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Published: January 28th 2005
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Who's a pretty boy then?
not Andrew with that haircut! Well we have been on the road for a month now and we feel like we have already done so much, I hope these journals testify to that.
One month in so we thought we'd take stock of the money we've spent, just to check that were sticking to the budget and that. Well to our surprise we've spent double our allocated budget in the first month, and we thought we were being quite tight too, San Francisco apart. It was hard to budget for this trip, so many places, so many currencies, so many different adventures. As a rule of thumb we decided on whatever the daily rent was that would also be our daily spending money - if the rent was $60 we could afford to spend that on living expenses for the day. That seemed to work out fine in theory because we knew how long (roughly) we would be staying in each place and we knew how much it would cost to stay there, 30 pound a night USA, 20 pound a night New Zealand, 8 pound a night Thailand, 60 pound a night Japan, 2 pound a night Cambodia etc. We then doubled that and
Fiona
and a North Island Brown it came to just over 13 grand, but considering we're planning to work for 3 months in Australia we thought we'd have quite a bit extra for special treats and that, maybe we'll have to stay in Australia and work for a year to generate funds to get home ?!! ONLY JOKING PARENTS, DINNAE HAVE A FIT, WE'LL BE HOME AS SCHEDULED!!
Anyway we've decided to cut out eating in restaurants and drinking, although i haven't signed anything to the letter so we'll see, Rome wasn't built in a day and that ....
With all that sorted it was agreed we'd only spend money on worthwhile causes.
The Kiwi, New Zealands national emblem was deamed a worthy cause so off we popped to the Kiwi sanctuary where they breed and release Kiwi into the wild.
The Kiwi is a fligtless burrowing bird with loose, hair like feathers. They have fascinated scientists for years and have more mammalian features than any other bird, it has marrow in it's bones, external nostrils on the end of it's bill and large ear openings.
The Kiwi is simply unique, it exists nowhere else and it's evolution is due to New Zealands
It's a family affair
of the Great Spotted Kiwi geographic isolation. Just a few hundred years ago there were millions of Kiwi living but nowadays the population is rapidly declining by half every ten years, this means the Kiwi could be close to extinction by 2015.
The place we visited is a working hatchery and nursery. The scientists breed some Kiwi's within the centre but also collect eggs from the wild where they have a very low chance of surviving. They then take the eggs to the centre and nurture them just as would/should happen in the wild. When the Kiwi are mature enough they are released back into the wild into the same areas where the eggs were taken from.
In the wild a newly hatched Kiwi has only 5% chance of survival, but when hatched and reared in a facility like this they have a survival chance of 90%. The survival is increased due to the lack of potential predators, stoats, rats, cats, dogs,pigs and possums. The government is now trying to make Kiwi habitat free of these predators so it is possible for the Kiwi population to thrive once more. The population is currantly around 70,000 and is estimated to drop to 25,000 before
A father and his egg
the mothers p'off after laying them growing again, thanks to these government conservation areas.
The centre is a nocturnal area so photography of the live birds was prohibited, but trust me they were amazing to see running about, they're so weird kind of like cartoon characters with their big beaks, wee body, big arse and huge feet, mental.
We saw eggs, newborns feeding/weighing and the 33 year old adult running about and wrecking the joint, hillarious! A very good day and very educational too!
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