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