New Zealand

 

I was recently fortunate enough to undertake a two month tour of New Zealand as part of my work sabbatical. I was surrounded by new sights, sounds and, unfortunately, smells, and was eager to share these observations with the good folks back home. So I started writing a diary and emailing updates back to the UK. Those updates are largely responsible for the blog idea taking shape, so it seems entirely appropriate that they should now be shared as my first post, this time with appropriate photographic accompaniment. Short they are not – be warned. Enjoy.

New Zealand Travel Diary – 5^th Dec 2013-4^th Feb 2014

Thurs 5th (England) - Saturday 7th (NZ):

The journey was fine, although it felt a lot like groundhog day with every flight offering up the same mix of forced cabin crew smiles, a repackaged pair of headphones and subtle variations on the same meal every 4-6 hours for about two days. I haven't travelled for ages, but there were a few things I noticed:

1. It's impossible to go through airport security without feeling suspicious

2. When you've gone through security checks, if you have a meal in departures, they give you a knife that is so pathetic it can't cut chips, presumably in case you then use it to wipe the forced smile off a cabin crewperson's face

3. People who fly a lot must love toblerone, since every airport duty free is stocked with huge pyramids of the stuff, providing everyone with the opportunity to buy a lifetime's supply of triangular chocolate at discount price

4. Nobody ever tires of airport travellators

5. Whatever airport you are at, there will be a Myna bird there with you

Despite checking several times, I was still nervous that I might have left the lens cleaning fluid or tweezers in my hand luggage and that it might spark some kind of international terrorist alert. Also, I noticed that my camera bag had picked up some seeds at some point when I put it on the floor. Since NZ has suffered massively from the introduction of non-native species, I thought I should remove them and spent half an hour trying to get them unstuck, wishing I had the tweezers that wouldn't have made it through security!

Inevitably on the plane I was stuck between a large lady and a grumpy young man who slept for the entire two-day period. Although, slightly worryingly, in the rare moments he was awake he would occasionally cough and white powder would float out across the space between us. Nobody seemed to react positively to the announcement from the captain that the wings would need to be de-iced prior to departure. I enjoyed a 'new feature' on the plane, which was the forward facing live camera that allowed you to watch take off and landing from the pilot's perspective. I enjoyed it up until we landed at Christchurch in a heavy crosswind. Disappointingly, nobody joined me when I burst into spontaneous applause on landing.  

Anyway, I arrived and leapt straight into a car to drive north to Kaikoura. In order to save money I had hired the budget option, and while I fully respect Nissan's decision to make the 'Sunny' thirty years ago, I suspect they may not be mass-producing them still. It lacks any form of acceleration, which makes it difficult on the hilly windy roads, and I've become adept at pulling over to allow other traffic, people on bikes, and farmyard animals to pass. On arriving at Kaikoura my stereotypical prejudices were instantly satisfied when I was greeted at the hostel by a teenage boy playing the guitar and singing while surrounded by teenage girls. But I was here, I was tired, and I went to bed.

The Sunny

 

Sunday 8th:

Today was the day of Albatross Encounter, a boat trip into the rich waters off Kaikoura with seabirds in mind. It didn't disappoint. Within five minutes we had come across a confiding blue penguin, and shortly after were circled by no less than 13 true 'pelagic' species, and we saw a host of coastal species too. The highlights were the five types of albatross, with the world's largest wingspan on show and chances to photograph them all. Most came to within a few yards of the boat, attracted by the gourmet offer of shark's liver. We in the meantime got hot chocolate and ginger nuts. It was so good I instantly went and booked the whale watch for tomorrow.

 

 

Wandering Albatross

Blue Penguin

I found a supermarket to pick up rations and to my delight discovered that the Kiwis are a sensible race, offering almost everything for exactly one dollar or multiples thereof. Which means no need to carry around masses of tiny change. A nation of geniuses (Genuii?).

I had a stroll round the headland after lunch, which was, slightly weirdly, accompanied to the sound of various British farmland bird species. It turns out much of the wildlife here is British, and they have healthy populations of yellowhammer, skylark, various finches, and, strangest of all, cirl buntings. We tried for years to reintroduce the little blighters to Cornwall, but they seem to be doing well over here! It even rained, giving the whole experience a distinctly British feel (apart from the snow-capped mountain backdrop). I did find a couple of NZ species, including a fantail feeding young. And I had my first sight of fur seals, and a stunning group of Monarch Butterflies that refused to sit still long enough to get a photo.
 

Monday 9th:

An early start for the whale watch was not a problem as my body is not recognising NZ time yet. I considered tactics for where on the boat would be best. Given that someone who did the tour days earlier spoke with joy at the breaching whales they had seen I was expectant. Which is a bad thing to be on a whale tour, as the world's largest living things tend to be reluctant to spend any time within eyesight of the world's most-technologically advanced species. But I carried the camera stuff anyway, hoping to add to the hundreds of seabird shots already taken. The boat is speedy, and we were forced to sit inside as it travels to allow us maximum chance of arriving at a whale in good time and without being soaked or hurled overboard. This also maximises the possibility than anyone with a nervous maritime association will be in no fit shape to view any cetaceans encountered. The captain spotted a whale at distance and we shot forth, ever eager, only to be told that it had just dived and wouldn't be back on the surface for 40-60 minutes. I'll skip the next 40-60 minutes. But when it returned some way off we shot after it again, and saw the Sperm whale, the largest toothed predator on the planet, bobbing along beside the boat, doing what whales do best. Sperm whales tend to raise their tails as they dive, and we were warned when this would happen to allow us all to line up our lenses like a paparrazi scrum. Sperm whale done, and a cheeky humpback whale on the way home for good measure. Throw in dusky dolphins and hector's dolphin (the world's smallest and rarest) for good measure, and it was a pretty good trip!

Sperm Whale

 

The rest of the day was spent driving. I knew that 'routefinder' times were likely to be quite a lot out, but hadn't realised how far out they are. They assume several things:

1. You are on an empty road where you can do the speed limit

2. You are not looking at scenery as you drive

3. You are not looking at birds as you drive

4. You have not hired a Nissan Sunny

The roads were generally empty, to the point where I wondered how long I would have to wait for assistance if the sunny packed up. But the vastness of the landscape is pretty terrifying. It feels like you could drive all day without seeing anyone, and passing through a land forged by giant forces millions of years ago. The tiny streams sit in massive canyons that must have been eroded over g'zillions of years. It made me wonder how the NZ postal service works (probably still better than ours). And half of it looks like a Lord of the Rings set. Although it was a long drive it was fantastic, not least after I had figured out how to use my iPod with the car radio to give the trip a soundtrack of epic SigurRos anthems.

The Open Road

I arrived at my lodge quite tired, but delighted to find a stunning hidden gem of a place, where a couple had built their very own lodge on a ecological theme, with composting loos and outdoor showers, surrounded by pristine habitat and intersected by it's own river. Here I had my first encounter with Bellbird and Tui, a couple of endemics. I also had my first encounter with Danielle and Danielle's Gran, who accosted me on arrival and told me about their trip for the next half hour. Given that we were travelling down a single road with obvious tourist attractions, we would spend the following 48 hours following each other south. Although they were nice people to chat to, it becomes a little awkward when you say goodbye and wish them well only to bump into them again 45 minutes later, repeatedly, for a day and a half. It's a bit like doing a supermarket shop where you are on opposite lanes with someone you know and as you enter the next lane you know you will see them heading towards you again, smiling awkwardly.

Tui

 

Tuesday 10th:

A morning amble around the lodge grounds was the precursor to another day of driving. This one was punctuated by stops at the Pancake Rocks (Danielle and Danielle's Gran beat me to it!) and various scenic layby's for views or walks. Also the route wound through a few small towns, most of which seemed to be modelled on the American mid-West Gold Rush theme, which I guess they probably were since gold mining was what opened up the area originally. One of the small towns offered me the opportunity to go 'fossicking', which I was tempted to do just to find out what it means. The town roads are mostly straight, with Saloons on the corner and the railroad cutting straight through the middle. In fact, the railways here seem to take precedence over all other forms of transport. They are not fenced off, but merely assume that people aren't stupid enough to trespass or throw stuff onto the lines. Plus they get right of way at junctions, and actually cross traffic roundabouts. In one instance the road crossed a rail bridge, so that you were driving along the tracks. There was no room for both car and train, and no apparent system for notifying one another of when the other one wished to use the bridge.

The Pancake Rocks

 

The roads, when not hijacking the railway line, are amazing in their own right. Many seem to be in the process of still being built, or are in a continual state of being upgraded. There seems to be a disproportionate amount of line painting going on to support the few cars making use of them! But they are well worth it, as the views are fantastic. Every few miles you pass a sign for another scenic reserve, without having realised that the last one had finished!

The West Coast Road

I made my way to a small place called Okarito, which has only about 25 permanent residents now, most of them apparently ex-pat Brits. It has a lagoon which supports a variety of waterbirds, but is also home to the Okarito Brown Kiwi, which has a global population of just 385 individuals. One of the ex-pat Brits, an ex-insurance salesman called Ian, tracks the Kiwis and offers evening tours. This is how I found myself stood silently in the forest in the pitch black holding a radio and listening for the faintest sound of rustling that could be the tell-tale sound of an approaching Kiwi. Ian knows where they are and how far away, but unless they decide to cross one of the few forest tracks there is no hope of reaching them. Even with eight of us, stationed at appropriate intervals along the track, the kiwi managed to sneak through before we could all creep close enough to see it. Fearing a kiwiless evening (Ian boasts a 95% success rate!), we trudged back towards the vehicle with one bird left in radio-range. As we approached the car park, in strict single file, Ian slowed down and got us all into position. He flashed his torch and in the red-light beam was Beaumont, a female kiwi that was presumably named 30 years ago by a rugby fanatic. She delighted us with a spot of foraging, before hopping off into the night.

The night time excursion also tested our abilities to deal with sandflies. I had begun to develop a strong dislike for them yesterday, and thankfully Ian provided head nets for our nocturnal jaunt. Apparently Okarito sandflies are 'notoriously vicious', although I hadn't noticed a sensitive side to the sandflies I had previously encountered. On the plus side, I am told that they die overnight, or when they have bitten you, neither of which seems to be a sensible evolutionary strategy.

Okarito Lagoon

Wednesday 11th:

My early morning boat tour of the lagoon had been postponed a day due to poor weather, which promptly turned out to be nice weather. So I took myself off on a circular route out to three mile lagoon. Many of the features here are imaginatively named, but I guess it's the Ronseal approach to nomenclature, and gives everyone a good grounding in both direction and distance. The walk is only circular if you do one stretch of it along the beach, and this is only possible at low tide. The route has in fact been closed by the Department of Conservation due to coastal erosion, but everyone said it would be fine to go anyway. So the first hour or so of the walk involves a perilous tightrope walk along a narrow beach where you will either be swept to your death by the tide or crushed by falling rocks. Neither of which I was too keen on. Once safely through, I found out the bridge across the lagoon was also closed for maintenance, but everyone told me to ignore that too. Walking back through pristine forest alive with the calls of myriad hidden species, I wondered whether answering the call of nature there would be considered an offense. Subsequent investigation lead to the discovery that there is, in fact, official guidance should you need a number 2!

 

Okarito Beach

Having exhausted myself with the walk, I opted for a lazy afternoon of being bitten and writing to you good selves. A large German travel writer called Hans introduced himself to me, and shortly after relayed a message that Ian had summoned me to go out on Kiwi watch again that evening, free of charge, to assist with the proceedings. So I found myself again stood silently in the forest in the pitch black holding a radio and listening for the faintest sound of rustling that could be the tell-tale sign of approaching Kiwi. And with great success! We saw two Kiwis this time, with much better views, and also a confused possum that emerged from the bush stunned to find a line of people stood silently in the forest in the pitch black holding a radio and listening for the faintest sound of rustling that could be the tell-tale sign of approaching Kiwi. Having celebrated success and returned to the village, I was asked by a gay man in a dressing gown if I'd like to join him on the sofa for a glass of wine. I declined.

I also discovered today that my handwriting is so utterly awful that there is little point in sending you all anything other than a blank postcard!
 

Thursday 12th:

The rescheduled boat tour went ahead in considerably worse conditions than the previous day. Apparently the rain and tides had conspired to leave the lagoon much higher than usual, and as a result there was no mud for the birds to feed on, and so no birds. We did see a few things, including spoonbill, and learned about the area from Swade, who I tried hard not to ask if he was releasing a Christmas single. Apparently the lagoon was formed by a couple of Tsunami in the 1500s. Seismologists had taken core samples that indicated the wave height for each was around 30m. Given that the village sits 1m above sea level, this does not bode well when the inevitably long-overdue wave hits. Although the seismologists have apparently bought some land in the village to retire to, so the residents may know how serious the risk is when they build a 40m high structure. I also heard about all the birds that other people keep seeing around the village, but not me.

Having not seen much from a boat, I decided to not see much from a kayak. For some reason, the opportunity to propel yourself through the lagoon seemed too good to pass up, and indeed it allowed me to access further up river than we had in the boat. Drifting along the quiet river with forest dripping lazily along either side was genuinely stunning, although it turns out I have the upper body strength of a six year old girl. I also discovered that, when kayaking alone for three hours, there will be a moment when you end up talking to yourself and then laughing at the absurdity of it all. Singing made up motivational songs is not necessary but likely. And people who pass you on boats like to smile and wave and take photos, and you smile and wave back through gritted teeth while secretly hoping they fall overboard. It was worth it to hear my first booming bittern though, and I made it back just as the heaven's opened.

Kayaking the lagoon

 

Okarito River

I have a confession to make here. I wore socks and sandals together. My feet had by this stage been so thoroughly chewed by the flies that it was my only option for comfort. My apologies to all, and no, it is still not acceptable in any other circumstances, but in the continual battle between blood retention and feeding the local wildlife it was a necessary evil. 

It dawned on me that it is now less then two weeks until Christmas, but there is no hype here at all. It appears that Santa Claus is very much not coming to town. Unless Swade gets involved perhaps.
 

Friday 13th:

Not a day to attempt a coastal walk of death!

One thing I've noticed is that wherever you go in the world there will be an oystercatcher there. And it will sound like an oystercatcher, regardless of faith, colour or creed.

