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Published: January 24th 2007
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It is the day after Christmas, and Robyn and I are heading south to Stewart Island, the lesser of New Zealand's three main islands, in search of birds. It is our first time there. The plan for day one (Tuesday) is travel from Christchurch to Dunedin, then on to Stewart Island the next day, and back up to Christchurch on Sunday.
The first stop on the road trip was the mighty metropolis of Timaru. There is an aviary at Caroline Bay (a big round one with common parroty birds) and another at the Botanic Gardens (a much smaller one with even commoner birds). That's about all there is to say about Timaru so...um, we headed on towards Oamaru. Oamaru's claim to fame is penguins. There are two species resident there, the little blue and the yellow-eyed. The little blues spend all day out at sea fishing and come ashore at night to their burrows. Oamaru has a special grandstand on the shore for tourists to watch the penguins scrambling up the shore in the dark. It wasn't even afternoon yet so no penguins but we stopped off at the place for a look anyway. It was very cold on the
beach so we left again. New Zealand decided to forego summer this year so instead of the standard heatwaves there has just been lots of rain and wind. A couple of months ago there were even massive Antarctic icebergs floating off the coast. For the whole of our trip it was drizzling probably 75% of the time and proper raining about 10%. It didn't ruin anything overly much but it would have been nicer if it had been warmer.
After Oamaru was Moeraki, which has huge rounded boulders littering its beach. Not just any huge rounded boulders either: they are concretions, shaped not by wave action but by layering, a bit like the way a pearl is formed inside an oyster shell. The phenomenon is not too uncommon but the results are usually very small; the size of the Moeraki boulders is quite remarkable. Its great being smart (its also great being able to read explanatory signage). Of course scientists are in the pocket of the Establishment. Alternative thinkers know that the boulders were really dumped here by Chinese explorers hundreds of years ago. There is a restaurant / souvenir shop above the beach where the carpark is and
they expect you to pay $2 for the privilege of walking down their very rough half-minute track to the public beach. You can also just go down the hill a bit further along for free. Or not pay and go down the track anyway just out of principle. The boulders are pretty amazing. We wondered how many had been carted off to foreign museums and how many had been smashed open to see how they were formed, before they became protected.
Finally we arrived in Dunedin. It is the fourth largest city in New Zealand, which isn't saying much because its New Zealand. I'm sure locals find it a very easy place to navigate, but we were constantly confused by the randomly changing street-names, non-grid-pattern, and teleporting buildings. We did find the aquarium easily enough though. Officially its called the Westpac Trust Aquarium, but everyone knows it as the Portobello Aquarium (Portobello being the area its in). We got in for free, one of the perks of working in an aquarium ourselves. The aquarium originally started out as a University reasearch facility and is still staffed by University students. It is only small but is one of the best
aquariums I've been to. Anyone who thinks that New Zealand fish are boring needs to come here. They had hagfish (if you haven't seen one before, they look like dead eels), Maori chiefs, red cod, southern pigfish (looking like the result of a particularly simple-minded child trying to draw a horse), blobfish (called toadfish in New Zealand), and best of all, a whole hearthful (so to speak) of bellowsfish.
They also have two big outdoor pools which in former times were used as fish hatcheries but now house bigger fishies. Above these pools hangs a life-size model of what has recently become known as the colossal squid (as opposed to the more familiar giant squid). This is a mysterious species, known only from bits and pieces from whale stomachs and one single intact specimen -- and that one an immature -- but it has become fashionable to name it as the world's largest invertebrate. Personally I'm going to hold off judgement until there is more concrete evidence. [In February 2007 an adult female weighing 450kg was hauled up by a fishing boat off New Zealand. The photos show it to be absolutely massive, so I am now accepting it
as larger -- but not longer -- than the giant squid. I still don't like the name though. In December 2008 this specimen went on public display at Te Papa museum in Wellington.]. The model at Portobello was made for a somewhat grotesque "wildlife documentary" series on Discovery Channel where models and computer simulations of various big scary animals are pitted against each other to see who comes out on top.
The problem with travelling is that you never have enough time at any one place, so while we could have happily spent hours fossicking around in the aquarium's touch tank we had to move on before evening set in. Further along the road from the aquarium is Taiaroa Head, home to a colony of northern royal albatross. There are about 30 or 40 pairs there and they form the only albatross colony on an inhabited mainland anywhere in the world (depending on your definition of what constitutes an inhabited mainland of course). Most of the rest of this species' population nests on the Chatham Islands off to the east. You need to pay to view the actual colony, which is on the other side of the hill from
the carpark, so we did what all cheapskate albo-watchers do: we went and stood on the top of the carpark cliff and watched the birds as they flew past. There were quite a few albatross and also a new bird for me, the Stewart Island shag, in both pied and bronze morphs. There were lots of tourists taking photos of red-billed gulls.
After the albatross-watching was taken care of, we headed back down the peninsula to Hooper's Inlet where a UK birder had reported seeing two Australian chestnut-breasted shelducks a few days before. There were three pairs of the native paradise shelduck there, each with several well-grown young, but none of the Australian visitors. They must have been around somewhere though because someone else saw four of them a few days afterwards. There has been lots of fires and drought in Australia recently so there have been quite a few Aussie birds turning up unexpectedly in New Zealand. After getting back to Christchurch, nine chestnut-breasted shelducks appeared on Lake Ellesmere just nearby and so I managed to see them there after all.
BIRD OF THE DAY: Stewart Island shag. Also the two male ring-necked pheasants squaring off by
the side of the road just outside Christchurch, because they were very beautiful.
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