Tuesday, January 31, 2023

First day on Kangaroo Island

You know it’s been a good day when you can pull to the side of the road and take a picture of a koala with your phone. Or when it’s not worth stopping to photograph kangaroos and wallabies because you’ve seen so many. Or when you say “Galahs” with a shrug when yet another group of bright pink parrots fly over your head.  And then there were the sea lions….

Kangaroo Island, a 20 minute flight south of Adelaide, is a very unusual place. The currents between the island and the mainland are vicious, and the island is prone to devastating brushfires every twenty years or so (the last one in 2020). As a consequence it has had episodic rather than continuous human habitation. It has no rabbits and no foxes, so it has both animal and plant species that were eliminated on the mainland many years ago. It has some local variants or subspecies— for example the Western Grey Kangaroos are chocolate brown rather than the grey of the mainland. The island also has the unusual problem of an overpopulation of koalas. 

There is a large sea lion colony on the south shore.  There were quite a few pups on the beach.  The mothers go out to sea for three days feeding then come back to feed their pup.  While the mothers are at sea, the pups play together, body surf, call for mom, or just sleep.  We saw kangaroos “everywhere”, while wallabies tend to stay in the under brush for protection from Wedge-tailed Eagles. We saw about half of the western section of the island today, with much more to come.

Pictured: Koala, three Australian Sea Lion pups, Western Grey Kangaroo, Rosenberg Wallaby





Monday, January 30, 2023

South Australia Birding

 We spent today (12 full hours) on a birding trip with a local guide. We visited bush land, wetlands and mountainsides on the outskirts of Adelaide. We saw 85 species of birds, as well as koala, and 2 types of kangaroo: Eastern Gray and Red.  The Red Kangaroos are typically found in the central dry bush country.  Where we saw them is on the very eastern edge of their range.  Unlike the dry year being experienced in southern New Zealand, southern Australia has had a very wet spring and early summer. This has enabled many migratory bird species to delay their migration, as their winter homes are less inhospitable than usual. This was a disappointment to our guide, but of course we were happy with what we did get to see.  

We also learned more about specific species and the threats to them. For example, the population of a very cute and tiny bird named the Diamond Firetail has been decreasing for years. These birds eat seeds of grasses; the native meadow grasses bear seeds all year long, but the invasive grasses only bear seed in one season, so the birds are starving. I had never thought about this aspect of invasive plant species before. 

We also learned an interesting historical fact about the green space surrounding Adelaide. The city was laid out by Colonel Light, who wanted open space encircling the city for defensive purposes, to prevent an attacking army from sneaking up on the city.  At the time, the Australian settlers were concerned that the French might try to expand their colonies into Australia.  While this perceived threat never materialized, the green space was retained and converted to parks and gardens.

Pictured: Chestnut Teal, Australian Ringneck (parrot), Spotted Pardalote 





Sunday, January 29, 2023

Adelaide walkabout

 Sunday, January 29

What a beautiful city Adelaide is. When it was laid out in 1836, the plan was for a grid city layout surrounded by green space and parks, and that design has been retained. To the north-east are the zoo and botanical gardens.  We did not go into the zoo, but we did walk through parts of the botanical gardens — it was beautiful. The informal city parks that complete the perimeter included playgrounds, golf courses, soccer fields, tennis courts, cricket pitches, a high ropes course, several bike and skate parks, a Japanese garden, and a fitness trail. There is a bike/ walking path that takes you through all of them. Very impressive! We walked eight miles and only covered about 40% of the total ring. We also took a ride on the (free) city tram… very easy and otherwise we’d have walked another mile! 

We went back to see the bats today. Have you ever wondered how a bat pees? The answer is that they hold on with their hands rather than their feet… logical when you think about it. We saw several new species of parrot today… each as loud as the next but with distinctive yells (oops, calls).  We’ve seen 27 bird species so far, about half of them new to us. Not bad for “just walking around a city”!  During our city walk we got to see many more older buildings. These are interspersed with new ones. Often we observed apartment buildings built just behind older structures.  It’s clear that the planning board wants to keep as many of the old buildings as possible while still providing more modern living spaces.

