Friday, May 24, 2019

Māori


Before there was New Zealand, there was Aotearoa. Before Abel Tasman first spied land east of Australia and named it after part of his Dutch homeland and before that name was Anglicized into its current spelling, the islands had been given another name by people already living there, master mariners of Polynesian descent who called themselves Māori. This final post about New Zealand (for now) is about those people. And because they called the land Aotearoa, I will only refer to it that way in this post after this paragraph.  OK so there's one exception.

When we left San Francisco on March 1 bound for Auckland on a very long flight over the Pacific Ocean, we hoped we were heading to a nation which celebrated the people who were there before the European explorers and settlers. After all, people of Māori descent make up over 15% of the total population. We hoped there would be a lot to learn and appreciate so we deliberately tailored part of our agenda to focus on Māori sites, particularly on the north island. I don't think we were disappointed by what we found. I hope that comes through in this post.

But before we get started in earnest on this post, let's clear up some pronunciation. Before setting foot in Aotearoa we were halfway convinced the correct way too say Māori was "mao-ri", not "may-or-ee" as we'd heard some people say. We were almost right. It is "mao-ri" but with a roll of the tongue on the r syllable. Glad I could clear that up. Let's move on.

Māori warriors, Tamaki Māori Village, Rotorua.
The islands of Aotearoa were one of the last spots on Earth to be inhabited by man. It shouldn't seem that way to me. There are many many pieces of land way smaller than the nation's two main islands pretty close to them in that part of the Pacific that were settled by men many centuries before. I would assume the biggest islands would always be settled first because they are the easiest to spot. Maybe not when you are as far south and east as Aotearoa. I'm sure the ocean's way bigger than I imagine it is.

So how late in history did man first land in Aotearoa? How about really late? Like about the year 1300? Seem too late? It did to me too. I assume mankind has inhabited every reasonably-sized, at least temperate speck of land on the whole planet for a couple of millennia at least. Not so down in the part of the world where the Māori decided to stake their claim. 

Maybe we should delve into a little big picture history. Isn't that always useful, after all?

Before European settlers were taking their ships out of sight of their homelands and still believing the world was flat, Polynesian people were sailing across the biggest ocean on the planet (what is now known as the Pacific Ocean) exploring our world. While most of the entire Roman empire was still intact, there were men and women sailing in relatively tiny boats from the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia all the way to Hawaii. And not by accident. There is evidence that once they got there, they successfully traveled back and forth to home deliberately. Across a distance of over 2,300 miles. As long ago as the year 300.

They didn't stop there. By the year 1200 they had reached Rapa Nui or what is now known as Easter Island, almost 2,300 miles in the opposite direction down the Earth from the Marquesas. Then by the end of the 1200s, historians believe the Polynesians had discovered Aotearoa (which means "long white cloud") and had decided to stay. More than 3,400 miles from home. In dual-hulled catamarans way smaller than we really could imagine crossing a stretch of water that vast. While Europeans were about to start exploring the seas, the Polynesians had been there, done that for about 1,000 years. And with a lot more success.


Feel like a 3,400 mile ride on this? New Zealand Maritime Museum, Auckland.
For about 400 years, the Māori lived in Aotearoa (which at the time was a name applied to the north island only) untouched and undiscovered by any other men. Then in December of 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first white man to find the islands and meet the Māori. Apparently it didn't go that well for the Dutchman. He failed to reach the shore, beaten back by the inhabitants. 

27 years later, England's Captain James Cook found the islands and the Māori in a substantial enough way that he was able to place a guess on the population of 100,000, a figure which today is believed by historians to be accurate. It was the first contact between the Māori and the English, who had already claimed neighboring Australia to the west as a territory. There's some foreshadowing there. 

After Cook came the whalers. And the sealers. Then the missionaries and the settlers and the miners and the ranchers and the loggers. And the whalers and the sealers and the missionaries and the settlers and the miners and the ranchers and the loggers brought with them muskets, which allowed whichever Māori tribes got their hands on these weapons first to wage more efficient war on their rival tribes. They also brought diseases that became the number one killer of Māori who were powerless to stop what they could not see. And eventually they brought requests and demands to share the land. Why wouldn't they? They had done it everywhere else.