Variable Oystercatcher

Apparently the west coast has mountains, but I still haven't seen them. On the plus side I finally had some cake! To keep the theme running I had hummingbird cake, which I recently found out in a pub quiz is largely based on pineapple, though this one included passion fruit and banana as well.

Lake Matheson, where mountains should have been

Fox Glacier was my main port of call today. Where to start! It reminded me why I've avoided the west coast tourist hotspots. Busloads of mostly Asian groups arriving with designer clothes, iPads and sunglasses to walk up a steep, rocky track to a glacier in the drizzle. One intrepid young lady decided to combat the trek in foam platforms and a short skirt. And another old timer carried a radio with him, which appeared to be playing elevator music. Each time I stopped to take a photo I could here the elevator coming up hill behind me! The glacier itself is undeniably magnificent, and brought back memories of geography lessons at school. Anyone for a spot of moraine?! But it sits within a chasm of a valley that it has itself created over many centuries. The access road along the valley has signs showing the extent of the glacier through time, giving a stark reminder of its own personal struggle back up the valley from which it is trying to escape.

I stayed at a place called Lake Paringa, where you can sit on the pontoon at dusk and gaze out over the calm water, imagining yourself to be in one of millions of generic lake photographs the world over. But as desk fell the calls of Kea picked up and two birds flew down into the site itself. When I eventually found them they were no more than six feet away. For the non-birders amongst you, Kea are large alpine parrots, and are wonderfully inquisitive and intelligent birds, and it's a genuine pleasure to spend time in their company.

Lake Paringa

 

Saturday 14th:

Another long day of driving ahead, via a number of waterfalls and pools in the steep valleys. Glacial blue is very much in fashion here. The road was another winding, steep, hairpin filled climb and fall over a mountain pass, but with the Nissan's sunny disposition we chugged on. It was our final day together, and we parted on good terms. The car had got me around without failing, and actually burst into life on the final downhill stretch where it's abnormally tight turning circle was incredibly helpful on the hairpin descent to Queenstown. I suspect it would have struggled going up the road, but despite my grumblings I actually miss it a bit, mostly as I now have to carry my stuff everywhere.

The Blue Pools

 

Drive to Queenstown

In fact my arrival in Queenstown could not have made me look any more like an adventure virgin as I stepped off the bus in the town centre with my giant luggage hoisted about my person, staring in wide eyed amazement at the array of activities on offer and clutching my lonely planet in one hand. Queenstown picked up where Fox Glacier left off. It is lively, bustling, energetic, youthful - all the things I'm not! It is filled with expectant young faces eager for life experience - nervous teenage girls travelling in gangs and young, buff guys in tight shirts reeking of testosterone and false bravado. This cosmopolitan place is stuffed with the trappings of corporate investment. Homes, holiday homes, hostels and hotels creep further up the mountain sides. International chains offer coffee and fast food by the KFC bucketload. And opportunities to feed the adrenaline-infused visitors are on every corner. After all, who wouldn't want to hurl themselves off a bridge and eat a burger afterwards?! I should have been here ten years ago, but I suspect my younger self would still have been as cynical and uncomfortable as I am now.

Some of the strange things I've seen so far in Queenstown include a guy dressed like Alice Cooper, a man in a policeman's hat with a truncheon and a pot plant, and every manner of fancy dress imaginable. Even the local lawn bowls club were in fancy dress, and also were half the age of their UK bowls counterparts. In fact, it seems that everyone here is youthful and fit, despite the junk food deluge. Presumably living so perilously close to death permanently encourages your body to burn off vast quantities of fried food. Lots of people here jog, and I imagine that they jog all the time, including when carrying out mundane tasks such as food shopping, hanging out laundry, or going out to dinner. Having said that, walking brisky along swinging an elbow backwards as if to render unconscious an unseen adversary just over your shoulder does not constitute jogging.

Literally all manner of adventure sports are on offer here: skydiving, bungee, jet boat, rafting, rafting in a cave, being thrown off a cliff in a chair, helicopter rides. I would love to walk into an adventure sports booking agency and ask for the most extreme and ridiculous 'sport' imaginable, just to see if they can facilitate it. Perhaps bungee jumping out of a helicopter in a chair attached to a shark on a mountain bike? (NB, I know some of you are thinking it - I am on the bike, not the shark).

There is a foghorn in Queenstown that I can't quite place yet. I assume it is attached to a boat, but it goes off randomly and sounds like a million Bolivian panpipe players all piping the same note simultaneously. The 'OK gift shop' turned out to be better than that, as it sold the best postcards I could find. This sort of modest understatement is not common in Queenstown. In an attempt to stay awake after 9pm I sat at a pub listening to a not very good guitarist until I could bear it no more. Having left, there was an unbelievably good pianist outside playing his own pieces on a wheely-piano that had been rolled out especially for the occasion. This was the soundtrack I wanted to dusk on the quay with the mountain backdrop, but eventually even he was drowned out by the bar crawling smurfs and santas stumbling their way from one ubiquitous establishment to the next.
 

Sunday 15^th:

Having been rudely awakened by the nocturnal arrival of my dorm mates overnight, I crept forth as quietly as possible in the morning and decided to climb a mountain. Leaving Queenstown seemed like a good thing to do, for me and for everyone else, so I set off uphill to try to conquer Ben Lomond. All the Department of Conservation (DOC) tracks here are marked with approximate timings to certain points on route, and I find that they must be measured by people who don’t do much walking as it always takes less time to reach than predicted. This is a good thing, as it raises morale and allows the avid walker to plan what to do with the spare time he or she has gained. I reached a point where the mountain valley opened up giving unbelievable views of the lake below. I noticed the alpine plants and wondered if they had Eidelweiss there. To my considerable dismay, the tune of the same name from ‘The Sound of Music’ accompanied me for the remainder of the walk, branching out briefly into ‘Feed the birds’. The tree line was breached, I met several goats, and plodded upwards to ‘songs from the musicals’ until the cloud came in, preventing me from seeing the route ahead or the view back down. So I gave up and returned to the skyline cafe for a piece of cake.

The view from the Ben Lomond Track

The skyline centre is perched precariously above Queenstown giving wonderful views of the Remarkables (imaginatively named mountains) and the lake, sitting at a point 18,946km from London. Most tourists are ferried up and down the hill by the skyline gondola, a kind of margarine tub suspended from overhead wires that rocks continuously side to side. I was glad to be on foot, and even more glad that I was heading down past the panting and heaving people just making their way upwards. As each asked how far was left to go, I felt it would be inappropriate to give them anything other than the DOC approved timings for the walk, which was each time met with a look of pure terror.

Queenstown from the Skyline Cafe

Returning earlier than planned allowed me to embrace the fast food diet and tuck into a Fergbakery pie. Fergburgers have an international following these days, and though I enjoyed that I found the Fergbakery pie to be tastier and better value for money. Fergbakery over Fergburger everyday! Another food tip I would recommend is banana and peanut butter. I’m sure someone has discovered this already, and wondered if their discovery, as mine, came out of the necessity to use up all remaining food to prevent having to carry it thereafter.

The early return also allowed me to relax before the real work starts, and I sat in the living room in the hostel on giant pillows and watched the world pass by. Two Germans came in and put a film on. Despite both speaking English, they put subtitles on as well, also in English. This was particularly useful when the masses began their evening drinking session in the adjacent kitchen, and we were forced to watch the remainder of the film to a soundtrack of dance music whilst reading the subtitles. The film was ‘Blind Side’, which I would recommend anyone to see, but perhaps with its actual soundtrack and no subtitles.

The final thing I saw before retiring to bed was a poster for an extreme sport of one type or another. Underneath was a quote from Drew in Liverpool, which read ‘Even my shit was scared!’. Such an eloquent summing up Drew, and the perfect point at which to leave Queenstown.
 

Monday 16^th:

I leapt onto an early coach bound for Twizel. The three hour trip was punctuated with interesting snippets of information given by the driver. On our left the first vineyards in the region, on our right the Chinese gold-mining huts, ahead yet another opportunity to plunge into a ravine. I was interested in the facts whilst hoping the driver did not need to turn to face whatever feature he was discussing.

It was disconcerting to be the only passenger disembarking at Twizel, with the coach driver rather apologetically saying to the rest of the passengers that we had to stop there to drop me off, and me having to do the walk of shame down the entire length of the coach. Liz, the head aviculturalist on the Black Stilt (Kaki) Project, was there to meet me. She offered to give me the tour of Twizel, and thirty seconds later we were on our way back to the rearing facilities. Twizel is not large, although weirdly it boasts two 4-square supermarkets within a stone’s throw of each other.

I was taken to my lodgings, an old caravan parked at the side of the rearing facilities. After the shared lodgings at Queenstown it was a glorious palace, and I was assured that it had been made weather-proof for my arrival. I assume by this they mean waterproof, as it has no central heating or cooling mechanism to combat the rise and fall of the sun. So in the day it is roasting, and a series of vents can be opened to give some circulation. But at night the heat is sucked out and I’ve been scrounging blankets since then to keep the chill out at night. It’s actually quite warm here in the days but I’m told it’s quite cold currently by the locals.

The view from the caravan is fantastic. Although there are powerlines running across it, there is a mountain backdrop, and in the foreground a series of pools, culminating in the kaki aviaries. This means I can listen to the birds calling at night as I lie shivering in bed. I immediately started a caravan bird list. I am parked next to a small house where I can cook and wash, and the occupants are all DOC staff, working on kaki or other local species.

Caravan and view

One blindingly obvious thought occurred to me today: if New Zealand is 13 hours ahead of the UK, presumably nowhere can be more than ten hours behind us, otherwise it would be a whole day behind New Zealand, making it in fact New Zealand a day late.
 

Tuesday 17^th:

Today I became an aviculturalist. Having worked with a number of avics I had some inkling of what I was letting myself in for, and as predicted, spent most of the day clearing up bird poo. I had to scrub bird poo, throw away bird poo, and most excitingly of all, jet wash bird poo from the mats. Most of aviculture is about keeping everything clean to prevent disease from spreading, and although it sounds dull, there is something very satisfying about the process involved. I also got to handle and weigh the birds, from two-day old balls of fluff to 30-day old bundles of energy. They call continuously, with a kind of piping shriek that goes right through you. They’re also unbearably delicate, and when you are tasked with catching and restraining the world’s rarest wader chick you want to get it right!

Newly hatched Kaki chick

There are, this year, only 18 known breeding pairs of kaki on the planet. This is, unbelievably, an improvement from the 23 individuals that were known to be left in 1981, and thirty years of painstaking conservation work has got us to this point. When asking about the species, I’m yet to find a single fact that gives them hope for the future, other than the dedication of a team of conservationists. They are delicate birds, ground nesting and eaten by virtually everything. Their habitat is rare and under threat, and they hybridise with non-native pied stilts, thus diluting the genuine population. They do themselves no favours, and if you were to quote Darwin’s theories on survival of the fittest you would make a strong case for these guys not being fit enough! The problem, or course, is that they were fit enough to cope with the environment that they evolved in, but we went and stuffed it all up by throwing a menagerie of hungry toothed mammals in their general direction.

Black Stilt/Kaki

Despite all of this, the team find enough pairs and nests to take the eggs into captivity where they stand a better chance of reaching fledging age. Much better in fact, and the facility is something of a kaki production line, with over 100 eggs or chicks passing through annually. For any confused mathematicians among you, each pair can lay four eggs in a nest, and if these are taken by the team, they will relay up to four times a season. Now the obvious question is why over 100 eggs and chicks does not result in over 100 new Kaki for the population. As with most species, the bulk of the young birds perish in the first winter, and this is the problem here too. So this species is perilously close to extinction and there is no obvious way to remedy that situation in the short term.

Kaki Eggs

I retired to the caravan buzzing from the first day to find a note from the field team informing me that tomorrow I would be taken up the Godley. I spent a nervous night wondering what exactly they had in mind for me.
 

Wednesday 18^th:

The Godley is, rather fortunately, a breathtaking river valley which is home to a few kaki. The team kindly gave me an easy section to walk, and I was deposited alone, vulnerable and trembling, in the wilderness, and told to walk downstream for two hours to the rendezvous point. This was, of course, epic, and I strolled slowly down the river bank hoping to see my first kaki. I failed, but in their place I saw several other specialists of the braided river valleys, notably wrybill, the only bird in the world that has a sideways pointing bill which it uses to turn stones over. And the Godley truly is the most astounding place to ‘work’ in.

The Godley River Basin

The kiwis have a very different attitude towards health and safety than we do. Although they have all the necessary checks in place, you may have gathered from previous updates that the opportunities to damage yourself are continually more apparent than in the UK. I was told that river crossings would be part of my work load here – something I have never had to do before, and certainly not in fast flowing freezing cold glacial streams. Anything above the knee is generally not recommended, but with limited options for crossings and water that backs up your leg dangerously close to those parts of your anatomy that have no interest in being coated in glacial water, it is difficult to adhere to this strategy all the time. Having combated river crossings, I was then informed of the quicksand. Although I haven’t experienced this one yet, the technique for survival is apparently to flounder backwards and reverse out the way you came. I suspect it is easy to spot new field workers as they eye every patch of sand with suspicion and pace back and forth along river banks dipping a nervous toe into the shallows to asses flow and depth. Coupled with these afflictions I have developed hayfever out here again, making me officially the worst field worker in the world.   

An easy crossing!

However, the perils were all worth it when I saw my first kaki – nine of them in fact, representing about a quarter of the known population of breeding adults on the planet. Two of these had a nest, and our job was to remove the eggs for hand-rearing and replace them with dummy eggs (this is necessary to ensure the pair lay the full clutch of 4 eggs – only three had been removed from this nest). The nest itself is little more than a few pieces of vegetation plonked conspicuously on the mud, with spotted eggs that stand out like a giraffe in dark glasses at a polar bear’s only nightclub (thank you blackadder). It’s no wonder that none of them make it in the wild. It makes you want to grab the kaki by the shoulders and tell it, in no uncertain terms, that if it doesn’t get its act together pretty sharpish then all hope is lost.

Simone removing eggs

 

Thursday 19^th:

The decision for today revolved around the tricky issue of what shoes go best with what outfit. Having purchased new walking boots, I was not keen to ruin them immediately by ploughing straight on into the river, but other options simply don’t protect your feet as well. A trial run with the boots left the other 99% of the walk as a squelchy, cold but comfortable trek. Trialling sandals (this time without socks!) was successful at the crossings, but they quickly rubbed my toes sore and provided no protection against the tall vegetation or hot sun. So for anyone back home yearning to take up river walking, my suggestion is to wear boots and carry sandals for the crossings. Unnecessarily complex perhaps, but my sunburnt, bitten and raw feet are glad of it. I’ve been told I have hobbit feet before, and now I can see why.