Pictured: Musk Lorikeet, Crimson (Adelaide) Rosella, 1904 Fruit and Vegetable Market facade, bat demonstration, Adelaide tram 






Saturday, January 28, 2023

On to Adelaide

 Our luck with weather (at least the weather we experience) continues to hold: the overnight rain in Christchurch cleared by morning and the heat wave in Adelaide broke before we arrived. But torrential thunderstorms (nearly 10 inches of rain in 24 hours) closed the Auckland airport last night and diverted ALL international flights to Christchurch, a situation that continued through this morning. The Christchurch airport was a zoo. We were lucky to have our flight to Melbourne take off only an hour late and we made our connection to Adelaide. Some of our companions from the New Zealand trip are stuck in Christchurch till Monday!




Adelaide is a very walkable city with many museums and parks and interesting Victorian and Edwardian buildings. The Australians, being practical people, have amended the British crest which normally has a lion and a unicorn (rampant). Adelaide has a crest that keeps the lion but substitutes a kangaroo for the mythical creature, while Australia substitutes both, and has a crest with a kangaroo and an emu.  On a long walk this afternoon we explored several Adelaide neighborhoods. As we walked near the zoo, we saw at least five hundred Gray-headed Flying Foxes (fruit bats) roosting in the trees and flying around. It was overwhelming. We also saw three kinds of parrots and a number of other birds we recognize from the north Australia trip last fall. 

Pictured: Adelaide crest, the Beehive building (1895), Gray-headed Flying Foxes roosting 

Thursday, January 26, 2023

Last day in New Zealand (for now)

 January 27




Our final day in New Zealand was largely filled with traveling to Christchurch and learning about the city and in particular the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. I had not realized that the 2011 one (which had fatalities because of its location and timing) was in fact an aftershock of the stronger but less deadly 2010 earthquake. 12 years later, much of the business district has been rebuilt, but the cathedral and basilica have not been, and there are large residential areas that have been declared unbuildable.  The fault lines that run towards Christchurch are branches off the long alpine fault that we learned about when we were in the west. 

On our way there, we passed the location in Castle Rock where part of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was filmed. We also spent time in the Christchurch Botanical Gardens, where we saw California Quail with eight tiny fuzzy chicks.  Walking around the business district it was interesting to see Manukah Honey on sale everywhere, now that we know what Manukah is, and how hard people work to encourage the bees to only eat Manukah in order to be certified at the higher quality / price point. In some cases (like at Arthur’s Pass, where they have 26 hives that produce 5 tons (!!) of honey), they place the hives carefully and tear out all the clover as the bees would prefer clover to Manukah if they had the chance. 

Tomorrow we are off to Adelaide and the start of our South Australia adventure.  We’ll be back in New Zealand on the north island for a day on our way home. 

Pictured: sunrise at Arthur’s Pass, California Quail chick, scaffolding around Christchurch Cathedral

Arthur’s Pass

 January 26

We had a busy day today. We started with a pre-breakfast walk with the lodge owner, then after breakfast went kayaking on a local lake. After some other rambling, it was back to the lodge for lunch. The afternoon was spent hiking up to a waterfall, searching for alpine parrots, and learning about the sheep raising side of the property.

On the pre-breakfast walk we learned about the beech forest that surrounds the lodge, and the sequence of shrubs and trees that precede the beeches. An important first species (after a fire or other ground disturbance) is Manukah, a relative of eucalyptus. Honey made from its flowers is highly prized for antiseptic properties as well as taste, and the shrubby trees provide protection for the beech seedlings that follow. Historically the small beech and manukah were eaten by browsing sheep in the winter, but the farm has moved to growing winter feed for the sheep to protect the forest, an interesting example of cooperation and compromise between conservation and agriculture. The beech woodland was much more open and airy that the temperate rain forest of our previous locations. A risk to these forests comes from the plantations of Douglas Fir, Lodgepole Pine and other (non-native) conifers that were planted for lumber in the past. These trees are so acidic that nothing else will grow in their vicinity, no birds or insects are nourished by them, and their seed can travel six miles on the wind. It is a daunting task to remove these plantations but there is an ongoing effort to do so across New Zealand.

The predicted rain moved in from the west today, so Lake Moeraki and the west coast are happy. We got a little wet on our climb up 300 steps to the bottom of the Devil’s Punchbowl Falls, where we had excellent viewing of Riflemen, New Zealand’s smallest bird. We got even wetter as we tramped around the town of Arthur’s Pass looking for Kea. Kea are the world’s only alpine parrot. They are loud, mischievous and have learned that humans are messy eaters (the Kea tend to hang out near cafes). Eventually we were rewarded with seeing four of them, one at quite close range.

