ACTUAL Kiwis and Bioluminescent Maggots

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I might as well just admit it. There’s no way I’m going to see a real Kiwi in the wild (they’re a threatened species, they’re very reclusive, and they’re always nocturnal) so I might as well just suck it up and pay the admission price to see them in captivity. Because going to New Zealand and not seeing an actual real live Kiwi is just not an option.

So we went to the Otorohanga Kiwi House.

The Kiwi is truly a peculiar evolutionary oddity. I’d seen zillions of photographs, heaps of artistic stylizations, truck loads of stuffed toys, and dozens of cartoons of the bird so I felt like I knew pretty much exactly what to expect. But looking through the glass into the dark Kiwi habitat I was still a little awestruck. The birds seem quite big until you realize the size of the egg they lay and then you marvel in astonishment at how such an enormous egg could come out of a bird so small. A Kiwi egg is about the same size as an Emu egg! (Comparing a Kiwi to an Emu is like comparing a toaster to a school bus!) The egg is practically as big as the bird is! So basically what we’ve got here with the Kiwi is a fluffy, feathery, egg incubating ball with a couple of legs and head that sticks out with a long pokey beak at the end.

The birds are almost entirely blind but have a fantastic sense of both smell and hearing. They also move a lot faster than I expected. Their chicken legs scurry across the leaves as their beaks ticks back and forth over the ground like a blind person carrying a cane and they snatch up little insects and grubs like their going out of style!

Okay, so for the briefest of time I reveled at the spectacle of these bizarre little (or big, depending on what perspective you take) birds, revisited some other native birds I’ve become acquainted with throughout this trip in the free-flight aviary, was nearly attacked by a territorial falcon, and then we were off to the next obligatory New Zealand budget draining attraction.

Which brings me to the Glowworms!

The glowworms were one of the bucket-list-must-do’s so after the Kiwi House we went to The Waitomo Caves.

The Waitomo Caves were kept secret by the Maori who lived near them up until 1887 when a Maori chief, Chief Tane was convinced to take an English surveyor, Fred Mace into the caves. They entered the cave on a raft from the Waitomo River with only candles to light their way. That’s when they discovered the millions of little glowworms inside!

Our tour guide was the great, great, great granddaughter of Chief Tane and took an eager group of us down into the caves. A charming Japanese family stood in the back with Fern and I and a little bilingual girl no older than 6 or 7 tugged at her grandfather’s pant leg insisting that something smelled like marshmallows. I excitedly agreed with her (something really did smell strangely like marshmallows) and the little girl looked shocked to have this stranger talking to her and I all of a sudden remembered that when not at camp I can’t always get away with engaging with other peoples kids. In this case though, this proved to be the start of a new friendship as the little girl continued to through us side-glances after making each new proclamation of her observations and her grandfather was so thrilled that he made us an origami fish.

As we walked deeper into the cave our tour guide told us all about the glowworm life cycle (which is fascinating and I’ll get more into that later) and showed us all the stalactites and stalagmites that vaguely resembled all sorts of funny things. She called this part of the cave “The Modern Art Gallery”. There was a mother with a baby on her hip, an elephant, SpongeBob Square Pants, a bungee-jumping Kiwi, and Bob Marley’s dreadlocks. This was a big hit with the kids (and me). Our tour guide also brought us to what she called “the cathedral” and told us about what good acoustics limestone makes. She then turned off the little lights along the path lighting our way and sang to us in Maori. She had a beautiful voice and as she held out each soulful note our eyes adjusted to reveal more twinkling glowworms over our heads. It was so magical! Almost like something right out of Harry Potter!

The “Glowworm” is actually not a worm at all. It’s a maggot but “Glowmaggot” doesn’t sound quite as nice. An adult glowworm fly will lay around 120 eggs in groups of twenty. The first larva to hatch, after about 20 days, will eat all the surrounding eggs in a lovely display of brotherly love, build a nest, and start the “glowing process”. They let down a line (kind of like a spider web) and secrete a sticky substance that coats the line in little droplets. The light that the larvae emanate is illuminated down this line that grows to about the length of a matchstick over a 9 month period. Bugs are attracted to this light and get stuck in the sticky lines and are then consumed by the little worm. The light they produce is part of a process called bioluminescence and is similar to how a firefly lights up. After the maggot cocoons itself much like a butterfly and hatches into an adult fly it immediately launches into the mating process and lays more eggs. The adult fly looks a lot like a large mosquito but has no mouth so after about 48 hours of franticly dispersing their species they either die of starvation, exhaustion, or they fly right back into the sticky luminescent strands hung by other larva in one last heroic self-sacrificial cannibalistic act.

For the last section of our cave tour we all climbed aboard a wide rowboat-like raft and floated through the part of the cave that Chief Tane and Fred Mace first rafted through 123 years ago. We admired the glowworm lights and their delicate droplets descending like tiny lit-up icicles from the ceiling of the cave. We all just sat there in silence as our guide gently nudged the boat along by pushing off of cables and overhanging sections of the cave wall. Millions of little glowworms speckled the cave like stars achieving a very similar effect to if you’ve ever accidently splattered the contents of a glow-stick all over the inside of an old canvas Girl Scout tent at night. (Not that I’ve ever done that…) The tour was over all too soon and we reluctantly climbed out the riverside opening into the bright sunlight again.

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