It turns out that everyone here is mad. The field team are a whole bag full of crazy, but that fun, laugh-until-you-hurt kind of crazy that combines a blend of over the top in jokes, a dash of take-it-one-step-further dares, and a gentle sprinkling of living too close to the edge. These people, each so very different, have created an ambience in which they know they can rely totally on each other, and do so with the kind of affection reserved for those you normally describe as close friends rather than colleagues. I’ve been told that they were worried that they would have to ‘act normal’ with me around, but they quickly realised that this was not necessary. The avics are equally nuts, spending, as they do, most of the working day cleaning up poo. One note I read posed the question ‘Where is egg 91?’ and written below, in the same handwriting, was the blunt answer, ‘Dead’. The fact that the person in question had written out the question, answered it, and written that down too, is symptomatic of the fact that there are rather a lot of eggs, and chicks, in this particular basket. Keeping track of it all is no small task.

Me, Will and Liz - the aviculturalists!

Friday 20^th:

Another hot day in the field left me dehydrated and, to everyone’s delight, sunburnt around the neck. This allowed them to refer to me as a redneck, and was hugely unfortunate as there was a BBQ planned for the evening, during which I had been informed that I would eat my own weight in meat, drink a sizeable amount (none of which, it turned out, would prove at all useful in combating dehydration), and be introduced to a few true kiwi characters. These characters have come to know me by various names or descriptions. Redneck aside, I have come to be called Will I’m Not. Another new member of staff, Will, has not been here long and clearly having two names to deal with is too much for some people to handle. So to differentiate between the two of us, he has become Will I Am and I am now Will I’m Not. This was how I was introduced to many people at the BBQ, and I have a feeling it will stick.

Kaki

At the BBQ, I ate my own weight in meat and drank a sizeable amount. I was told that this was ‘a quiet one’ which means I’m living in continual fear of being invited to a loud one. Farm animals here must fear the weekends, and the food left over will see us through a few more days, probably until the next BBQ.

We decorated the Christmas tree with all the traditional adornments: baubles, pine cones, and flashing plastic kiwi. And atop the tree is a small toy Christmas robin that came out from England with me. Most of the decorations run the permanent risk of being chewed up by our resident mutt Bindi, a confused young thing that thinks she should bark aggressively at you until you stroke her, whereupon she rolls onto her back so you can tickle her tummy.
 

Saturday 21^st:

The morning after the BBQ involved another plateful of meat, with bacon sarnies and leftovers being offered round. This was my first day off, and coincided neatly with some rubbish weather, so I spent the day writing emails, postcards and making a start on the report I need to write up as part of my sabbatical. And I did something very stupid indeed – I made chocolate truffles.

Some of you will have experienced the truffles before, and I thought it would be a nice Christmas pressie for the team here. Sadly, it went down so well that the team immediately went out and bought the Town’s remaining supply of chocolate to make another 18 batches for family, friends, themselves, people they vaguely know, tourists and animals. And since they are more imaginative than me with alcohol content and fillings, we had to buy and test a load of different combinations too. The result of this is that there were several days where there was a continual supply of melted chocolate to be licked from spoons and bowls, and truffles to be tasted. We had chocolate orange truffles (the best!), baileys truffles, and Malibu and coconut truffles as a small sample. Although I am an avid consumer of dark chocolate, there comes a point where it can become too much. That point is considerably closer after eating my way through several farmyard animals at a BBQ and a couple of days before Christmas. If they weren’t full of fresh cream I would be tempted to post a load home!

In fact eating and drinking seems to be a large part of the day to day activities here. Most conversations revolve around food in some way, and I don’t seem to have started any of the food that I bought yet as other people are always offering their own or we have leftovers. One of the guys here dropped in a huge trout and two salmon which has kept the whole house going for at least four meals. It’s fantastic having such a supply of local, fresh produce, and everyone here seems to be a fisherman and own a gun and a hunting dog.
 

Sunday 22^nd:

Today I was back in the rearing facility, where the highlight was a trip to the local wetlands to collect bugs for chicks to eat. This means donning waders and wielding a large net through the mud and vegetation to sweep up small aquatic snacks for young kaki. It also gave me a chance to get close to some of the birds on the pools – paradise shelduck, white-faced heron, pied stilt, pied oystercatcher, banded dotterel and a pair of Caspian tern on a nest.

Bug Collection

 

Pied Stilt

I also got to experience Radio Twizel, which has so little chat on it that I suspect it is someone running a playlist off an iPod and then leaving it all day. Not that I usually mind more music and less chat, but the music in question makes me feel like we’ve stumbled into middle America. There’s a heady blend of country and western music, ‘classic’ hits, and insipid elevator music. Thankfully they avoided playing Christmas songs though, and I busied myself cleaning poo to block out the sound. When cleaning poo and listening to radio Twizel, it is necessary to close down at least three of your senses, and dull the remaining ones to a minimal input to avoid vomiting into the brooder.

I also tested skype with Fran to see if we could do a dummy run for the family catch up on Christmas Day. Needless to say the combination of devices, slow connections and ignorance resulted in a less than perfect experience where one or other of us could not hear each other and one or other of us could not see each other. What followed was a long-distance game of charades where one participant was forced to mime the answer to ‘How are you?’, followed by a long pause and some conferring. Eventually she worked out that I’d been eating, drinking and cleaning poo (not a healthy mime to perform), and I concluded, after a misunderstanding involving the Pope and the Indian cricket team, that she was looking forward to Christmas.
 

Monday 23^rd:

I was lucky enough to get back into the field to work off some truffles, or so I thought. Sadly the work involved very little walking, although that was because we were trapping black-fronted terns (BFTs-Roald Dahl’s less successful book) to take blood samples. The tern colonies are small and also being hit hard by predators, so they are testing the genetics to see if there is any movement of birds between colonies. This was an excellent chance to get up close and personal with a BFT. We went to a colony that nests on the Upper Ahuriri, yet another picture perfect river valley below snow-covered peaks and with lush beech forest on the slopes. The terns are caught by way of drop-traps. A wire cage with mesh is placed over the nest and set on two thin wooden rods attached to a wire that covers the eggs. When the bird crawls into the cage and returns to incubation, they trip the wire and the cage falls. Someone then attempts to break the 100m world record to get to the cage before the fluttering bird damages the eggs, but across boulders, slippery rocks and through streams. Easy, except in the windy conditions that we encountered. Having had a false start or two we decided the conditions were just too windy to safely trap the terns, and decided to give up for the day.

Our tern processing office

On returning to the trap, we found a bird inside! The bird was quickly manhandled into a bag and removed from the area to be processed. This meant attaching rings to its leg for identification and taking a small amount of blood from it to be analysed. I give blood and am well aware of how tricky it can be to locate a suitable vein from which to drain the precious liquid. A BFT is little bigger than a blackbird and our expert, Simone, was expected to find a vein in the bird’s tiny wing. I struggled to identify the thin bone in the outstretched limb, but Simone stabbed successfully at the area and a small bubble of crimson liquid appeared. The bird seemed none the wiser, although BFTs have a habit of grabbing at anything they can with their bill, and the angry little blighter latched on to any lone finger or piece of clothing that strayed too close.

Black-fronted tern

Having released our single tern, we drove back home. On the way I realised that the shortest day in the UK is around now, and wondered whether that meant that it was also the longest day in New Zealand. Although I am sure that day length varies across the planet, the equinox must fall at the same point globally as the earth must have reached its tilting limit at the same time. Therefore the shortest day in the northern hemisphere must also be the longest in the southern hemisphere (assuming no daylight saving!). This thought sparked vigorous debate, to which we have no conclusive answer.

The Upper Ahuriri River

I also found it difficult to type on a computer that had no working ‘H’. This meant that my nouns lacked a definitive ‘The’, and reading the document back it sounded like I had typed the whole thing in a west country accent or from a Dickens novel. I was ‘ere’ not ‘here’, I ‘ad eard’ instead of ‘heard’. It was not very andy, and caused me a orrible assle.
 

Tuesday 24^th:

The outdoor aviaries are located in a valley below the main rearing facility, necessitating a short drive down a steep slope twice a day to carry out feeding. To be of more use I have access to the work vehicle, which is similar to the double-cab 4x4s that we use for work back home. The key difference between the two, which I noticed with the Nissan Sunny too, is that indicator and wiper levers are on opposite sides of the steering wheel. This leads to a couple of potentially awkward situations: at a junction, instead of indicating, I begin to wipe the windscreen. As panic sets in I jab the same lever harder and the wipers begin to slide furiously back and forth as though swatting an army of invisible sandflies. Or, as it starts to rain, I indicate randomly left and right while driving down a perfectly straight road. I suspect it is easy to spot tourist drivers out here (not least if they hire from ‘Juicy’ rentals, whose vehicles are painted the same shade of purple and green and adorned with an array of hideous pictures of girls from 1950s films blowing kisses).

I’ve also been studying the language here. Kiwi ‘E’s become ‘I’s, so that we collect ‘iggs’, go on ‘igscursions’ and have an ‘igcellent’ time. ‘T’s are usually ‘D’s, although this is an affliction shared by Americans and preddy much anyone not speaking the Queen’s English. ‘Os’ can sound like ‘U’s, which becomes even more confusing when combined with ‘T’s, so that ‘Pottle’ (what they call a small pot) become ‘Puddle’ (what we call a small body of water!). ‘A’s can be ‘I’s in certain circumstances, such us when ‘wear’ becomes ‘weir’. Lots of things are ‘sweet’ or ‘choice’. In return, I have been asked to say certain words, such as ‘lovely’, whereupon they all fall about in fits of giggles. I feel like the character in love actually who goes to America to become cool, except that I failed on the being cool bit and am yet to meet a group of gorgeous girls who are so poor that they can’t afford pyjamas and have only one bed.

There is one common strand that ties aviculturalists together the world over: they all walk backwards through doorways. This may sound ridiculous to the uninitiated, but most of the rooms in a rearing facility have different purposes, and it is necessary to reduce the risk of disease spreading through a facility by having separate shoes for each room. Here each room also has a low wooden board to step over, so each new room requires a step into a new pair of shoes. If you have previously arrived at the threshold walking forwards, it follows that your shoes will now be facing the wrong way, forcing you to step backwards into them. This could be avoided by walking backwards towards doors, but you would still have to perform a twist from facing backwards into forward facing shoes. There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to this, except that aviculturalists have also dispensed with socks to save time and energy, as these would also need changing from room to room. I have not yet acquired the deft spin needed to move with grace from room to room, and I prop myself up on whatever surface is closest at hand to do so. Also, with my bitten and burnt feet already a state, stepping into a welly (gumboot) unsocked tends to cause excess rubbing, proving that I am also the world’s worst aviculturalist. It seems that my feet are destined to ruin any potential career that would otherwise be afforded to me!

I had to do without my usual Christmas Eve game of darts at the pub and opt instead for yet another re-run of Notting Hill. This at least allowed me to stay up late enough to be awake at midnight as Christmas Day arrived in New Zealand, and to make the most of that rare opportunity to be the first to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
 

Wednesday 25^th:

We decided that we would all work on Christmas Day, in the hope that it would speed up the morning session in time to allow us to eat our weight in meat at lunch time. This plan worked well, with Liz and Ben catering for the avicultural team for Christmas Lunch. More hand-caught salmon and venison was on the menu, with an array of salads and followed by a chocolate, baileys and mars bar cheesecake that resulted in lengthy periods of heavy breathing and lying around trying to stay awake.

Young Kaki Chick

The meat was cooked on the BBQ and I experienced my first Christmas Day lunch outside, although to make it more homely for me there was also rain and it wasn’t very warm. We also fought over who would drive the five minutes home, as there was, of course, plenty of alcohol available. A brief international game of paper, scissors, rock followed (we opted not to go for the more complex but amusing paper, scissors, rock, lizard, spock) where New Zealand outgunned the UK and I was left to drive. This became more distressing as lunch went on, as I found out the car I was due to drive was in fact an automatic, and that I needed to carry my license on me at all times when driving in New Zealand. The thought of getting pulled over while lurching someone else’s car down the road and not carrying a license was enough to overturn the paper, scissors, rock loss. As it turned out nobody drunk that much anyway, as we had planned another big meal for dinner and had to return to work.

By the time we had finished feeding the birds we were all ready to sleep, and there followed a two hour lull in proceedings as everyone dozed or read or merely attempted to regain their full breathing capabilities. Despite having no appetite left, we needed to cook the food and began on our second enormous feast, this time roast lamb and vegetables, with an assortment of cheeses and trifle to follow. It reminded me of an episode of the Vicar of Dibley, where Dawn French somehow agrees to attend three separate Christmas lunches, and politely eats her way through each of them before passing out.

I also noticed that, at some point, presumably prior to my arrival, someone shot our bathroom. I’m not sure what it had done to warrant such ill treatment, but there is a small bullet hole in the window, just around the area where your head would be if you were having a bath. After making enquiries, nobody can remember, or is prepared to tell me, how, when, or why the bathroom was shot. The inner pane of double-glazing is intact, leading me to deduce that it has either been replaced since the incident occurred, or that we have bullet-proof glass in the bathroom. As a result, if we come under attack for some reason, I will be heading for the bathroom.
 

Thursday 26^th:

Bindi, our resident canine friend, has an unbelievable talent for predicting which exit you are about to take from the house and appearing at that threshold moments before you wish to pass through it, thus blocking your path and resulting in yet another belly stroke to remove her. I had begun to wonder whether there were several Bindi’s located around the property, and decided to test the theory by pretending to go through one door but in fact doubling back and sprinting across the house to the opposite exit. Bindi was not present on arrival, but came jogging merrily round within a second or two.

I hear a lot about manuka honey. It seems to be a form of currency in New Zealand, equivalent to gold. Manuka honey is apparently added to any form of product to give it mystical powers. A scoop of manuka honey in cosmetics to sooth the skin, a dash of manuka honey in medicines to heal unseen ailments, and a hefty blob of manuka honey woven into your clothes to make you smell of summer. I’m reasonably convinced that there is no product available that would not benefit from the addition of some manuka honey. They’ll be eating it next!

