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Published: January 24th 2007
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It was the last day of our trip. It was also the last day of the year. We started the morning with an early visit to Dunedin's main tourist attraction, Baldwin Street, the steepest street in the world. I will admit, it is pretty steep. Driving down it was kind of freaky. It would have been more fun if we'd had a couple of wheely bins...
Next on the agenda was the Botanic Gardens, where they have an excellent aviary complex, housing all manner of exotic birds, as well as all the native parrots (except for the kakapo of course). This is one of the few places where you can see an orange-fronted kakariki; there are fewer than 200 left in the world.
Then it was back down the road to the Otago Museum. This has to be the best museum in the country. Normally in museums I straight for the animal section but here we ran into a Pacific Culture gallery first. There were all sorts of artifacts in here, from woven gimp-masks to Easter Island figurines to Solomon Islands pig-bowls. Its the kind of display you could easily spend an hour or two in. The natural history
areas were far more interesting again. There was so much for me to drool over: the most complete skeleton yet found of a Harpagornis (that's the giant eagle that once lived in New Zealand); the 1898 takahe specimen; rare mounted specimens of extinct native birds like Chatham Island fernbird, Auckland Island merganser and NZ little bittern; the 16 million year old crocodile bone recently found in Otago; etc etc and etc! Then there's the exhibit called "the Animal Attic", set up as an old-school museum, which is the kind of museum I like, with glass cases stuffed full of mounted animals and jars of alcohol with preserved beasties floating inside. There was a Japanese crested ibis, a Carolina parakeet, a red-faced malkoha from Sri Lanka (I love malkohas), a quetzal, and best of all, a rat king. Don't know what a rat king is? Shame on you. The rat king is a (true) piece of rural folklore, where a nest-full of baby rats have their tails become so intertwined that they grow up as a ball of rats, all joined in a circle by their knotted tails. And then probably starve to death. There used to be a bit of
an industry constructing fake rat kings but genuine specimens have been examined and X-rayed, showing the tail bones knitted together as could only happen in the growth stages.
We could have spent all day at the museum, but we had to move on, so we drove northwards a short distance towards the Orokonui Reserve, home to the tallest tree in New Zealand. The turn-off is at the road to Waitati where the sign reads "Welcome to foggy Waitati". The DoC sign at the parking area says that the trail takes an hour. We reached the tree in fifteen minutes which was confusing but it had to be the right place because there was a sign beside the path giving the tree's vital statistics. It is a Eucalyptus regnans, known as a regal gum in the common tongue, and it stands 69.1 metres tall (that's 227 feet) and is about 100 years old. Its not actually that impressive to look at because its surrounded on all sides by other eucalypts, all having grown up after a bush-fire in the early 1900s and most of which are almost as tall as their famous sibling. There are also eastern rosellas in the
area, of which we saw several. These Australian parrots are common in the North Island but in the South are found only around Dunedin.
The final stop before Christchurch was Katiki Point. The Moeraki Boulders that we stopped to look at on the way down are just north of the actual town of Moeraki. Calling it a town is stretching the truth a little, but never mind. Moeraki is on the northern side of a little peninsula (well, more of a bulge in the coast than a peninsula) and on the southern tip is Katiki Point, where there is a yellow-eyed penguin hide. This was the best of the hides we went to and the most successful (actually the only successful one). Within a couple of minutes of entering, two penguins came up out of the surf and waddled up the beach, and over the next half an hour three more came up plus one going back down which may or may not have been one of the ones we'd seen going up. There was also a big fluffy chick right in front of the hide in the flax bushes, and another bigger one off to the side. According
to the log-book in the hide, there was an elephant seal on the beach the day before. Yellow-eyed penguins nest in coastal forest, of which there isn't a lot left, so they are restricted in where they can breed. This hide was so good we figured because the approach was hidden from the beach so the penguins couldn't see people coming and going (they are very shy), and also the actual beach area was quite small with cliffs either side so they had to come up in just a certain area.
And that was our trip.
BIRD OF THE DAY: yellow-eyed penguin and eastern rosella
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