The rain did not proceed east of the mountains and the lodge area was dry for a sheep herding and shearing demonstration. Although we had seen this sort of demonstration before, the farmer taught us a lot of new things, particularly about merino wool and the wool business. Dinner tonight featured the farm’s own lamb and honeycomb ice cream. 

Pictured: Kea, Riflemen, Devil’s Punchbowl, kayaks on Lake Pearson 





Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Mountains and odd creatures

 January 25

We drove 230 miles today north up the west flank of the Southern Alps, then turned east through Arthur’s Pass to tonight’s lodge. The lodge is on a 4,000 acre sheep station, and is run by the son of our host from Lake Moeraki. Our travels today took us past glaciers and almost impossibly steep mountainsides on one side and flat farms, swamps, and beachfront on the other. Many of the seaside towns had been much larger during the 1860s gold rush than they are now. 




Along the way we visited a nature center with two primary programs: kiwi egg rescue and nurturing, and tuatara breeding. It turns out that kiwi parents provide little care of their chick once they are hatched. The kiwi egg takes 30 days to produce and weighs 20% of the mothers weight (ouch). Then the male spends 78 days incubating the egg. Once the chick hatches (which takes 3-5 days), parent involvement ends.  The hatched chick has an egg sack which will provide it with nourishment for a week.  After that time the chick must be able to feed itself.  The chick is quite vulnerable at this stage and the parents do not provide protection to the chick if it wanders from the nest. This was probably okay before there were stoats or possums or feral cats, but the chicks aren’t big enough to defend against these. In the wild it can take up to two years for a chick to grow big enough to defend itself; as a result only 5% of eggs survive to adulthood. The rescue center incubates, hatches and rears kiwis of two species until they are a viable weight and then releases them to the wild, usually about 25 such releases a year. Fortunately kiwis don’t “imprint” on humans so the releases work well. As part of the kiwi presentation, we saw a burrow-cam video of a stoat and a possum attacking a kiwi nest. The adult kiwi was fully able to chase them off, but it was terrifying to watch!

Tuatara are ancient creatures. They look like lizards but are the only survivors of a family that predates the dinosaurs. They live to be over 100 years old, and do everything very slowly; the eggs incubate for over a year! They have a “third eye” at the top of their heads, not for vision but to help them absorb vitamin D from basking in the sun.

We also learned a good deal about the seismology on New Zealand. It is not too much of a stretch to say that the whole country “is” the 600 mile long fault line that runs down the center of the South Island. The west coast is moving northward and the east coast is moving southward.. the mountains uplift about one inch per year but erode a half-inch per year. Seismic cores show 8,000 years of pretty regular seismic events, which suggests another major one is due in the next 50 years. Of course we finish our trip in Christchurch so we’ll learn more about this there. 

Pictured: New Zealand Falcon, Tuatara, glaciers on the Southern Alps

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Lake Moeraki

January 24

Today we did a lot of walking through the ancient rainforest. This is entirely original and primary forest, as the area is too remote and the soil too poor for it have been cleared even by the Māori. Overall in New Zealand, the land was 80% forested in 1000, 40% forested when Cook arrived in 1770, and is 23% forested now. The ancient trees are staggeringly tall and many are covered in epiphyte ferns which give them the lumpy appearance of Avatar. There are also a huge variety of ferns in this temperate rainforest, from sturdy bracken to the “filmy fern” that is only one cell thick. And it is genuinely a rainforest: on average it receives a half-inch of rain per day, which puts the current drought (the last rain was January 5th) into perspective. The river is running very low, ferns are drying, and it is only the 2nd time in 33 years that the lodge has they to water the lawn. 

We saw both Hector’s and Dusky Dolphins on the coast of the Tasman Sea, and apparently this is the first reported sighting of the two species intermingling. We also saw an example of rainforest sourced pharmaceuticals: there is a local mushroom that invades the larval stage of cicadas, overcoming their immune system, consuming them and then releasing spores to do so again. The immuno-suppression element was extracted, but proved to be too powerful for human use. A synthetic version was used in the first oral medicine for multiple sclerosis. 

Tonight before dinner we watched as Gerry fed Long-finned Eels… these creatures only grow one centimeter a year, so the ones we saw (at least four feet long) are over one hundred years old. Because they grow so slowly they are not farmed, unlike salmon for example. This means that eel sushi is made from wild eels — Gerry asks that we eat salmon sushi instead! 

Late in the evening (dark comes about 10 pm) we went out to see glow worms, tiny larvae with phosphorescent tips to attract bugs to the sticky tendrils that hang from their bodies. The effect is a cliff side of non-blinking fireflies.