I went for my traditional boxing day walk in a pathetic attempt to burn calories. It was less traditional than usual, in that it was possible to do it in shorts and a t-shirt. I found myself at a rowing centre, closed for the holidays but used by the New Zealand rowing team as a base prior to big competition. Large images of proud kiwis with biceps bulging adorned the entrance, but the lake was on this occasion the home of pleasure craft and jetskiers. The adjacent caravan park was every bit as tacky as those in the UK, bustling with inflatable castles, screaming children, windbreaks and cramped caravans – all of the usual holiday season paraphernalia. I left swiftly to return to my cramped caravan.
 

Friday 27^th:

Today was an excellent day. Phil, who lives in the house and spends his working day searching for wrybill and dotterel in the river valleys, offered to take me out to see a wrybill nest. I had seen his photos and was insanely jealous, so he kindly set up a wrybill photoshoot for me. This little bird is either the world’s best or worst parent. Having reached the nest site, and been cuckolded by the incubating bird for straying into it’s personal space, it promptly determined that we weren’t a threat and returned to incubating the eggs. And there it sat, regardless of which lens or camera I thrust towards it. In the end Phil had to stand over it to persuade it to move enough to reveal the eggs beneath. This strategy would be suicidal against any mammal predators, though Phil assures me it would be more proactive in the defence of its eggs if it was genuinely threatened. But I admire its plucky character and it’s overwhelming desire to incubate. I started with the telephoto lens, lying on my belly and zooming in. But I ended up using a standard lens and simply holding it within a metre of the bird for a wider angle shot of it sat unperturbed in the landscape. We even ended with Phil on one side of the bird photographing me on the other photographing the bird and him. What a splendid creature (the wrybill, not Phil, but fair play to the guy!).

Wrybill

After that we stumbled upon a pair of kaki, one of which took a less relaxed attitude to our presence than the wrybill and responded by flying low and fast directly at our faces. Kaki have a long and pointy bill that, although delicate, would presumably inflict some reasonable damage if it were to be thrust up your nose or into your eye. The bird would veer off at the last minute and return in a wide arch to mob again. Phil rightly predicted that we were near a nest, and we found two eggs in a small scrape nearby. Having taking the co-ordinates, we made off to allow the bird to settle, pleased with the find but aware that someone from the kaki team would return there the following day to remove the eggs for hand-rearing. I felt a little sorry for the poor kaki, although it turned out that the eggs were already dead, so we probably did it a favour as it would have continued sitting on them otherwise.

Protective Kaki

Phil is one of those naturalists with an inquisitive nature, and seemed happiest turning over rocks or pulling off dead bark to search for skinks, geckos and weta, all of which he found and allowed me to photograph. The weta is a kind of giant cricket, armed with spiky bits, sharp mouth parts and a hiss loud enough to deter a wary Englishman from picking it up (It’s just not cricket!). Phil did so with wild abandon. We then went to look at the Tasman glacier, which gave us yet another opportunity to feel totally insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Phil last visited the glacier viewpoint five years ago, but even in the short period since he was last there, the glacier has retreated several hundred metres back up the valley. In fact it’s now quite a few miles from the viewpoint, which was originally built at the glacier face. The meltwater has created a large and deep lake, and the water on the glacier face is increasing the rate of melt, so that it now loses between 500-750m every year. Some people had taken to canoes to get a close view, and they appeared as tiny specks in a landscape otherwise devoid of scale.

Gecko

 

Weta

While Phil went off to do some actual work, I had a look around Mount Cook village, the best route from which to conquer the peak. The information centre had some very interesting interpretation regaling stories of the first attempts, those who had tried and failed, and the development of the mountaineering scene in the area. I love to hear stories of the great pioneers of the untrodden parts of our planet, and to live vicariously through them without exposing myself to a fraction of the peril that they endured. The sheer lunacy of climbing mountains was laid bare, and feeling inspired I elected to walk along a flat path for about an hour to Kea Point. Anywhere with kea in the name inevitably holds no kea, although I did hear an avalanche somewhere above the clouds where Mount Cook and others were hidden.

The Tasman Glacier at Mount Cook

Saturday 28^th:

I was busy making up the food for the chicks and wondered how the particular diet used had come to be so. It is based on ox heart, which I assume is not a natural food source for the kaki. I like to imagine that some of them become hooked on the stuff, and upon release search out the nearest cow for dinner. By working together, I think it might be just about possible for the entire global population of kaki to bring down a cow – perhaps using a succession of pointy bill to the face attacks. Whilst contemplating this, I discovered that it’s best not to thrust a spoon into the blocks of ox heart too quickly, as it results in a spurt of blood the flies into your face and down your front. To the ox heart is added ‘Wombaroo’, a generic food source for rearing insectivores that no doubt contains all the vital nutrients and supplements that a young kaki needs to grow and develop a fair complexion. I had originally thought it may be a mix of wombat and kangaroo, but I suspect this is a potential target audience rather than an ingredient.

Young Kaki

I was about to set off down the hill to carry out the afternoon feeding at the aviaries, when I noticed a group waiting to be shown into the hide that looks down on the captive kaki. It occurred to me that it was difficult to tell who was on show here, as I dropped into the enclosed auditorium while they peered down on me through binoculars. I wondered if the kaki felt like they were being watched, and if it made them as clumsy and self-conscious as it made me.

The Public Hide

Sunday 29^th:

Having spent the last few days eating our way through the Christmas leftovers, space was starting to appear in the fridge. And with it there were questionable packages, tubs and bags full of stuff that nobody wanted to claim and even fewer people wished to touch. It seems that every shared house throughout the world will harbour something in its fridge that is no longer recognisable as food and could more readily be used as a weapon of mass destruction. I extricated a particularly heavy ice cream tub full of fur and removed it to a safe distance before carrying out a controlled explosion.

Perhaps in sympathy with my suffering, some of the birds have been sick. They are whisked off to the isolation unit at the merest hint of illness to prevent any spread to other birds, but without knowing the cause of the ailment it is difficult to know how to stop it from spreading. It tends to be some kind of bacterial infection, but the sad result is that the afflicted youngsters lose their balance, droop their heads and spin round in circles when trying to walk. If badly enough affected, the bird simply does a face plant and lies on its front with its tiny wings out – a position similar to one that I have adopted several times after drinking too heavily. It would in fact be comical if done by drunkards, but to see the little things suffering in this way is quite difficult. Fortunately most of them make a full recovery if treatment begins early enough. The treatment involves putting a tube down their throats to ensure the antibiotic liquid is swallowed. It’s not a pleasant process to watch, but it is heartening to see the impact afterwards when the birds pick up again, and you just hope that they will all still be there the following morning when you return.

Monday 30^th:

Although all the chicks made it through the night, one poor thing was in a bad way and was not responding to treatment. Eventually you have to make a call on whether it is suffering too much, and the sad truth is that there is too much to do keeping the healthy birds alive to spend too long caring for birds that are not improving after medication. In the end you hope it makes the decision for you and either gets busy living or gets busy dying. Unfortunately this bird did neither, and so Liz was forced to pass judgement on it. It’s end was peaceful if undignified: being shut in an ice cream tub with a piece of cotton wool soaked in chemicals. I couldn’t help but wonder whether that was what I had found in the back of the fridge. I guess a black sense of humour is quite useful sometimes, as there was no time for sentiment.

The outdoor aviaries are located in a slight valley, and prone to channelling the wind through from time to time. Carrying trays with sieved food to the aviaries in these conditions is not easy. Imagine trying to carry a tray of carefully measured dust through a wind tunnel and emerge at the far end with the same amount that you started with. If anyone has seen the scene in ‘The Big Lebowski’ where they attempt to spread someone’s ashes on top of a cliff in a gale, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The Outdoor Aviaries

 

I had dinner with several other DOC workers, all of whom have fantastic sounding jobs in unbelievable looking places – the sort of people you love to hate! Not least as they were also socially capable, outgoing and kind people. I imagine they sleep well, eat healthily, and skip through lush meadows in the sun holding hands with angels. But in between doing that, they offered me the chance to visit them when I finish in Twizel, and I hope I will be able to see some more conservation work in action before I leave, and perhaps get access to one or two things that most tourists do not. As with many walks of life, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, which is very fortunate in my case!

Bindi has learnt a new trick. Instead of appearing at whichever door I wish to leave the house by, she now lies prostrate across whichever threshold I would like to enter the building by, forcing me to step over her. I’m beginning to wonder if someone is teaching her to do this.
 

Tuesday 31^st:

New Year’s eve was another work day. One in which I discovered that the sink of doom is actually called an ‘in-sink-erator’. Everything that goes in here is sure never to return. It’s like a black hole of waste management. All the leftover food goes down and is sliced into a billion tiny pieces by razor sharp blades rotating at the speed of light. All of this occurs just millimetres below the plug hole, adding yet another element of danger to the day. Do not lose a ring down the hole, never attempt to clear a blockage by hand, and under no circumstances should you ask where everything goes thereafter, as nobody knows.

There was an unfortunate misunderstanding today when Liz asked if I knew where her car keys were. Assuming she meant kakis, I wondered if the poor, exhausted and overworked woman had in fact lost more than that. The evidence had been pointing to this, as I found another note on which was written ‘Where is 123?’. I had replied by adding ‘a fine question indeed’, assuming there might be some form of spiritual or metaphysical element to the query. When I returned to the note later there was another addition, saying ‘Also dead’, to which I couldn’t help adding ‘Not again!’.

The plans for our New Year’s celebration were somewhat fluid. I was told that someone who I’d never met may or may not be having a BBQ party at his place, to which some of the team may or may not be going, and which I was welcome to go or not go with them, after which we may or may not end up in the pub, and there may or may not be a sober driver to take us home at the end of the night. It sounded too good to refuse, and as it turned out which pretty much totally accurate! One of the field team, Cody, had mates around and we all started there, before heading to the theoretical BBQ where there was indeed a party but no BBQ. After that we stopped briefly at a house where nobody seemed to know anyone, before heading to the pub, which was more like a giant social club. At some point New Year arrived, although nobody seemed to know when as there was no countdown or opening champagne or singing ‘auld lang syne’. After some more drinking and some dancing it was probably time to go home, by which time only Cody seemed to be left so we returned to his place to find his mad, energetic and insulin deficient mate Richie Rich cooking up some sausages that we had failed to eat at the non-existent BBQ. Various people lay around the house in various states of intoxication, but there was a spare bed remaining and I duly passed out.
 

Wednesday 1^st:

Far too early in the morning I woke up and sat dazed and confused in Cody’s living room wondering why I wasn’t still asleep. Stories and recollections from the night before came flooding back, each one causing debate and discussion among the room as to what the true version of events actually was. Whose house had we visited? Was drinking gin a good idea? Was Richie Rich a dead ringer for Kevin Spacey on speed? Did Beardsley get kicked out and leave in an ambulance, and was that what he meant by a sober driver?! We returned home none the wiser and mostly went straight back to sleep.

The rest of the day was spent walking gingerly between the kitchen and the sofa, consuming small amounts of bland food and asking the birds to sing more quietly outside the window. I discovered that it was easier to sleep in the caravan in the day than at night, possibly due to the warmer conditions, or maybe a result of my total lack of sleep from the night before.

In my hungover state I concluded that being an aviculturalist would give you access to some good fancy dress ideas, mostly using disposable body suits and wellies and appearing as a member of slipknot. It also occurred to me that the UK did not reach 2014 until lunchtime in New Zealand, which means that my 2014 will be about half a day longer than my 2013 was, unless I am away for New Year again next year.

Fancy dress?

 

Thursday 2^nd:

The highlight of the day was getting stuck in an aviary. We’ve all been there I’m sure, but I’m glad that nobody was in the visitor hide observing my moment of woe. Having had various conversations with other avics who have found themselves stranded in aviaries, sometimes for quite some time, I was aware of one or two tricks to extricate myself from my temporary confinement. Regardless of that, there is an inevitable slight moment of panic when you realise the door has locked itself behind you and, despite logic dictating otherwise, you imagine your skeletal remains being found many months later, resulting in a Darwin Awards nomination. I regained my composure enough to tug at the piece of string set up for just this emergency, and with a bit of wiggling and the application of no small amount of force the bolt gave way and I was free once more.

Young Chick in the Aviary

We also had a visit from a group of American students eager to learn about animal husbandry. Despite early indications that my prejudices and stereotypes were about to be confirmed in vocal and overenthusiastic style, they turned out to be interested and interesting people, with a sound knowledge of captive rearing and an ability to articulate it. The group was large enough to be split into two halves. My job was to entertain one half whilst the other was shown inside the facility. After answering many questions on kaki, other birds and my work, they asked where they could see wild kaki. I politely explained how difficult it would be and that they would need to go off the beaten track, out into the river beds and deltas on a kaki quest. Within minutes two wild kaki arrived in front of the hide to show me up. Apparently some do pass through, though it is a rare occurrence and timed to perfection on this occasion.

It dawned on me from one of the questions posed to me that we live inside a compound. There is an electric fence around the edge, providing yet more opportunities to damage myself in the name of conservation. I’m told that the fence provides quite a kick, but it seems utterly hopeless at keeping out predators since the traps seem to be gathering rats and stoats still. Still perhaps it does a better job of keeping out people.
 

Friday 3^rd:

I may have mentioned already that most of the tasks I undertake on a daily basis involve clearing up poo. On the rare occasion that the facility is poo-free and I am allowed to do something else, one of the tasks I can do is holding a sick bird steady whilst an expert thrusts medication down the poor thing’s neck. This is possibly the worst moment imaginable to sneeze. Not only is it inappropriate to drop the chick in order to use your hands to prevent the sneeze, but it’s also considered poor form to throw the chick upwards at the moment of sneezing. There must be something psychological that overemphasises every little itch during those moments when you can’t possibly hope to scratch them.

In the evening we had another BBQ to dissect and analyse the New Year’s Eve goings on. Many questions were left unanswered, although we did find out that Beardsley had indeed been kicked out, having fallen off his chair and with blood dripping from his nose, and that instead of leaving in an ambulance, he simply slept in the gutter behind the pub. It also turned out that we didn’t really know the person whose house we had been at, and that someone there had broken a chair and left whipped cream in the bathroom. Everyone seemed happy with these explanations, as though it was a normal night out in Twizel.
 