In 1840, the Māori and the British signed the Treaty of Waitangi. If you go souvenir shopping  today, you will find the date 1840 printed on all manner of trinkets and t-shirts (I have one with 1840 on it) claiming that's the date the nation was founded. Call me skeptical on this one. For the British, it was a chance to grab Aotearoa for the crown; for the Māori, it came with a promise of protection against the French and guaranteed British citizenship, whatever that meant.

The three articles and The Treaty of Waitangi. Te Papa Tongarewa.
It came with immediate problems. First, not all the Māori signed the document despite representatives of the British government spending seven months transporting various copies of the document around the island. So it was by no means accepted by everyone. Second, the Māori didn't understand land ownership in the same way the British did. For those of us in the United States, this has to sound familiar. 

Disputes over land started less than 10 years after the Treaty was signed. New rules were introduced. The British wanted proof of land ownership from the Māori (which of course they couldn't produce). Any land not in obvious use by the Māori automatically became property of the government. Any Māori deemed rebellious by the government forfeited their lands. Troops were brought in to enforce laws and eventually the line between enforcing laws imposed by an all-white parliament and unlawful treatment of the natives got blurred. Homes were destroyed. People were evicted from their land. Eventually there were arrests and what seem to be to be unjustified killings. Ring any bells here my fellow Americans?

This went on for more than 100 years. It would be the 1980s until any real meaningful balance was brought to the relationship between the Māori and the British, which by that time was the New Zealand (not using Aotearoa here because it's just not appropriate) government.

Told you there was an exception.


Māori tiki, Rotorua.
So back to our trip.

We started and ended our exploration of Māori history and culture this past March in museums, hitting up the New Zealand Maritime Museum and the Auckland War Memorial Museum in Auckland and Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington. I found the Maritime Museum to be a great introduction to the history of Polynesian exploration in the Pacific; I honestly had no idea that these people ranged so far in such small craft so long ago. It is useful to stand next to replicas of the catamarans and imagine nothing but water as far as the eye can see. Stunning and a little scary actually.

Both Te Papa and the War Memorial Museum have incredible collections of Māori art, artifacts and watercraft and both places have a full size Māori meeting house for you to walk into (without shoes). If I had to give a nod to one over the other, I'd go with the War Memorial Museum. Their collection seemed much more tied to an historical timeline of the Māori and they allowed pictures, whereas Te Papa does not. I also got a lot more perspective on the relationship between the Māori and the European settlers in Auckland. 

If you need one reason to go to each place, hit up the War Memorial Museum for the carvings. The cover photo of this post is from that museum. And Te Papa? I found the most valuable exhibit to be the life-sized Māori storage house that you could poke your head up into from below. It provided a touch to an aspect of Māori life that we got nowhere else.

Think we just visited museums, though? Come on! Seriously? In between the start and end of our Māori exploration, we spent three days in Rotorua, the Māori capital of New Zealand. And there we learned a whole lot more.


Te Puia geyser, Rotorua. As seen from Whakarewarewa.
Rotorua is located a couple of hours drive from Auckland in what is known as the Bay of Plenty area. Like most all of the land in Aotearoa, the area in the Bay of Plenty was formed by volcanic eruptions; unlike most of the rest of the country, volcanic influence is still present and affects life in the area every single day. The Māori settled Rotorua in the 14th century and found a place with built in central heating for keeping warm, a reliable source of hot water for bathing and an ability to cook food without fire. What else could you ask for in the 1300s?

In Rotorua, the Māori are not squirreled away in a museum with stories on walls describing their history and what the Europeans did to them. Instead, they are living their lives in their own town and sharing their culture with visitors. We spent time in two places with the Māori in Rotorua: at Whakarewarewa just south of town and at the Tamaki Māori Village quite a bit south of town. Both these places are Māori owned and feature the opportunity to learn about Māori culture and history in addition to being entertained for a couple of hours. 

Tamaki Māori Village is a nighttime affair, featuring a welcome ceremony where elected chiefs from the three busloads of tourists are challenged and ultimately allowed to enter in peace and ending with a traditional hangi, a celebratory feast of meat and vegetables slow-cooked below ground on red hot rocks. It's similar to a luau in Hawaii (if you've attended one of those) and so the experience could be decried as something invented to cater to tourists from outside Aotearoa. 

Maybe. 

I didn't see it that way. 