Pictured:Dusky Dolphins, Long-finned Eels, the mushroom 



Monday, January 23, 2023

Up the southwest coast

Monday January 23





We drove today from Lake Wanaka to Lake Moeraki, stopping for walks several times along the way to see some beautiful landscapes and do a bit of birding. The western shore of the South Island is quite remote, and the roads largely follow ancient Māori trails. It is also an area filled with national parks and conservation areas. The combination of Mt Aspiring, Mt Cook, and Fiordland National Parks and the SW World Heritage total six million acres of protected land. As we drive along the Haast and Landsboro rivers, we were struck by the beautiful blue of the water, a consequence of the mica and schist rocks of the river beds. We drove south along the coast from Haast to eat lunch at a small diner in Jackson’s Bay, featuring “crayfish” or rock lobster. We were entertained at lunch by seagulls… in most cases vying to steal an inattentive diner’s lunch, and in one case a gull who repeatedly dove into the ocean for now apparent reason. 

We are staying tonight at the Wilderness Lodge at Lake Moeraki, which was opened in 1989 by Gerry McSweeney. The lodge has its own hydroelectric generation plant, although the current drought is challenging that a little. Dr. McSweeney was instrumental in convincing the New Zealand government that establishing the South West New Zealand World Heritage area and ecotourism was a better answer than converting ancient swamps and forests into dairy farms. While ecotourism has been very successful in providing local employment as well as preserving native species, it is still a fragile concept. During Covid, when tourism dried up, there was pressure to go back to logging “as this ecotourism thing clearly isn’t working “. Fortunately the resurgence of tourism this year has exceeded pre-Covid levels, but it does demonstrate the importance of outside visitors to offset internal skeptics.

Pictured: coastal landscape, dancing gull, blue waters of the Haast River, Tomtit

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Lake Wanaka

 This morning we took a 20 minute skiff ride on Lake Wanaka to reach Mou Waho Island. The island is a predator free sanctuary for the Buff Weka, a different species of Weka than the one we saw on Stewart Island.  The Buff Weka is smaller, paler and even less frightened of people. They have been extinct on the mainland of New Zealand for over one hundred years, and it has been a struggle to save them from the stoats that invaded previous sanctuaries.  We saw several weka as we hiked up to a lake, where we were rewarded with tea and biscuits overlooking “an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island”.  After tea we continued up to the summit for amazing views. The complete hike climbed 600 feet in 1.3 km — a little steep! The landscape around Lake Wanaka is quite dramatic and includes mountainsides used in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. 

The island was originally forested and a favorite hunting ground for the Māori, who understood the importance of fruiting trees to sustain the birds that in turn sustained them. The local Māori tribe was eliminated by a tribe from the north, so that Europeans only saw an empty island with great timber potential. When the native trees had all been harvested, pines were planted, which have no nutritional value to the local bird species. The pines were all removed about 25 years ago, and for the past 16 years a local ecotour company (the one that took us this morning) has planted over 8500 native plants and trees, and the island is recovering. 

We learned some interesting plant facts as well. There’s a tree (Lancewood) that is so different when it is young from when it is mature that Capt. Cook named them two different plants. But they are one, and the young one grows such sharp leaves that the Moa wouldn’t eat them. Once the plant gets “taller than a Moa”, the growth habit changes to a pear shaped deciduous tree with rounded leaves. Moa’s went extinct 600 years ago, but the tree doesn’t know that. 

This afternoon we watched Great Crested Grebes in the Wanaka harbor. Grebes make somewhat flimsy nests near the surface of the water that are easily swamped by boat wakes. A local man built nesting platforms for them, and the population has rebounded. We watched pairs of grebes doing a courting dance, others building nests or sitting on eggs, and a few grebes swimming with their tiny pied chicks riding on their backs. 

Pictured: Buff Weka, courting Great Crested Grebes, Grebe with chicks, lake on Mou Waho Island with the summit above





Milford Sound

 Today we were up before dawn, driving two hours north along the west edge of the fiordland mountains to Milford. We were the first ship out on Milford Sound; the day was clear, the water was calm, and without other boats it was quiet. Our ship can hold over 100 passengers but our little group had it all to ourselves — it was wonderful, we could freely wander about the ship and have no fear of being photo bombed.