Saturday 4^th:

Tired from excess alcohol and a shortage of sleep, I was less than 100% productive in the aviaries today. Working in a small, enclosed space, where chicks have moulted and defecated everywhere is definitely no cure for a hangover. Needless to say, we needed a quiet and straightforward day. And needless to say, everything went wrong: chicks became ill, machines broke, and we ran out of wombaroo. In our decrepit states it felt like the world was ending, but a new bag of wombaroo was located, some prodding and hitting brought the machine back to life, and the chick was soon drugged up.

Chick being ringed

I have come to be known as N’Dogg. The ‘Will I’m Not’ thing was obviously confusing some people, and after someone found Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’ on my iPod and some rapping at New Year, N’Dogg was born. People here have started asking me to speak the lyrics to well known R&B songs in the Queen’s English, which they all find hilarious and bizarre in equal measure. I’m not sure whether I like it or not – the irony is quite appealing, but I’m disinclined to buy myself some huge gold rings and a car that bounces on the spot. I find it difficult meeting new people now, as I no longer know whether I’m Nick, Will I’m Not or N’Dogg. Anything goes, apparently.
 

Sunday 5^th:

The 12 days are over and the Christmas Robin has flown the tree.

I noticed that my caravan is called Pioneer. I’ve often wondered why caravans have such daft and entirely misleading names. What, exactly, did it pioneer? The fine art of providing cold lodgings to foreigners?! I’ve seen others in the UK called ‘Swift’, when evidence is strong to suggest that they are anything but, or ‘Discovery’, when they can only reach places already found by others to provide a wide enough lane for them to block. My apologies here to caravan enthusiasts, but let’s be a little more realistic when it comes to names from now on. I’ve renamed mine ‘Fridge’.

A mate of mine, who shall remain nameless, queried my statement regarding my 2014 being longer than my 2013, and with good reason. On my return home I will do another time shift, which may or may not mean that I lose the extra time gained by reaching New Year earlier. This thought caused my tiny brain to explode as I wrangled with the possible calculations involved. My understanding is that, if I had remained in England for New Year, it wouldn’t have occurred until 13 hours after it occurred here. So I know that my 2013 was 13 hours shorter than usual. Therefore, if I remain in the UK for 2015 New Year, my 2014 has to be 13 hours longer than usual, and by default 26 hours longer than 2013. To allow for this, I must actually gain that time when doing the flight home (and so it follows that I lost it on the way out). I leave on Monday 3^rd at 16:55 and arrive back on Tuesday 4^th at 11:55, a duration of just 19 hours, yet I know I will actually be spending considerably longer in transit. Presumably 13 hours longer, giving me a travel time of 32 hours. This all seems to make more sense written down than it did in my head.
 

Monday 6^th:

I went into the field today with Cody to try to ring some wild kaki chicks. Kaki pairs in the wild have such a low success rate with rearing chicks that it is pointless leaving them to even try. Each year, the plan is to find and take every egg from every pair for hand-rearing. Periodically, one or two slip through the net, usually when the team are unable to visit a site frequently enough to locate everything at the egg stage. Most will fail, either as eggs or soon after the chicks hatch. However, Cody had found two pairs in one site that had managed to get chicks through to quite an advanced stage. In so doing, he had increased the known global breeding population from 16 to 18 pairs. Even then it is useful to catch and ring the chicks to assess survival in future years, which is what we were off to do.

Cody’s dog Jazz accompanied us on this expedition. Jazz is trained to sniff out hidden chicks and has been employed quite successfully in Kiwi tracking elsewhere in New Zealand. The training for this is intense and standards are unbelievably high – rightly so as one dead rare bird at the hands of a dog gets a lot of bad publicity, and dogs are banned from most of the national parks here. After a while watching the chick in question, Cody and Jazz went in to collect it, but it took flight proving that we had missed our chance. This is, in some ways, good news, as it means that the chick has passed the most dangerous stage of its development. It was really interesting to see Jazz in action, and when she picked up a scent she locked onto it and homed in with great accuracy. On the way back we saw another kaki chick that had reached fledging age unringed. That meant that we had seen, within the space of an hour, the only two known wild-reared kaki chicks in the world – a stark reminder of how close to the edge these birds are. Although getting two birds to fledging age is a good result, it was pointed out to me that each pair will have laid four eggs, so even this ‘success’ represents only a 25% survival rate. But that’s better than the usual less than 5% rate! 

Chicks in brooder

Tuesday 7^th:

Some of the young birds here get moved to a captive rearing facility in Christchurch when our aviaries become overcrowded. So today I was able to make that journey with them. It started at 7am when, armed with huge nets, four of us entered the enclosure to catch the birds. Being of a delicate nature, the instructions were to avoid catching them in flight, or in the water, or when they’re moving too quickly, or in groups. As we entered the air they took flight, landing only to move quickly in groups through water. The process was not straightforward, and the poor confused birds were calling loudly throughout. Having secured them in boxes and packed them into the truck, they continued to call loudly for the three and a half hours it took us to drive to Christchurch. They called when we went up hills, when we went down hills, as we turned corners, or anywhere that acceleration or braking were needed. The only time they stopped calling was when we had a ten minute break from driving.

The facility in Christchurch is owned by some kind of construction company. The owner of the company had a passion for conservation and established a captive rearing centre for rare New Zealand species, and not just birds. I was amazed to find that this was not forced upon them as mitigation for development, but simply because she was keen and prepared to spend the money doing it. In true Kiwi style, they do not shout about it either, but keep plugging away without needing to publicise the work or even open up the centre to members of the public. It reminded me of a great saying that I heard, weirdly by Jay Leno, and even more strangely on Top Gear. He said ‘Americans love people to know about all the good work they are doing anonymously’, a statement that couldn’t prove more to the opposite in this case.

While there we met Anne, who manages the conservation work at the centre, and Kevin, a bird conservationist dedicating his spare time to the recovery of the Brown Teal population. They were engaged in ringing Brown Teal as we arrived, but soon broke off to see the kaki, take us out to lunch, and provide all manner of opinions on the current state of global conservation. I had been warned that Kevin would talk for England (do other nationals speak on behalf of their own nation?), but he was as interesting a character as I had met in my travels and it justifies my time out here as ‘networking’ on my timesheet.
 

Wednesday 8^th

I tested the water in the plughole scenario today while draining a pond for chicks. As predicted, and found by every other northern hemispherist visiting the southern half of the planet, it naturally drains clockwise but can be induced to go anticlockwise if persuaded correctly.

Bindi has developed another new trick, though I suspect this one is actually an old trick, proving irrefutably that you can, in fact, teach a new dog old tricks. She broke wind in the living room and caused such a stench that the occupants were all forced to vacate the area and open all the doors. This in turn created such a draft that the Christmas tree (which had not been removed yesterday along with the Robin) fell over, spilling its content of baubles and tinsel onto the ground. From there Bindi picked them up and chewed them. Whether that was part of her original masterplan or simply a fortunate side effect remains unclear.

The sky was beautifully clear tonight and I’ve discovered why this area is an international dark sky reserve. According to their website, there seem to be only six reserves in total, and two of them are in the UK! I had known that Exmoor is one, but it seems the Brecons also acquired the status recently. I tried to pick out stars and constellations that I recognised with no joy. It made me wonder whether we can see all of the same stars as in New Zealand but at different times, or whether we only share some, or none at all, or whether there are any that we can see at the same time. My guess is that we must share many of them at different times of year, but perhaps there are one or two that never expose themselves to the opposite poles. And it must be possible to see some at the same time (or at least the same night) given their distance from the earth and the fact that New Zealand and the UK are not totally on opposite sides of the planet.

Caravan Sunset

 

Thursday 9^th:

I decided to take a day off for once, and use it to explore the local area. Borrowing a car I made my way to Lake Ohau, where I encountered sandflies for the first time in weeks. This was inevitable as I had just left my repellent in the work truck with no hope of return for several days, along with the bite relief gel that would be sorely missed over the following 48 hours. I walked a track up the side of a steep creek into the hills, emerging above the treeline for a spectacular view across the Lake. Having not once passed another human being on the two hour hike, I discovered three of them sitting in my lunch spot and had to continue upwards for another few hundred feet to gain the peaceful solitude I was hoping for. On the way I was stabbed by a Spaniard, a spiky plant with razor sharp edges, but it was well worth it for a picnic on top of the world.

Lake Ohau

After returning to ground level I had a bit of time to kill and drove to Lake Benmore, where a confusing road system and series of hydro-electric dams caused me some delay. The lakes are all connected by large man-made canals, allowing the flow of water to be controlled and generating power that is currently being piped to the North Island. Some of these canals sit high above the surrounding plains, which made me wonder why they don’t build the power station further back along the canal to save building it up in the first place. I suppose it needs to have a certain force behind it during its fall to make electricity generation worthwhile. But the works are quite impressive, and most have roads along the banks, allowing you to gaze over the surrounding plains. Apparently the Christchurch earthquake has got a lot of people wondering what impact a similar magnitude rattle would have on the local infrastructure and glaciers. A lot of water is being held behind dams, both natural and artificial.
 

Friday 10^th:

My phone has been battling with illness since I left the UK, and I thought that it had finally passed away today, only for it to grumble back to life in what I thought were the final stages. I have attached a DNR note to it now, as it is causing more grief than the useful service it provides. Someone suggested that it might be damp, and that taking it apart and putting it in rice could help. Whether they were pulling my leg or not I will never know, but my housemates were bemused to find pieces of a phone sitting in a bowl full of rice when they returned home. Having found that had no discernable impact, I was then informed that the parts must be submerged in a sealed bag of rice for at least 24 hours. At this point I drew the line, before I end up searching for a cauldron and eye of newt to add to this strange concoction. Still, it’s quite a neat thought that the expanding Asian economies where most of our electronics come from have easy access to large quantities of rice in the event of a flood.

I’m reading Captain Cook’s log book while I’m here in a pretentious attempt to be at one with my surroundings. He does quite a lot of navigating, and enjoys writing about it, which makes large parts of the book pretty dull, but at least means I’m making good progress through it by skimming over the boring bits (much as many of you may have done with these emails!). In between the navigating he meets lots of natives, where the usual story goes that they are quite friendly but keen to steal things from the explorers until one of them is shot as a consequence. Cook is actually very fair in his dealings with the natives, and he writes extraordinarily detailed accounts of the places he visits and what he finds there. Most of the places he ‘discovers’ now carry the names of obscure admiralty figureheads or his crew, who probably would not have expected to leave such a legacy.
 

Saturday 11^th:

One of my daily tasks is to mix the food for the chicks, and I have previously mentioned the delights on offer to the ravenous little blighters. When the mix is complete various quantities have to be measured out onto trays, and there is a sad satisfaction to be gained from realising that you know almost exactly what 230g of ox-heart and crushed cat biscuit looks like. It’s like a little game where you try to get as close as possible to the exact amount, in the same way that putting petrol in your car allows you to try to spend exactly a certain number of pounds, or stopping a stopwatch exactly at the second mark. Maybe it’s just me, but life is full of tiny pathetic victories like this. Aviculture seems to be full of them too, perhaps as the tasks can seem quite mundane otherwise.

Another job that I’ve been able to do today is picking up poo. Some of you may have noticed a common theme running through the aviculture sections of my diary. Having spent weeks cleaning it off walls, blasting it off mats and washing it from trays, I have now stooped so low, both metaphorically and physically, as to pick it off the floor. Some of the birds get sample tested to see what little nasties they might be harbouring within, but instead of them being provided with a tube and be told to take their time, we have to put down sheets of plastic in a place where we think they simply can’t hold it any longer and then come round over the following days to check whether they need more fibrous wombaroo in their diet to persuade them to leave a stool for us. The process relies on you reaching the sample before it dries into an impenetrable splodge, which was made all the easier today when it rained. Having said that, the ‘scoop’ provided does little to assist you in persuading a slippery poo to leave a slippery plastic surface in favour of a test tube. I found the best technique was either to use the edge of the tube to dive beneath the poo as it slides down the sheet, or to use enough speed to persuade the poo and the plastic to part company. I also imagine the birds wondering what on earth we are doing and whether we are right in the head.
 

Sunday 12^th:

It turns out that it’s not possible for us to tell a male kaki from a female without breaking out some expensive technology. So I wonder how exactly a male kaki tells which one is worth investing more time in. In the absence of having access to genetic analysis, there must be some way that the birds can tell each other apart that we are not yet aware of. Is it as straightforward as trial and error? Do they have dating sites that ease the process? Or do they use subtle clues beyond the scope of human understanding? I would be interested to know how it works and whether anyone has researched this further. Or indeed whether anyone else cares.

Male or female Kaki?!

In the incubator room is a machine that you can use to tell if an egg is alive or not, by recording whether it has a pulse. If a beat is recorded, the egg is definitely alive. But, apparently, if no beat is seen, this does not definitely mean that the egg is dead for some reason. Which seems to make the machine rather ineffective for evaluating whether an egg is dead.
 

Monday 13^th:

Nature has produced a great variety of materials that man has harvested for his own benefit: eider down, fur, cotton, silk to name a few. But now we have discovered the softest material known to man: Bindi’s ears. They have a unique quality that can only be described as ‘the ideal substance to make the world’s most comfortable pocket liner’. There is a long list of people awaiting the opportunity to obtain the ears for manufacturing purposes.

I found out today that Brits abroad make news even in New Zealand. Three construction workers went camping on a small island on Lake Tekapo and managed to set fire to it. The ensuing blaze was visible for miles around, the men had to be rescued, and over 80% of the native forest was destroyed. The men will not be prosecuted as it was an accident, but presumably they are suitably embarrassed, and pleased to have enhanced Britain’s reputation abroad still further.

Everyone here thinks I come from Shrewsbury, because Salisbury sounds a little bit like Shrewsbury and they have heard of Shrewsbury Biscuits. I’ve never heard of Shrewsbury Biscuits, but from the description they sound like Jammy Dodgers. Can anyone enlighten me?
 