The unearthing of the hangi. The lamb was the best part of this meal.
So, sure, the food was served at long picnic tables buffet style next to people generally from North America and Europe. And there was pavlova, which is decidedly not a traditional Māori food. The food wasn't the highlight of our night. It was everything leading up to that point.

The Māori are perhaps most famous for the haka, a ceremonial dance with plenty of loud chanting, body slapping and facial contortions including widening of the eyes and sticking out of the tongue. This dance was performed before battles a long time ago, either to demonstrate strength to their opposition or just psych themselves up for the skirmish. Today, most kiwis can identify this dance by watching their national rugby team, the All Blacks, who perform the haka before rugby matches to the same effect that their ancestors used it centuries before. 

The haka was performed for us before we entered the village, right after our chiefs for the night offered ceremonial silver ferns and stood their ground in the face of wide eyes and wagging tongues. Determined to neither show aggression nor fear before a wall of Māori warriors, the simultaneous showing of respect without terror by us, the visitors, was a palpable throwback to the past. I am sure centuries ago that I would have been more than a little unnerved by the possibility of doing the wrong thing and getting my head bashed in by a jade club but the seriousness of the interaction came across nonetheless. 


Learning about Māori weaponry...
and the use of the poi balls.
After admission to the Village itself (and without being attacked by jade club or spear-wielding warriors) we went through some Māori history lessons, including talks about the development of their weapons, their expertise in watercraft, their storytelling traditions and their use of the poi balls. 

Poi balls, you say? Yes. Poi balls. These balls on strings, which were originally rocks wrapped in bullrushes attached to a length of rope likely made from the flax plant,  are used in a ritual dance. Their ancient purpose though was to teach young warriors coordination in the art of weapon use. They stopped this practice when the Europeans imported the musket. All of a sudden, hand to hand combat with sticks and clubs was rendered absolutely useless. Those muskets changed the Māori way of life suddenly and irreversibly. 

The men in our tourist group were also forced (or maybe peer-pressured is a better term) to perform the haka dance as a group activity. A couple of things here. While the dance is marked by the same activity over and over again, it's not so easy to pick up when you have like a couple of minutes to learn it before having to make your debut in front of your fellow tourists. I got the tongue thing down (I mean who doesn't love sticking out their tongue?) but failed to coordinate it with the big eyes. The rest was just a mess.

Second, I'm sure it's way more intimidating wearing Māori warrior gear rather than a bright blue Patagonia rain coat. I could be wrong here but I doubt it. There is photographic and video evidence of all of this that will not be shown on this blog. I haven't even brought myself to watch the video yet. I can tell you it's a lot easier to pick up jumping with the Masai in east Africa than it was to do the haka, although i'm convinced if I could be better at one, it would be the haka. My knees and legs aren't made for getting any serious air in Africa, if they ever were. I'm convinced I can scream and slap my body loudly and I'd likely get the tongue coordinated with the eyes eventually.


Sulfur pools in front of houses at Wharekarewarewa.
Before we went to Tamaki Māori Village, we visited Whakarewarewa (pronounced fa-kar-e-wa-re-wa; the wh in Māori produces a ph sound), a town constructed right on top of one of those volcanic hotspots found all over Rotorua. If our experience at the Tamaki hangi was a polished, scripted affair which is abandoned for the night once all the tourists are gone (not being derogatory here; it just is what it is), Whakarewarewa was anything but. This is a living, breathing town where people sleep at night, leave to go to work, leave their kids to go to school and then come home at night, bathe, eat some thermally cooked food and then do it all over again.

Just like at Tamaki, Whakarewarewa offers a guided tour; some lessons about this history and culture of the Māori; a performance featuring a haka, poi ball demonstrations and singing; and some food cooked underground. Only here, the food isn't placed on hot rocks in an excavated hole, it's just dropped into one of the few plywood boxes located about the property above a high temperature vent in the Earth and left there all day. Raw food goes in at the beginning of the day; hot cooked food comes out at the end. No fires to start, no gas to turn on, no electricity costs, just good cooked food. We'd seen this same sort of thing years ago in Iceland when we ate some rye bread baked in the hot soil around a sauna. That was a gimmick. Whakarewarewa is the real deal.