Although it was named Milford Sound in the 19th century, it is really a fjord. A sound is a river that has been inundated by the sea. A fjord is carved out by glaciers, which affects both its shale (deep, steep and with a rounded bottom) and its makeup (the entrance from the ocean shallower than the rest from debris deposited as the glacier receded).  The surface of the water was very blue.  This is because the salt water sits on top of the fresh water which is rich in tannins.

The sheer magnitude of the mountains was hard to grasp, and we found ourselves taking lots of pictures with other vessels (once they appeared) or small planes or some other object in it for scale. In addition to the majesty of the mountains and waterfalls (some of which are three times the height of Niagara Falls, though they look small compared to the height of the fjord walls), we also saw fur seals (including a baby) and seabirds. As we entered the Tasman Sea, a pair of Bottlenosed Dolphins played around the ship, which was an unusual and wonderful treat.  We also saw two people climbing up one of the cliff faces en route to Mt. Mitre. They must have been dropped off by a ship, as they were not very far above the water when we saw them, and there was nothing around them but rocks and water.

The rest of the day was spent retracing our steps to Te Anau and then heading east and north into Central Otago and Lake Wanaka. We stopped in a number of small towns along the way, many of which were founded during the 1860’s gold rush. Some of the towns have well preserved buildings from that era. One of the shops had a collection of gold nuggets found recently in the area,  including the largest at 7.5 oz.  We got to hold it for a moment; it is quite a chunk of metal.  Our hotel for the night is on the shore of Lake Wanaka which afforded a chance for birdwatching and a lovely sunset over the water. 

Pictured: Milford Sound and waterfall, dolphin breaching, baby fur seal 




Friday, January 20, 2023

Travel day with takahe

 Today was another travel day, flying from Stewart Island to Invercargill, then driving along the coastal road to Te Anau near the entrance to Fiordland National Park. Along the way we stopped  in Riverton to visit the local museum, in Orepiki for lunch, at Lake Manipouri for a walk, and at the Lake Te Anau Bird Sanctuary to see Takahe.  It rained all morning and cleared about lunchtime.  The rain was a blessing as the south and Stewart island had been without serious rainfall for nearly a month. 




The Riverton museum was surprisingly comprehensive for such a small town. Riverton is one of the oldest communities on the southwest coast, settled by the Māori about one thousand years ago, established as a town in 1835.  In turns, it was a sealing, whaling and agricultural hub for the area. The very earliest European settlers intermarried with the Māori and so the town has always had a “mixed” character (as our many-generation-Rivertonian guide termed it).  Orepiki was a boom town of 3000 inhabitants during the gold rush of 1864, but now has about 10 houses in it. The former doctor’s house and office is a farm-to-table cafe run by a local farmer, and some of the best food we’ve had thus far. The drive up the southwest coast was beautiful, looking across first the sea and later across a series of lakes at the massive mountain range just to the north. 

The Takahe is a flightless ground bird that has some superficial resemblance to a purple swamp hen. The takahe suffered from predation by stoats, and were thought to be extinct by 1920. (As a reminder, the stoats were introduced to try to address the rabbit problem created by European introduction). A takahe flock was discovered in an isolated mountain valley in the 1960s, and since then there have been serious conservation and restoration efforts on their behalf. There are several sanctuaries that work together to improve the genetic diversity and chick survival rates, raising chicks for re-release to the wild.

Pictured: takahe, view of fiordland across lake manipouri, lunch counter in Orepiki 

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Stewart Island by sea and land

 


We spent the morning exploring the coastline of Stewart island looking for seabirds. The white-capped albatross started following our boat hoping we were a fishing boat.  We ended up with about a dozen around the boat. Two other kinds of albatross joined their whited-capped friends bobbing in the water around the boat.  We also saw a number of migratory sea birds, including a Cape Petrel and a Sooty Shearwater. The last time we saw these birds was from high up on the bridge of the NatGeo ship in the Southern Ocean near South Georgia. Seeing the birds from water level was a treat.  We worked our way around several different islands to see other wildlife including New Zealand fur seals, sea lions, Stewart Island Shags, and Pied Shags. Katharine got a quick view of a Little Blue Penguin porpoising.  The captain of the boat is a many generation Stewart Islander (his family came in the 1860s) and started the first kiwi tours in 1999. 