Tuesday 14^th:

I had the chance to go out with the team to trap terns again today, and this time the wind was much more suitable. We were drop trapping adults again, with much more success, getting four adults to process in the morning. I had the chance to handle one of the birds, which was as feisty as ever, but fitted perfectly in the hand. The other task we had to complete was catching any chicks to be ringed and blood sampled. Given the poor success of the tern breeding colonies, we did not expect to find many tern chicks, and were surprised to see over a dozen scurrying away from us as we approached. This instigated some dashing about scooping up tern chicks before they reached the river and drifted away. All of this was carried out to the accompanying bombardment of the irate adults screaming at us as we rounded up their young. Having secured the chicks, a production line was established where the chicks were processed and released back into the colony to further aerial attack. As usual, the terns bit out at everything, including themselves. It makes me wonder if the national blood service should adopt a similar technique to obtain blood samples.

Black-fronted tern

 

Wednesday 15^th:

As it was my final day in the field today, the team decided that a 20km walk down the Godley was in order. This was a final ‘sweep’ for kaki, to check for late nesting pairs, and involved four of us spaced out across the river and delta stomping downstream. As the river meanders across the valley it was necessary to make a lot of crossings, some of which were deeper and faster than I had experienced before. As the water made its way up my thighs I could hear Simone’s voice advising me not to attempt crossings much deeper than knee height, and I started to struggle. The weight of water was pushing me downstream, and the slippery rocks provided no stability whatsoever, as I thrashed my way wildly through the water. Phil later said that he watched me with amusement trying to stay upright and struggling on, stupidly trying to cross at speed with my arms flailing around instead of taking my time. It dawned on me that it wouldn’t really matter if I was swept away, as I would simply pitch up at the next shallow section or wash into the delta. It turns out that the team did once survey a river on rubber rings, drifting downstream for hours in search of kaki.

The Mackenzie Basin is one of the windiest places that I have experienced. It’s a dry wind too, which makes it perfect for drying your washing. This I discovered to my advantage when I was able to dry my river-soaked hanky in my hand in five minutes. But it can also be a disadvantage, as others have discovered when their washing ended up hundreds of metres away in the kaki aviaries.

I had a conversation today about nationalities, and whether I was proud to be British. The fact that the question was asked seems to indicate to me that the matter should be brought into question, and I suspect the answer should therefore be no. I found it quite tough to answer, as there are some things about being British that are good and other things not so much. It occurred to me that, if asked by a foreigner what nationality you are, it probably isn’t universally well received to answer that you’re from Britain. Conversely, I suspect that there are very few places that would have much against kiwis. Possibly this reflects our respective foreign policies. One result of our foreign policy is that there are no rubbish bins in the UK in case they are used to house explosives. New Zealand is a nation of rubbish bins, flaunting their green credentials on every street corner. The logical conclusion to this argument is that UK foreign policy is directly contributing to waste disposal problems. 
 

Thursday 16^th:

We have a daily ritual in the captive rearing facility where we find ten minutes in the day to do the Stuff Quiz (a New Zealand website). There are 15 multiple choice questions on a variety of subjects, and to date our best score (with several team members) is 13. But on most days we get 6-8. Most of the questions have four choices, but some are true/false, which means that, at worst, probability alone would dictate that we should get 4-5 out of 15. And when there are a few of us taking part together, a score of 6 is particularly depressing. I suspect that a troop of captive monkeys could score higher.

While in Twizel, an alarm went off that rattled around the entire town. Nobody else seemed to bat an eyelid but I took cover in the truck fearing an attack. From who or where I knew not, but I wondered if this was the system employed when the dam broke upstream, or if an earthquake was about to strike. It turns out the fire service is entirely voluntary here, and instead of giving them all pagers, they simply blast a siren out across the district informing all volunteers that they are needed. No doubt the residents are delighted at this system when it occurs overnight.

As it was my final day in Twizel the team held a celebratory BBQ to ensure that I was definitely leaving. It’s been really good working with the kaki team and having a base, but I’m excited about having some travel time again and seeing new things. It’s hard not to think about heading home now, and I’m not enjoying that thought, mostly as it’s great having no responsibilities at all here. But I still have a couple of weeks to enjoy and I’m not going to waste them worrying about what I will find when I return home!
 

Friday 17^th:

I don’t think I had really appreciated that I was leaving Twizel until I got on the bus, when it suddenly dawned on me what an excellent time I had there. I was able to work with a wonderful bird and a fantastic set of people in a stunning area. Because it was supposed to be ‘work’ I think I underestimated how awesome some of it was, but looking back now I have been so lucky to do some of these things – walking the Tasman river in the shadow of Mount Cook, lying next to a wrybill nest taking photos, watching a kaki chick emerge from an egg, wading into the Ahuriri to scoop up tern chicks, catching juvenile kaki for transfer in and out of the aviaries. These experiences are not available to most people and are now cherished memories. Most of all I’d been able to do it in great company, being made to feel welcome by everyone I met and being brought into the team. I will miss their crazy sense of humour and laughing until I cried, and I hope I will see them again. To see a video of the aviculture element of my work click here.

Mount Cook

On the bus I was given the same commentary I had heard on the way to Twizel, but in reverse. This driver seemed even more inclined to share his thoughts with us, as though someone had asked him at a dinner party for his opinions on the New Zealand countryside. I guess when you have a captive audience you might as well make the most of it.

In Queenstown there is a guy by the name of Chuck. I know this from the kaki team who met him when visiting a friend there. Chuck is an extremist. He craves all things extreme, which makes it rather fortunate that he lives in Queenstown. Chuck is sponsored by red bull, which no doubt gives him the energy to do extreme things. I imagine he has a lifetime supply of red bull stored in an extreme fridge, allowing him to do extreme things forever more. Though I wonder what the lifespan of an extreme enthusiast is, given the potential life-threatening scenarios he must find himself in on a regular basis. Actually he doesn’t do much extreme work, because he earns enough doing such extreme things that he doesn’t need to do them frequently. Which gives him a lot of free time. During his down time, he likes to show people videos of himself doing extreme things, presumably so that they are impressed by his extremeness. I am not impressed by his extremeness.

As I was back in Queenstown in need of sustenance, it seemed like a good opportunity to sample the delights of the Fergbakery again. I reaffirmed my dedication to the pies by sampling two of them, both of which were equally delicious. To accompany my double pie I had a bottle of fruit juice and promptly discovered that each serving contained 150% of my recommended daily allowance of calcium. Since I had already consumed two servings, I made a vow not to consume any more calcium for the following two days to get me back on track. Given that I had also has 200% of my RDA of pie I probably won’t need to eat for a while.

It’s been pretty windy since I got to New Zealand, but I discovered how bad it was tonight when a huge tree fell down outside the hostel. It was large enough to cross the road and strike the motel opposite on its second storey roof, before coming to a rest on the adjacent cars. This caused a great crowd to gather, made up of locals and tourists alike. Some of them came to witness the spectacle, and others were forced there as the road that was now blocked was the only route in and out of Glenorchy. It took four hours to chop it up enough to allow cars to pass.

Tree Carnage in Queenstown

 

Saturday 18^th:

I enjoyed Queenstown slightly more on the second visit, possibly because I now knew what to expect, or possibly because I spent even less time there. I discovered (thanks to a coach driver) that Lake Wakatipu, on which Queenstown sits, has a ‘seiche’. Being a student of geography I was fascinated to discover that this rare phenomenon has passed me by until now. A seiche is effectively a tide within a lake caused by differences in atmospheric pressure at different points across the lake. Apparently only two other lakes in the world have them: Geneva and Ontario. The one on Lake Wakatipu causes the water to rise and fall eight inches every 27 minutes.

I arrived in Te Anau to be greeted by Jas and Maddie, and spent the day preparing myself for the rigour of the Kepler Track over the coming days. We had a BBQ where I was again able to eat my weight in meat, this time including venison and chamois. I was also again introduced to a crowd of DOC workers, and was lucky enough to be present when the news came through that two Kakapo pairs had been confirmed breeding. The Kakapo is a large flightless parrot, which, needless to say, got eaten by everything that feasts on large flightless parrots. There are not many left, and they are all found on offshore islands without mammalian predators. Being such long-lived birds, with peculiar mating habits, there is no guarantee that any kakapo will breed in a given year. Which is surprising when you witness the males over-amorous attempts to frisk any object they come across in case it should turn out to be a female kakapo. If you don’t believe me, watch Mark Carwardine being molested in ‘Last Chance to See’. I also found out that Takahe (a large and, yes, flightless kind of moorhen that is indeed rare and elusive) produce eight metres of poo daily, a fact that astounded me despite my recent expertise in the field of poo.

Finally I went to bed, and was delighted to find that Jas and Maddie had available a double bed in a warm spare room with no other people, thick curtains, and I did not have to provide a sleeping bag or use my fleece as a pillow: possibly the first night of good sleep since I have been in New Zealand!
 

Sunday 19^th:

Today was the start of the Kepler, which meant donning the outdoor gear, packing up four days of supplies and setting off along a path into the forrest. Luckily the rain finished mid-morning, so I was able to start promptly after that in the dry. After an hour the path turned sharply uphill and remained so for the next three hours, during which time I sweated out far more than I was able to replenish in water intake. I was able to maintain my two-thirds ratio for walk timing, taking four hours to do what was listed as a six hour walk. But in so doing I cost myself my heels as the blisters started to form. Sadly the last song I heard before leaving was Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’, which accompanied me uphill for four hours.

Start of the Kepler

I developed a little game to keep me occupied on the trek. Using the goal difference system, I awarded myself +1 for every person I overtook, and was given -1 each time someone went past me. Having started late and walked too fast, I accrued a whopping +19 on the first day. However, true to cultural stereotype, I found that the Germans had beaten me there. They had nabbed the best beds and the best seats, and they had carried with them several boxes of wine which they were to consume noisily over the coming nights, resulting in much giggling at bedtime and several hours of snoring thereafter.

Luxmore Hut

 

I also took the advice of the Lonely Planet guide and stocked up with scroggin. Scroggin is just a mix of nuts, fruit, seeds and chocolate, and is like a tiny life-giving elixir for trampers walking up hills. I had a sizeable bag of the stuff to hand, and I suspect that it would be my luxury item if I ever went on Desert Island Discs or Big Brother (two references to account for the age difference of the audience there!). Most of the food I had brought appeared to be snack based, although I did at least bring pasta and veg for my evening meals, albeit that I failed to bring anything to cook it in. Having asked at the DOC centre whether I would need cooking equipment and been told that it was provided I was surprised and disappointed to find that it wasn’t. Thankfully a kind family from Oz – Rick, Cathy and Meggsie – loaned me their equipment each night to stave off my hunger. Lots of people brought lightweight freeze-dried meals with them to save weight. By adding boiling water to the pack and waiting ten minutes, a pile of sawdust magically transforms into a chicken balti curry. It’s even possible to get apple pie in a bag. My snobbish revoltion at these options was quickly quashed when they actually seemed to be perfectly tasty and provide welcome hot food. But I draw the line at the culinary expertise of young Arno, a Dutch tramper, who brought with him nothing but cereal bars for four days. Each bar was supposed to provide a third of his daily needs, but I suspect the slimfast diet was not healthy when walking 15km each day. It was at least a source of constant amusement for the rest of us at mealtimes.

I may carry too much with me on the trial, and I may pander to style over comfort with my walking gear, but I would never ever wear skin-tight, fishnet thermals as one brave walker did. It wasn’t so much the wearing of them as the flaunting of them over dinner that was so brazen.
 

Monday 20^th:

Day two of the trek was the one that made me nervous. The Luxmore Hut in which we had stayed is perched above the treeline, and the track from there to Iris Burn Hut was mostly along the exposed edge of the hills, including a long section that ran along a ridge with sizeable drops on both sides. Given my huge fondness for heights and the likelihood of driving rain and wind, I was more than a little relieved to find the weather was dry and calm – the first day like that for quite a while! I couldn’t have been luckier, and I set off with Arno to conquer the track. It was good walking together as the company made me less aware of the vertigo, and I was on hand in case he should pass out from a lack of nutrient intake in his cereal bars. The view from Mount Luxmore was breathtaking, as was most of the walk, and we encountered Kea along the way. Even without the strong winds it was a tiring walk, and as we descended the appropriately named Zig-Zag path (due to the number of hairpin bends, not because it was named after a pair of furry comedians) my legs and knees were feeling the strain and I got a migraine. I’m probably not the first to suffer on this leg of the trek, but I had to sleep for two hours on arrival at the hut before I began to feel normal again.

View from Mount Luxmore

 

Arno on the ridge

The hut rangers are real characters. They give a hut talk and safety briefing each night to the assembled masses, which, as ever in New Zealand, gives them a chance to air their views and thoughts. One was inevitably called Peter Jackson, and it seemed that he might have been at the hut for the last thirty to forty years judging from his weather-beaten appearance and giant beard. We wondered whether he was actually only 23 years old, but a season in those conditions had taken its toll. He brought in a dead stoat at dinner time, which lay frozen in death as if it had passed away whilst giving an air guitar performance. Each warden has impressed on us that the best stoat is a dead stoat, a fact that was so well enforced by another group of walkers who, on encountering a stoat, somehow managed to corner it, pin it down and beat it to death. Another warden was Robbie, the world’s smiliest man. He told us about the trampers who attempt to cross the ridge in high winds and end up crawling for several hours for fear of being blown away.

View of the Ridge

Goal difference today was +1, disappointing but unsurprising having started ahead of most people. A short walk from the hut was a waterfall, and this stretch of river is one of the best places to view Blue Duck, yet another rare species that I was seeking out. I was joined on my birding expedition by three Aussies – Anne, Laurent and Meggsy – and duly bored them with bird related trivia. We found a blue duck, and then saw some long-tailed bats, another rare species, but failed to bump into any kiwi. As I lay in bed scratching my bites and listening to snoring Germans I heard a male kiwi call out and a female responded. I grinned and went to sleep.
 

Tuesday 21^st:

After the struggles of yesterday, day three was a long but gentle stroll along the valley bottom by the river. My blisters and sore limbs were delighted to have a relatively straightforward day of tramping ahead, but it was still a long walk and by the time I arrived at Moturau Hut I was worn out. By this time it had been three days since a shower and despite the temperature of the lake most people managed a dip. As it was our last night we cooked up all the remaining food and even managed to spare some for Arno, who was salivating at the prospect of it all. There’s something about walking long distances that makes every conversation centred around food and eating. We were all dreaming of the first big meal we could stuff in our mouths on our return.

Having a dip!