The world's least expensive and most efficient oven.
Today there are about 25 families living in Whakarewarewa (the full name of the village by the way is Tewhakarewarewatangaoteopetauaawahiao; they shortened it so tourists could pronounce it reasonably easily) which represents typically between 65 and 75 people. At its height, it housed 500. Availability of utilities which are more reliable and predictable and seeing what the hot steam venting from the ground does to wood framed houses (it's not good) likely caused most of the village's residents to accept remoter but maybe more homey settings. 

Because the village is a real genuine Māori community, they have a meeting house that's actually in use towards the center of the property. The front of the Māori meeting houses are a metaphor for a man, with a face at the top of the gable end, the slopes of the roof representing the arms spread over the community and the vertical supports symbolizing the legs. The most celebrated houses are adorned with carved patterns and images of tikis, sometimes with their tongues extended as if right in the middle of a haka.

Because the missionaries that came after the whalers and the sealers did a pretty effective job of converting the Māori to christianity upon their arrival to Aotearoa, there's a cross next to the meeting house in what looks like either a mixed message or a blending of two very different worlds which are now both embraced at Whakarewarewa.


Overall, the feeling I got at Whakarewarewa is one of genuine-ness and refusal to compromise all the Māori traditions even in the face of life which might be just more convenient and comfortable if they just ditched the village and lived like all the European settlers today. I think this is probably a good thing. It certainly seems like there's room enough for both traditions in the country today. I can't imagine how noisy those geysers are at night though. I suppose you get used to it.

So about that equality thing. I mentioned that it got to be all the way into the 1980s before the Māori started to get any sort of acknowledgement from the descendants of the Europeans in Parliament that their rights as a people were just as important as the rights of the invaders from Britain and other parts of the other side of the globe. A minute or two to review that is probably appropriate.

In 1977, a group of Māori occupied a piece of land called Bastion Point near Auckland as a protest. The land had been confiscated from the Māori in 1886 under the pretense that the land was needed for defense of Auckland harbor. The land wasn't developed for the purpose claimed by the government but they never returned the land. In 1976, it was decided that the land could be sold to a developer for high-income housing. The Māori disagreed and unsuccessfully protested, ultimately being evicted from the land again just as they were some 90 years prior.

But the land was never sold, and in 1985, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to examine past wrongs on the part of the government related to Māori lands. At first the Tribunal concerned itself with recent wrongs, including the Bastion Point dispute of the mid-1970s. But eventually they examined more historical land seizures and have recommended land be returned to the Māori with compensation and apologies. And in some cases, the lands have been returned.


The haka as performed at Whakarewarewa, Rotorua.
While I'm not celebrating the Waitangi Tribunal as a righter of all past wrongs (I mean, how could they possible repair the lives destroyed or taken away outright decades ago?), it is notable in contrast to our own history with Native American peoples here in the United States. The United States government brutalized the Native American tribes in this country, exterminating them with violence and disease, much as the Europeans did to the Māori in Aotearoa. They also forced migrations off their native homelands then coveted by whites to a spot in the U.S. territory less desirable to whites.

Once the tribes were relocated, they were sometimes relocated again, driven off lands promised or established by treaty as belonging to them in perpetuity. As It turned out if the white man wanted some place occupied by Native Americans, the white man won, even if it meant breaking a promise or tearing up a piece of paper. Words were cheap and unreliable.

The same kinds of broken promises and forced relocations happened in Aotearoa. Let's make no mistake about that. But some lands have been returned to the Māori. And no, it's not anywhere close to all the land confiscated. But it's infinitely more than has been returned to the tribes that occupied the nation where I call home when Europeans arrived on these shores. Maybe I'm reading too much into my own emotions about my experiences with the Māori over a couple of weeks in early March 2019, but I feel the relationship between the Māori and Parliament is far, far better than the analogous situation in my own country. And I think that's really too bad that the United States hasn't done more to repair those past wrongs. Maybe one day. In the meantime, I understand a little more about Māori culture and will honor the time I spent learning this year.

Māori meeting house detail, Whakarewarewa, Rotorua.

How We Did It
It's fairly easy to find and enter the three museums referenced in this post. 


The New Zealand Maritime Museum is located right on the waterfront in Auckland at the corner of Quay and Hobson Streets. It's open every day except Christmas Day from 10 am to 5 pm. There are many many more stories to explore in the Museum other than the history of the Māori although we found that most compelling.

The Auckland War Memorial Museum is located in Auckland Domain Park. It's a little far from the center of the city for a walk, especially on a hot day. We took the Auckland Train Network's Southern Line to Parnell and walked across the Park and we taxied back to town fairly cheaply. In addition to Māori exhibits they also have moa skeletons. The Museum is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm.

