete walls. Here, as it runs between the College of Education and the Polytechnic, the river (it's hardly a stream, despite its name), is partly tidal.

I was walking on the footpath beside it and as I crossed over the footbridge startled a shag, which flew off. But I didn't disturb the lone spoonbill, as it looked for tasty morsels in the green algae.

Royal spoonbill numbers have increased since 1940 when they first started breeding in NZ. There is a small local colony which breeds on the small offshore islet called Green Island. That's probably where this bird has come from.

Pietro & Tommaso

Pietro and Tommaso were always arguing.

At dawn the squeaking of their old bicycles and the sound of their voices – Pietro’s hollow and nasal, Tommaso’s husky and sometimes hoarse - were the only noises to be heard in the empty streets. They used to cycle to work together to the factory where they worked. From the other side of the shutter slats you could still feel the sleep and darkness weighing on the rooms. The muffled ringing of alarm clocks began a sporadic dialogue from one house to the next, becoming denser in the suburbs, until finally it merged, as town merged into country, into a back and forth of cock-a-doodle-doos.

The Queen’s Necklace by Italo Calvino. Penguin. 2011