 

View from Moturau Hut

The sandflies are back! The lower altitude and damp conditions are a haven for the little monsters and they have set about nibbling on any exposed skin. Apparently they know where I live! And even worse they are attracted to whatever pheromones are given off by dying sandflies. So it’s no use squashing those that come to dine upon your blood, as others will simply head on over to fill their place, which may explain why I’ve been finding clusters of bites together like a tiny allergic archipelago. I have brought with me from the UK some Avon’s Skin So Soft moisturising spray. Before you all mock me I should explain. This product appears to have insect repellent qualities without containing the nasty chemicals that others contain. Although the manufacturers make no claim to its effectiveness, it is stocked by outdoor shops in Scotland and apparently the army use it as well! Nobody here believes these claims, but they did say they felt a silky smoothness to their skin having tested it. I thought I had a bad reaction to the sandflies, but chatting to Anne made me feel lucky. She has a whole raft of allergies, but worse still she is allergic to anti-histamines! One of life’s cruel ironies.

Sandfly!

 

Goal difference today was +5, giving me a total of +25 for the walk. In the evening we had a fire on the beach and someone even had marshmallows to toast. I had possibly the worst night’s sleep ever, as a result of the itching and the snoring. It was so bad that I got up at 2:30am and went for a walk along the beach for an hour to look for kiwi. After half an hour I heard rustling in the bushes and stood motionless waiting for further sounds. Every few minutes there was another footstep or rustle, and after about half an hour I knew that the approaching creature would have to cross the path in front of me. Sure enough a lumbering shadow appeared on the path, and I flicked on the torch to reveal a possum. Not the result I was after, but I resisted the urge to beat it to death and enjoyed the clear night sky instead. When I went back to bed I failed to go to sleep before the itching began again. Once that had subsided, I failed to get to sleep before the cold set in. Finally I managed an hour or two before the light came up and everyone awoke again.
 

Wednesday 22^nd:

Having spent the last three days in the fine company of Rick, Cathy, Meggsy, Anne, Laurent and Arno, we decided to walk out together. By this time my legs were struggling and the company was needed to keep me plodding along towards the finish line. There was no energy left for celebration at the finish line, but we made it just and managed to do the whole walk without a single drop of rain – no small feat in Fjordland! At that exact moment the heavens opened as we walked back into Te Anau to find the nearest food outlet. Having collapsed in a restaurant we gorged on steak and chips, cider and puddings. When ordering the cider we were asked for ID, which apparently had to be a passport. Since it seemed unnecessary carrying it around on the Kepler I didn't have mine, nor did Anne or Laurent, but Arno had his. After enquiring whether he could purchase the round on behalf of all of us the waitress looked embarrassed and confessed that she was only really concerned about Arno all along. The rest of us looked suitably haggered and bedraggled to be worthy of an alcoholic beverage. Rarely has a cider tasted so good!

The Kepler Crew

 

The Finish Line!

 

To see a short video of the Kepler trip click here!

I returned back to Jas and Maddie's to find them there. The rain had prevented them from working so they had come home. You know you're staying with conservationists when you search in the fridge to find the tomato sauce and it's next to the stoat poo. I had a long hot bath and soothed my aching, blistered, scratched and bitten limbs, and found that one poor sandfly had somehow managed to bite me on the behind. Quite how it got there I will never know but I shouldn't have thought it lasted long.
 

Thursday 23^rd:

I am one lucky chump. Not that I’d doubted this before, but today made me feel particularly lucky. One of the Kaki team, Chloe, started a new job for DOC lately, and part of her role is to check that the tour operators in Doubtful Sound are adhering to the Bottlenose Dolphin code of management. Basically there are rules about how they should interact with the dolphins, and the way to check this is to send ‘mystery shoppers’ onto the cruises to record their activities. So I am going to be a mystery shopper on an overnight cruise through Doubtful Sound, and DOC will cover the expenses! This is rather awesome, and I spent most of the day getting excited about it and planning for the trip, which starts tomorrow. Rather obviously, the point of the trip is that the operators are unaware that you are watching them, so I had to prepare a cover story. This was actually more difficult than it sounds, since the questions people most frequently ask are ‘How long have you been in New Zealand?’ and ‘What have you been doing here?’, to which the answer ‘Working for DOC’ would probably raise some suspicions. I contemplated inventing a whole new persona as, say, an astrophysicist, but decided that it would be too difficult to keep up the pretence, especially if, by cruel inevitability, there happened to be a professor of astrophysics on board. It’s even more complicated when I have to get a VAT receipt to claim the expenses, which could only possibly mean that I’m claiming it back for some reason. In the end I settled on the semi-truth that I was on sabbatical and that, for whatever daft reason, the RSPB might cover my expenses on a luxury overnight stay as part of my studies into ecotourism operators! I spent the evening going over my story for fear of being caught out and sent to solitary confinement. The rest of the day was spent largely attending to blisters and walking gingerly around the house. The continued itching had reached such a point that, once Jas and Maddie has gone back to work in the evening, I spent three hours with my feet in a bucket of cold water.
 

Friday 24^th:

I arrived on the dock with my story ready and checked to see whether I had been followed. The first leg of the trip involved a boat across Lake Manapouri, then a bus across the pass to Doubtful Sound. At some point before boarding the boat at Doubtful, I had to turn on two GPS units so that the route taken by the boat could be mapped. This should have been straightforward enough, but I ran into complications immediately. The staff from my tour were also on the first boat, stood close to my bag where the GPS units were hiding. And apparently the bus that would normally transfer us had broken the day before, so I would be travelling in the captain’s jeep. I wondered if they already suspected me and were planning to interrogate me on the way over. Thankfully my resolve held firm and I was able to find a couple of minutes to myself on the quay when I could get the GPS on the go.

First View of Doubtful Sound

Doubtful Sound is a huge watery inlet on New Zealand’s SW coast in Fjordland. It’s massively inaccessible as giant peaks rise almost vertically out of the water and are covered in think native forest. Although it is often raining or cloudy there, that lends it an atmospheric air that is impossible to capture in photographs. There are a few tour boats there, but with such a huge area to explore it’s a haven for escaping the rat race and experiencing true isolation. Once on board I was shown to my cabin, which was essentially a bunk bed. There was enough space for one person to stand upright, but the bending required in order to get dressed resulted in either knees or bum being pushed through the curtain that provided my only privacy. Luckily I was not sharing the room, nor did I intend to spend any time there except when sleeping. The boat slept 12, most of who were Brits but also included an American Indian family (by which I mean of Indian descent living in America, not native Indians as in Dances with Wolves) with a small child who was charming and annoying in equal measure. All the meals were provided: lunch was crayfish tails fished up the day before, and we were able to catch our own fish for dinner, to go with the local venison.

Doubtful Sound

I have never fished before, having a strong belief that I would rather spend my outdoor time walking than standing waist deep in water. But on a boat in the middle of a deep Sound full of fish it seemed like the perfect opportunity to test my skills. I can say that I was pleased to catch a few things, including several different species, but I suspect that it would be very difficult not to catch anything in a place with as much marine life as that! I had a small personal rivalry going with a 60 year old Scottish woman, who was equally as useless as I was at it. The first one I caught was tiny and received much mockery. It wasn’t even good enough to be used as bait for bigger fish, but I was glad to hear that it would be suitable for feeding albatross. I soon made up for it with a blue cod that we later ate, but I don’t think there’s a career in fishing for me. There’s something quite exciting about feeling a bite and reeling it in against the struggle. The more struggling the larger the combatant on the other end of the line, and with up to 40m of line to pull in it can get very tiring. But as everyone gathers around to see what’s on the end of the line as it reaches the surface it’s quite enjoyable – like waiting to see what the odd-shaped object is at the bottom of a Christmas stocking. It seems that there is some skill involved, but if you have none it is possible to hold a small fish out in front of you to use perspective to make it look much larger than it really is in photographs.   

A bigger catch than mine!

We had an encounter with a pod of 20 or so Bottlenose Dolphins, and I was busy making mental notes whilst also marvelling at the playful creatures, some of which rode the bow of the boat. I suspect that, by the letter of the law, the captain may have pushed the boundaries of what was allowable, but it didn’t seem to affect the dolphin’s behaviour.

Bottlenose Dolphin

One of the highlights on board was seeing a man in his 60s totally drenched after confusing the shower tap in the toilet for the basin tap. The wash room contained both toilet and shower, and the poor chap went to wash his hands only to be soaked from above. He said he was intrigued by what that particular tap did, and was able to laugh at himself, along with everyone else!
 

Saturday 25^th:

It was a huge privilege waking up in the Sound with nobody around and watching the sunrise over the peaks. The overnight spot was sufficiently sheltered that there was no rocking motion in the night, and I slept well until the engines started at 6am. We had just enough time to grab breakfast and catch one more fish before we had to depart the Sound. On the way back I managed to switch off the GPS units, and contemplated that I had probably got away with it. There had been one or two slips, but nothing that would give me away, but I suspect a career as an international spy probably eludes me. That rules out espionage and fishing.

Sunrise in Doubtful Sound

Having returned to meet up with Jas and Maddie, we immediately shot out to find some native birds that they could show me. First up was Mohua, which Maddie was tracking. This particular pair had raised a long-tailed cuckoo chick, which I also got to see. Cuckoos the world over have duped unsuspecting smaller birds into rearing their young for them, and it’s always a bizarre sight watching a bird the size of a sparrow feeding a chick the size of a pigeon. We radio-tracked Kaka with less success, and then went to search for Rock Wren. This tiny bird is another of the native species in trouble, but there is a good site where they can be seen. The site is good because of its accessibility by car, but less good because the actual trail where the birds are found has been closed off due to avalanche and rockfall risk. Unperturbed Jas and Maddie brought high viz jackets and hardhats, so that we could claim we were surveying if asked. It made me wonder what protection high viz offered from falling rocks. I suspect very little, but it might make the body easier to find.

Rock Wren Danger Zone

 

Rock Wren

 

Sunday 26^th:

I awoke to find Jas and Maddie in a bit of a state. They had offered me the opportunity to go out catching bats the previous night as part of their ongoing work. Although it would have been good to see the bats close up, I had declined as I was tired from the early start on the boat, plus the weather was due to be bad, and I didn’t fancy trying to make my way across rivers or through thick native bush in the dark and wet, slowing them down when they were working. It appeared I made the right choice, as they had been up until 3am. Partly this was due to the high number of bats they had processed, but also an issue involving a broken trap and a lack of radio contact with other colleagues. So we all had a very lazy day, where I was able to plan the final stage of my trip.

Conservationists tend to talk a conservation language that must sound largely incomprehensible to non-conservationists. We have a habit of giving strange names to our birds, such as the Kaka called Camomile Tea, and the processes that we carry out when working become second nature to us, but often require further explanation to the uninitiated. This was driven home to me when I heard Jas say to a colleague ‘If it’s wet outside, just check the rings and blow on their nipple then let them go’. I had to question the legality of this action, but found out that it is possible to find out by observing a bat’s nipple whether it is a lactating female or not. All perfectly natural really. When the poor bats are not being blown on, some of them are strategically shaved to allow a small transmitter to be attached to them. These bats are known as Judas bats, as they then can be followed to give away the location of the roost. The transmitters last for a couple of weeks before falling off, which poses an obvious question: do the bats maintain a bald patch where the transmitter was, or does new fur grow to cover it. If it’s the latter, does this suggest that bats are continually getting hairier, and if so what prevents them from becoming too hairy? Does the hair stop growing of its own accord, or do they rely on passing conservationists for a short back and sides periodically?
 

Monday 27^th:

I was sad to leave Jas and Maddie, especially as it necessitated catching a bus at 7:05am. When buses are given departure times in New Zealand, it doesn’t really mean anything. All it signifies is that the bus will make several pick ups in the area, all of which have been given the arrival time of 7:05am. They pick everyone up at that point, but not by the most direct or logical route. So it’s entirely down to chance whether the bus reaches you at 7:05 or 7:20. And since you book through an agency, there is no knowing which bus operator is the one you are expecting, which makes for a nervous period of waiting during which several buses, which may or may not be the one you are booked onto, all come and go without picking you up. The long and short of it is that, despite booking a ticket, you have no idea what bus you need or when it will turn up.

I discovered that the sandflies have found a weak point in my defence. When I was doing the aviculture work, it was necessary to wear wellies for most of the time. As I was also wearing shorts, this had the impact of shaving some of the hairs off my legs in a ring around the top of the boot through friction. This area is now particularly vulnerable to sandfly attack as there are no leg hairs to slow their progress to my skin. I like to think that I have fought back by accidentally consuming a few flies whilst talking and walking, but I fear they may have bitten on the way down creating an unscratchable itch.

I made it onto Stewart Island and set off for a walk. In over five hours of walking I passed just one person. The solitude here is amazing. I walked up a place called ‘Fern Gully’, which I’m sure was a Disney film about fairies. My main reason for visiting the island is, obviously, wildlife. With very few residents and lots of native forest, the spread of pests on the island has been slower than elsewhere, and so a lot of native wildlife is easier to see here than elsewhere. This includes Kiwi, as the ones on Stewart Island are more active in the day than elsewhere. According to the locals they forage on the rugby pitch at dusk or thereafter, but I wonder whether this is a rumour spread by the islanders to encourage gullible tourists to walk around in the dark with torches all night. When I went to the rugby pitch there were certainly more people than kiwi, and despite hearing what may have been kiwi bumbling through the undergrowth, none of them ventured as far as the pitch. There is something exhilarating about standing in the dark, listening intently for small noises, to heighten the senses. The anticipation is fantastic, but after half an hour of standing silent and rigid in the dark it can be slightly frustrating when an idiot turns up with a torch that is only mildly inferior to the sun and strides noisily over to ask in a loud voice whether there are any kiwis about, because, to their amazement, they haven’t spotted any yet. One of the other birds I was hoping to see on Stewart Island is the Kaka, a large parrot. Having struggled to get brief glimpses of them elsewhere, I was delighted to find out that they are a garden bird on the island, with flocks of them fighting noisily on bird tables. Several were evident on the hotel balcony as I ate my dinner there.

Kaka

Having arrived at the backpackers hostel, I was shown to my room, where I was sharing with one other chap. The staff member said he thought the guy was French, and since there was a baguette lying on the bed I couldn’t help asking what it was that had given it away.
 