Te Papa Tongarewa is right in downtown Wellington and unlike the other two museums, it's completely free. Woo hoo! It's open daily except Christmas Day from 10 am to 6 pm.

Tamaki Māori Village offers tours and hangi feasts nightly. In warmer months, they offer 6:15 and 7:30 shows. We generally book these types of activities early and would have preferred the later show (figuring the haka would have been more atmospheric later on) but found it sold out at that time. The Village offers hotel pickup which is great if you don't have a car in Rotorua (we didn't). The ride can get long. We were picked up before 4 pm for our 6:30 show. The pickup vans take you to their downtown office where you board larger buses after a wait. The ride home was much quicker.

Whakarewarewa can be reached by taxi or bus. We took the Number 11 bus from downtown. Get off right after the bus turns on to Sala Street. It's a quick walk south from there. Guided tours are offered several times each day either preceded or followed by a cultural performance. There are also a series of geothermal nature trails on the property. We skipped these in favor of making our way to the Redwoods Treewalk. The Village is open every day except Christmas from 8:30 am to 5 pm.


Sunday, May 5, 2019

New Zealand Birds (But Not Kiwis)


Over the past almost six years, I've taken some amazing trips into nature. Some of these trips have involved exploring the natural features of our planet like forests or glaciers or mountains or even white sand dunes. Others have focused on wildlife, most notably in sub-Saharan Africa, the Galápagos Islands or here at home in Alaska (bears and bald eagles among others) and North Dakota (bison!). But I've never taken a birds-only focused trip. That is, until we went to New Zealand.

Now, I've never been much of a bird watcher. Call me unimpressed with the birds that have lived around me everywhere I've lived. Sparrows, robins and starlings? Can't go for these small, brown non-descript birds (I get that the robin has some red on it). Blackbirds and crows? Yawn! Sure every once in a while there's a cardinal or a hawk or something but the birds in suburban England, Connecticut and Washington D.C. never got me that excited.

But in the past couple of years, some things have changed about my appreciation of bird life on our planet. First, I saw my first in the wild toucan two years ago while eating breakfast down in Mexico. If there's a bird I love more than the toucan, I don't know what it is. The one we saw near Chichen Itza was right at the top of a palm tree so our look at it wasn't amazing. I have to find a way to get more of these birds in some future trips.

Then last year I made my second (of many, I'm thinking...) trip to the southern half of Africa and my eyes were opened. Not by the ostriches and the marabou storks and the secretary birds that I had on my must-see list but by the smaller birds: the fish eagle, the carmine bee-eater, the lilac-breasted roller and even, perish the thought, the vultures. These are some impressive creatures. I started to warm to the idea of bird watching. Enter New Zealand.


A variable oystercatcher on the beach of Ulva Island.
In the world of birdlife, New Zealand has a unique history so we actually planned several items on our itinerary specifically to watch birds. Crazy, I know! New Zealand was one of the last places on Earth to be discovered and occupied by man, meaning avian life on the two main islands and the various smaller ones around the perimeter were free to evolve without any interference from the world's number one predator and destroyer of species and the natural environment (that would be you and me). 

But New Zealand went one better here; there are also no land mammals endemic to any of the islands which make up this country, meaning the birds there were at the top of the food chain. And that led to some unusual things happening. Like birds there being the top dogs. Many, many species just got so complacent about the lack of danger that they just ditched their ability to fly. Heck, in some cases they lost their wings entirely. That's not to say that all birds in the country don't fly. Some certainly do and some are master aviators. But there are a ton that don't.

So where does one go to see birds in New Zealand? Well, seemingly anywhere you want but there are enough sanctuaries scattered throughout the nation that you are bound to be close to at least one. I'd suggest you go and see what this country has to offer. Even if, like me, you've never even been interested in something like this. There are no more 12 foot high flightless moas around (the Māori took care of wiping them out) but trust me there's a lot that's interesting. Maybe by the end of this post, you'll want to go find some of these things too.

This is the only kind of Moa you'll see outside of a museum in New Zealand these days. Good stuff!
Our bird watching itinerary took us from north of Auckland to south of Invercargill, meaning we pretty much covered all the way north of the north island to all the way south of the south island and many parts in between. 