After a picnic lunch on the boat, we were dropped off at Ulva Island, a 21-mile long, predator-free sanctuary.  Ulva was first settled by Englishmen in the 1860s, along with many of the offshore islands around Stewart; the original settler, Charles Trail, declared himself postmaster for the region, and his house still stands. There are pictures in the pub in Oban of Victorian ladies all dressed up for the social event that was rowing to Ulva to pick up the mail. Its a reminder of just how remote these islands are! Mr Trail was also a visionary who protected his land from lumbering in 1899.

The staff on Ulva fight an annual battle with rats who swim from the main island, but Ulva has been free of free of any weasels, stoats, possum or feral cats since 1999..  The island hosts a number of rare bird species that have died out on the mainland. During our outing we observed all the special island birds we’d heard about from our trip leader, somewhat to the surprise of our local guide. One of our favorites was the Weka, a brown flightless ground bird that looks like a kiwi with a short bill. Actually it’s the other way around: the Māori name for kiwi is “weka with a beak”.  We also got a glimpse of two Rifleman birds, which resemble a colorful cotton ball with a sharp pin for a bill. It is the smallest bird in New Zealand and some bird books say it is extinct on Stewart Island, but we certainly saw two on Ulva!  

The trees and ferns on the island are also fascinating, including a fern that reproduces by growing baby plants on its fronds which then drop off to root on the forest floor, and a tree that requires the NZ Wood Pigeon to eat and “process” its seeds for germination. We also saw kiwi burrows, some quite elaborate with over a dozen entrances.  You could see which ones were  currently in use as the leaf litter had been carefully swept wavy from the main entrance. 

Pictured: South Island Saddleback, Hookers Sea Lion (all 900 pounds of him), White-capped Mollymawk (albatross)





Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Traveling south

 Wednesday, January 18


Today was largely a travel day, by van from Dunedin to Invercargill (the southernmost city in New Zealand) and then a short flight in a six-seater to Oban, the only town on Stewart Island. Most of the drive was through the Caitlins, a relatively flat and rich agricultural area with many sheep and dairy farms and the occasional deer farm. Our stops included watching 4 Hector’s Dolphins rolling just beyond the breakers; Hector’s Dolphins are the smallest dolphins in the world at just 4 feet long. They are bottom feeders and stay within 5 miles of shore. At the same location in Curio Bay we saw the stone “logs”  of a petrified forest dating to 175 million years ago before Gowandaland broke apart. 

Stewart Island is a good example of how all of New Zealand originally looked: rocky, hilly and forested. The main islands have been largely deforested over a thousands years of human occupation. We are staying at Kaka Retreat, so named for the bold endemic parrot that will raid your pack for food if you are unwary. We looked high and low for a kaka, only to have one land on the phone wires as we walked home from dinner, and then another landed on the railing outside our room!  We saw a few more during a short, early dusk stroll. As with many sightings, once we have struggled to find the first one, subsequent ones seem to be everywhere.  A good example is the New Zealand (Wood) Pigeon, and enormous bird (easily twice the size of a conventional city pigeon) with an iridescent green-blue head, a green “bib” and a very prosperous white belly. They are quite noisy fliers which made it very easy for the indigenous people to catch them for food. At the other color extreme is a New Zealand Fantail, a tiny flitting drab gray bird until it flares its brilliant white tail feathers. 

There are approximately 60,000 kiwis of various subspecies in New Zealand. 20,000 of them live on Stewart Island, and we got to see four of those tonight. Kiwis are fascinating and unique creatures. They have the shortest beaks of any bird… because beak length is measured from nostrils to tip! They obviously have very long beaks and their nostrils are very close to the tip, to enable their great sense of smell to assist them in finding grubs etc in the ground. They also have whiskers on their beak tips to help them to sense vibration, and they have the second best sense of hearing of any creatures (the condor has the best). Their eyesight is very poor, and they have no cones so they are extremely sensitive to white light. We were careful to use only red light, no flash, no shutter sound, for our viewing tonight. Kiwis are famous for the size of the egg compared to the adult female, but what is less known is that they hatch fully feathered and ready to hunt for food. The parents do no nurturing of the chicks, but chicks of different ages stay in the parents range until they are old enough to breed. Only 10% of chicks survive to adulthood, but then they live for over fifty years. Tonight we saw siblings (one from last year’s brood and one only a few months old) playing and foraging together. 

Daylight lasts a long time at this latitude and this time of year. Our kiwi spotting tour met at 10:45 pm to ensure we would be in full darkness. As we met for breakfast at 7 am, it’s been a long day!

Pictured: Kaka, New Zealand Wood Pigeon, 3-month-old Stewart Island Southern Brown Kiwi