Tuesday 28^th:

Just offshore from Stewart Island is another island, Ulva, where there are no mammalian predators. The net result of this is that native wildlife is thriving, and some very rare species have even been reintroduced to the island. A day trip here is a must for anyone with even a vague interest in wildlife, or with a camera, since much of it has no fear of people. I discovered this when I met a native Robin who watched with intent as I tucked into an apple. The Robin decided it would get a better look from my knee, where it deposited a warm and sticky poo before attempting to steal my fruit. I saw everything that I had hoped, and managed to get photos of most of them, including a very accommodating Weka on the beach that I ended up sitting next to for a while (though it didn’t poo on me at least!). Having got back to the quay I spoke to a DOC warden who had seen two kiwis that day! Despite walking every track available to me, and doing as much as I could on Stewart Island too, I still hadn’t bumped into one, and was running out of time. In the end I booked a Kiwi tour as it seemed like the only way to guarantee seeing one.

Friendly Robin

The tour involved a boat trip to a remote beach where several Kiwi are known to feed at night. After a short walk through the bush we emerged onto the beach and promptly found a feeding bird. It didn’t seem to mind us walking alongside it at a respectful distance for a while, and I was even able to get several grainy photos of it. The second Kiwi we found was less fond of human companions and shot off into the bush at great speed. They move surprisingly quickly when they want to, and with no shortage of comedy about them. With such tiny and useless wings I can only imagine that a Kiwi that trips up simply plunges headfirst into the ground and has to right itself with the aid of its bill. If anyone ever gets the chance to trip a Kiwi I would be interested to know the result.

Brown Kiwi

 

Wednesday 29^th:

Seeing the Kiwi last night was great, but I was still eager to find one myself during the daytime. So I set off to walk 20km of forest tracks. I had no success with the Kiwi, but I did wonder whether I should have brought a pedometer with me to New Zealand. I must have covered quite a distance since being here, and would love to know exactly how far I’ve walked. I spent the evening chatting with an English couple who were both working in New Zealand. Needless to say, they had bumped into a Kiwi on Ulva island that day. It’s just not meant to be for me!

Stewart Island Beach

I tried using the internet this evening with little success. I can understand that there might be some logistical issues regarding providing superfast broadband to an offshore island, but was disappointed to spend approximately 27 of the 30 minutes of time that I had purchased waiting for one page to load. This didn’t seem fair and in the end I had to ask the provider to lend me more money simply to log out, rather than leaving my email account open for the next user. Not that they would be able to do much with it as it would take them half a day to send an email!

I was given some unexpected entertainment this evening in the form of a condom vending machine in the pub toilets. Someone had written onto it ‘If empty, see the bar man. If full, see the bar maid. For refund, insert baby here.’ A stroke of comedy gold no less! Further, less welcome entertainment came from Benjamin the German, who had just returned from 11 days hiking around the island. As one would, he promptly indulged in an alcoholic beverage or eight, and at 5am there was a knock on the dorm door as some unknown good Samaritan had taken it upon themselves to return Benjamin to his rightful place of rest.
 

Thursday 30^th:

I did not see Benjamin rise the following day as I was due to catch an early ferry off Stewart Island. I was heading back to the mainland, where I took a bus ride to the airport to pick up my hire car. It appears that every bus driver in New Zealand must fit a particular age and weight range, with all of the ones I’ve encountered fitting the 50-60 year old male with beer belly category. They also all have gruff voices and like to wave and make jokes.

Having picked up the car, I made a stop for supplies at a Pak n Save supermarket in Invercargill. This was an utterly terrifying experience. Pak n Save is obviously the Asda of New Zealand, a very budget option full of slow, bumbling, overweight people throwing mountains of food into wide trolleys. The trolleys were front wheel steer only, which made reversing very difficult. This was all the more of a problem as they have laid out the supermarket in a route that forces you to travel round in that direction, so that if you forget something you either have to attempt a dangerous reversing manoeuvre or start all over again from the entrance. Nothing in the store is clearly signed, adding to the issues, and when you take something from the shelves, the next one slid down into its place, so that it was virtually impossible to stuff it back if it turned out you didn’t want it after all. The final nail in the coffin of ineptitude was the superthin checkouts, which presumably allowed them to cram more into the store, but didn’t allow both you and your trolley to pass through at the same time, so that you could not unload your shopping within arms distance of the conveyor belt! Although it was a commercial shopping disaster, I sense that it would make for an excellent episode of supermarket sweep.

I left and escaped the city in favour of the Catlins, a stunning stretch of coastline that had been recommended to me for its beautiful scenery and wildlife spectacle. The first of these I met with after lunch, when I stopped to photograph sea lions. Despite following all the guidance on sensible photography distances, a rather large male took offence to my presence, and I have a series of images showing an increasingly annoyed sea lion approaching. I backed away rather swiftly, as the hefty looking beasts are capable of a reasonable pace apparently.

Sea Lion

I was staying at a place called Curio Bay, where the lonely planet says you might see dolphins. What it fails to tell you is that, if you do, they will be only 20 yards offshore and will be leaping clear of the water and surfing in the waves. There were quite a few people gathered for the spectacle, and with the long lens I was able to take some decent photos, one of which might just be the best photo I’ve taken all holiday. Once the dolphin encounter was over, there was just enough time to wolf down some dinner before the penguin encounter began! Yellow-eyed penguins breed on a beach there, and there is a small area roped off which people can sit within as the adult birds return at dusk to feed the youngsters. A large crowd of expectant punters was assembled by the time I arrived, and as the light fell one or two penguins began to emerge from the sea and waddle their way up to the rocks at the back of the beach where the young were hiding. One came past within ten metres, and spent 20 minutes or so regurgitating fish for its two chicks just in front of us. It’s not a particularly pleasant process, as the poor adult has to throw up quite a large quantity of quite large fish, whilst being hassled by two large chicks and an entourage of gulls waiting to dive in and snatch any scraps. All of this in front of 50 or so strangers gathered in a small roped off section of beach taking photos. Slightly embarrassing really.

Hectors Dolphins

 

Friday 31^st:

The Catlins has some stunning little coves and bays, and long sandy beaches. It’s the closest thing to Cornwall I’ve come across out here. On one beach I got addicted to wave watching. There’s something hypnotic about the way the water moves, and runs up channels in the rocks, especially as the tide comes and goes. I also got carried away with rock formations.

The Catlins

I had another sea lion encounter, and after my last meeting I gave them a wide berth. This caused some issues as one sizeable male had lumbered up the beach and was sat right in the middle, leaving very little room on either side of it to continue my walk down the beach. When the tide dropped enough for me to sneak past I had fantastic views of several animals having a few quarrels in the surf.

Sea Lion fight

 

This hire car is much better than the Nissan Sunny. There was no budget option available at Invercargill, so I had to get a small economy car, but for some reason I was upgraded to a Toyota Corolla. It was an automatic with a slightly different set up to the ones I’d seen before, and had taken me a few minutes of driving very slowly around the airport car park to figure out what I was doing. In the end I enjoyed the automatic as it allowed the left hand to roam free, which meant I could use it instead to eat crisps, wave at passers-by or take photos. Presumably it’s impossible to stall an automatic car.
 

Saturday 1^st Feb:

Whilst driving around I have come to the conclusion that the towns here are all modelled on the American mid-west. They have wide streets and low buildings with large frontages, and look like they sprung up during some form of mining revolution, which may in fact be the case. I also discovered that a lot of the roads here are gravel surfaced. This means driving very slowly, unless by good fortune you’ve hired a rally car. Partly that is because you have much less grip and control on the car, but also because I have no insurance policy that covers chipped windscreens for the hire vehicle. The dry conditions kick up a mountain of dust behind the car, much of which seems to attach itself to the rear end of the vehicle. As you can no longer see out of the rear windscreen, you opt for the washer and wiper, but this creates a thick mud paste which dribbles down the boot door and bumper. As a result it coats anything that brushes against it when putting luggage into the boot. And if you manage to avoid that, a thin layer of dust will leap off the boot door as you shut it, plastering your clothing in a layer of sandy grit. There’s just no avoiding it.

I took a short boat trip today to see more seabirds and sea lions. One interesting aspect of the trip was meeting George Waterstone’s niece. George was a pioneer in British bird conservation, establishing the observatory on Fair Isle and setting up one of the first ecotourism sites at Loch Garten to watch Ospreys. He was also a POW during the war and used the time to study birds in the concentration camps. An interesting book called ‘Bird in a Cage’ tells the story of four birder POWs, including George, although his niece confessed that she hadn’t read it yet. Sadly his legendary observation skills had not rubbed off on her, as she struggled to see any of the birds that were pointed out to her.

Beach on the Otago Peninsula

In the evening I heard an emergency vehicle in Dunedin, and considered that in my whole time in New Zealand I had only heard one other siren, in Queenstown when the tree came down. Then I saw a man in a nappy run across the street, which was an even rarer occurrence than the emergency vehicle.
 

Sunday 2^nd:

On my drive out of Dunedin I passed two men in bright blue lycra gimp suits at the road side trying to sell me a one dollar ice cream. I can’t imagine what sort of ice cream marketing requires not just one bright blue gimp, but two. I can only assume these men are being paid to wear the suits, as nobody would have volunteered for the post. In which case it seems like a costly strategy for the ice cream vendor, as they would need to sell a huge number of ice creams to cover the costs of the men and the suits. Surely one man would do, or perhaps they should charge considerably more for the ice creams.

I also came across a suicidal hedgehog on the road. I’ve seen plenty of carcasses whilst driving around, but this was the first live animal I’d seen. It was making its way slowly across highway one, and I suspect it may not have made it. It’s a strange sensation seeing an animal that I rarely see in the UK and being hit by conflicting feelings that, whilst I always enjoy seeing hedgehogs, I wanted this particular one to die as it part of a huge hedgehog army destroying native species.

I visited a place called Orokanui Ecosanctuary, where a huge fence and a predator removal programme has rid the sanctuary of everything that eats native species. As with Ulva Island, the thing that strikes you most in predator-free areas is the sheer weight of birds. Even if you can’t see them all, the noise is so much greater here than in other areas, and it’s a real tragedy to know that New Zealand used to be like that across the country before we introduced everything.

Red-crowned Parakeet

I arrived at my hostel, Chillawhile, with terrible timing. Someone else was checking in and had millions of questions for the poor guy at the desk. This was made worse by collective language barriers which meant every question had to be asked at least twice. Plus she needed a receipt, which necessitated a lengthy delay while the appropriate printing could be done. Needless to say, it wasn’t the chilled out ambience I had hoped for on my final evening. I thought it would be appropriate to finish with fish and chips, which came wrapped in paper the size of a bed sheet, which made it look like I’d just scoffed a battered shark. After dinner and a cider I was feeling more relaxed, and sat down with a few others to play the piano and drink some wine. A thoroughly enjoyable way to spend the final evening after all!
 

Monday 3^rd-Tuesday 4^th:

The long process of coming home started with a lengthy drive back to Christchurch. On reaching the airport I ditched the car and went to check in, somehow finding myself in amongst the Scotland Cricket Team. My knowledge of cricket is not good enough to have recognised any of them, except they were all wearing blue tops saying Scotland Cricket on them. Plus I overheard someone talking to one of them and it turns out they’d just qualified for the world cup. The Scottish Cricket Board is not wealthy enough to pay for 1^st class flights, so they were mostly lumbered in economy with the rest of us unrecognisable folk. The only ones who got to fly 1^st class were the coaching staff, among whom I recognised Paul Collingwood. A smily African chap sat next to me and introduced himself as Jacob, and promptly started to read the bible on a kindle. I wondered whether this is the modern face of the missions. Presumably the bible is free on kindle as there will be no copyright law going back that far.

I decided to watch take off through the forward facing camera, which is a little disconcerting. The runway looks like a road, but is actually ten times the size. But because the lines down the middle are so long, it appears that the plane is travelling very slowly along the runway, and it doesn’t seem possible that it could possibly get airborne at that speed. Thankfully a glance through the window confirms that pace is not an issue, and the ground rushes away from you as expected well before the end of the runway is in sight.

Whilst stopped in Sydney I popped in to use the facilities and was surprised when I somehow activated an automatic flush system twice before the appropriate moment! As if to comfort me, at that exact moment the radio started playing ‘Don’t worry, be happy’!

I have noticed that, over the last ten years or so, the use of ‘suitcases’ as we knew it has dropped considerably. With the demise of the suitcase comes the era of the wheely-case. I can fully understand the advantages that a wheely-case offers, namely being able to pull the weight along behind you instead of lug it around banging into your knees. What I understand less is that some people seem to have forgotten how to carry luggage at all, and insist on wheeling their cases at all times, even when massively inappropriate, such as on escalators, or, worse still, down the aisle of a plane that is narrower than the case is wide. The impact of this latter crime is a succession of bruised knees and run over toes. I think wheely-cases should be banned as hand luggage on planes, since they don’t fit the description of ‘carry-on luggage’ and don’t fit in the overhead compartments anyway, no matter how much pushing and shoving you try.      

In Bangkok, the plane stopped for a refuel and we were allowed to stay on board. At the point the last disembarking passenger had, erm, disembarked, an army of cleaners rushed on board and magically restores the cabin to its former glory. Every pillow cover was changed, each headrest swapped, new headphones were provided and the floors vacuumed, though where the power source is I was unaware. Presumably we plug in once at the gate. I suspect there is a record-breaking team out there somewhere who hold the record for the quickest clean, but I bet they get paid next to nothing and are only rewarded by the lost property they can scavenge.

It was of course a huge pleasure to return from the sun of New Zealand to seven degrees and grey in the UK, with gales battering our coast as they had been on the day I left two months ago. What a trip it’s been: a welcoming country full of jaw-dropping scenery, spectacular wildlife, and friendly people. There were many and varied highlights, among them holding three-day old Kaki chicks, lying within a metre of a Wrybill incubating eggs, searching for Rock Wren with a hardhat and high viz jacket on, spending a peaceful night on Doubtful Sound, watching dolphins leap clear of the waves in Curio Bay, getting hopelessly drunk with a great crowd of people at New Year, marvelling at Albatross and standing in the dark listening to the possible rustle of Kiwi, vast open roads, the amazing Tasman valley below Mount Cook, laughing with the Kaki team until I cried, watching the stars from the caravan, sharing a dinner of pasta, freeze-dried meals and cereal bars with the Kepler crew, listening to the birds on Ulva island, being bitten by tern chicks, and listening to the piano man in Queenstown. And of course, the two things that seemed to make up a huge part of my time, and my updates, the sandflies and assorted poo!