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