Great shots, Chig! Are most of the birds you see located only in New Zealand? I just wonder how Darwinism affects birds with different flight ranges over oceans.
All my photos are taken in New Zealand.
All of New Zealand's native birds flew here from Australia originally even the flightless ones such as kiwi which became flightless afterwards.
Some very small birds such as the Riroriro (warbler) which weighs only 6gm have managed to cross the Tasman Sea between NZ & Aussie which is over 1050 miles/1700km which is pretty impressive although probably blown across in a severe storm.
Of course strong flyers cross this sea often especially large seabirds so this has a big affect and New Zealand only has about 200 native birds vs Australia has more than 800 native species.
The other big factor affecting NZ bird evolution was the lack of mammalian predators before humans arrived about 600 years ago. This made flightlessness more advantageous so we had a huge number of flightless birds which have since become extinct due to predation by humans and predators we introduced such as Stoats, Rats and Possums
We had flightless swans, ducks, geese & parrots as well as many species of Moa which varied in size between the Bush Moa which was the size of a turkey up to 2 species of about 3.6m / 12' in height and weighing about 230kg / 500lb and also the heaviest eagle known: the Haast Eagle which weighed about 15kg and had a wingspan of about 2.6m, this would have been a pretty scary bird easily capable of killing humans as it specialized in eating Moa.