start of Wellington trip

---

Today I flew into Wellington. I rarely get up to the North Island -- the last time was in 2002 in fact -- so I thought we should make a trip up there and do some of the things that New Zealand's mighty capital has to offer. Its not often anyone states that they are excited to be going to Wellington, but I was happy to say it. On the cards were visits to the Karori Sanctuary, Kapiti Island, Somes Island and other birdy places. Because what else is there to do when travelling?

So we picked up a rental car that Robyn was extremely disparaging about the condition of, and drove through the narrow twisty streets to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. Between 1992 and 1999 a group of conservation-minded Wellingtonians set up this sanctuary, fencing off 252 hectares with a 8.6km fence in a water catchment area in the suburb of Karori and eliminating all the nasty mammalian pests inside (like stoats and rats and possums). Once this task was completed the stage was set for the reintroduction of native bird species that had disappeared from the region through their inability to cope with the onslaught of the introduced pests. Saddleback in 2002, little spotted kiwi in 2000 and 2001, kaka, brown teal, stitchbirds...; and on the non-bird side of things, giant weta, Maud Island frogs, and Cook Strait tuatara. Its still in early stages of course, but walking through the Karori forest is almost like walking through the New Zealand forests before humans messed everything up. Well, sort of.

The Karori website is http://www.sanctuary.org.nz/index.html

There are about 100 little spotted kiwi in the Sanctuary, descended from forty introduced birds, but obviously they only come out at night. Luckily, Karori does night tours. They say there's a 50% chance of seeing kiwi on one of these walks but I doubt that. The groups are too large (or at least the ones we were on) so if you see one you could probably count yourself lucky. We did two night tours. The kiwi are easy enough to hear calling to each other across the valley, but that was all we got on the first night. On the second one I saw a kiwi's bottom as it rapidly departed from the scene; Robyn just saw the grass moving. It was such a poor sighting that I'm not even counting it as having been seen. I guess we'll just have to wait for Tiritiri Matangi later in the year to see one properly.

The next day was Sunday and we went to the zoo, which was most enjoyable. One of the noticeable things for me was the big decline in diversity in the bird collection. One of the aviaries even had bantams in it, and others were making do with golden pheasants and magpies. The informational signs on the cages also were somewhat lacking from my point of view, obviously being designed for the idiot visitors who can't read. The signs are reduced to a photo and two sentences of text. There's not even the scientific name of the animal on there!! The warning signs (don't feed the animals, etc) on the other hand, while also simple, were very entertaining with great amusement value.

Pleasant asides at the zoo were the family of Americans identifying the African wild dogs as wallabies (!), and three of the chimpanzees apparently trying to kill one of the other chimps, who wasn't too thrilled at the prospect as one may imagine. They sorted it all out though and made up after their little disagreement. However watching the chimps rampaging about their enclosure like the Infected from "28 Days Later" certainly made me rethink any desire I may have been entertaining about becoming the new Tarzan.

---

Photos

common tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) at Karori
the beads on the nape of the neck are identification markers

male stitchbird (Notiomystis cincta) at Karori
the "cage" it is sitting on contains nectar dishes. The stitchbirds can enter to feed but the larger and more aggressive tui cannot.

male Californian quail (Callipepla californica) at Karori
he was all like, "woah, I'm from California dude!"