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