It seems like the appropriate place to start when talking about birds in New Zealand is on the ground with maybe the country's most famous avian resident, the kiwi. I'm not going to do that because I've already written an entire post about our epic night quests to find these funny birds. But there are plenty of others that can't fly like the takahē, the pukeko and the weka. And yes, there are penguins, but we'll come back to them.


The motto of flightless birds everywhere. Rotoroa Island.
I can't imagine how scary it would be to be a flightless bird evolving in peace on your own private island (well, with other birds I guess) and then having some large biped bring over a bunch of rats, dogs, stoats, weasels and pigs that will seemingly systematically hunt you and your chicks and your eggs down for sport or a quick snack. And that's not even considering the bipeds might just kill you out of boredom. There is absolutely no way you can possible defend yourself against that kind of attack. You'd need another several millennia to evolve again. The problem is you don't have that amount of time. Not with a stoat on the hunt in your neighborhood.

There used to be nine species of flightless moa on New Zealand. Go to the Auckland War Memorial Museum and you can see skeletons and reconstructions clad with emu feathers on some of them to get an idea of their shape and size. There is no accurate record of exactly what these birds looked like. By the time people with an interest in preserving that kind of record got to New Zealand, the birds were all gone. I'm sure there are probably other species that perished along with the moa. Those that survived were either lucky or fast or isolated or cute enough that people started caring about that they might be destroying before it was too late.

There are two critically endangered species of flightless birds in New Zealand: the kakapo, a comical looking flightless parrot (which we did not see) and the takahē (which we did). Want to find either of these birds in person? Get off the main islands, because all the known specimens are now isolated to predator-free islands off the main coast of New Zealand. 

It is likely that there are fewer than 200 living kakapo today but at one time, the takahē wasn't so lucky: it was actually declared extinct in 1898. I guess some folks refused to believe this declaration, figuring that New Zealand was unexplored enough that there might be one or two last ones out there. They were right; 50 years after the last known member of the species died, a group was found in the Murchison Mountains in Fiordland National Park. All 347 alive as of October 2017 are descended from this single group. 


Takahē, Rotoroa Island.
We were lucky enough to see a family of four takahē roaming about Rotoroa Island, which is located in the Hauraki Gulf north of Auckland. They stand a little taller than knee-high when fully grown and have this gorgeous iridescent blue-green plumage and red bills. Apparently they pack quite a bite according to our Rotoroa guide, Toni, who's had the pleasure, and they also seem totally unafraid of people by our interaction with them. It's easy to see why they might fall prey to an animal looking to do them harm. We feel fortunate to have seen more than 1% of an entire species in one day. Think about that...

The takahē definitely owe their survival to luck and isolation (the kiwi probably fall into the cute enough to care category). One of the other birds we found on Rotoroa, the weka, probably owes its existence to adaptability, healthy breeding (up to four broods of chicks per year!!) and speed. Weka are not as remarkable physically as the takahē, sporting speckled brown feathers on a two foot long body, but they are for sure fast. We were warned of the weka's curiosity and penchant for theft when we landed on Rotoroa and seeing some around the island I can believe their speed did enough to keep enough of them alive when they didn't have the Department of Conservation looking out for their welfare.


Weka, Rotoroa Island.
If you are looking to find some birds that actually fly, I'd recommend a trip down to Ulva Island south of the town of Oban on Stewart Island. Here you'll find weka but you'll also find plenty of birds that actually use their wings to get airborne. It's a quick ride on a water taxi or ferry and we spent the better part of a day from early morning to mid-afternoon exploring the 3-1/2 hours of trails on the island (the Ulva Island guide available for $2 at the dock measures the trails in minutes, not miles). 

So what kind of birds can you find on Ulva Island? Well, it all depends on where you are. Spend time on the beach and you are liable to find orange and black (all the way down to the eyes) oystercatchers poking around between the rocks in search of food. You might also hear (and you are much likely to hear before seeing) the whooshing sounds made by a New Zealand wood pigeon or two (or three) trying to get the attention of a mate. These are the biggest (and likely most attractive) pigeons I'd ever seen in my life and their mating ritual, which involves flying noisily about maybe 10 feet above the forest and then seemingly falling straight down into the woods like bags of wet cement was the strangest way I've seen to garner the attention of the opposite sex. Although we humans do some pretty odd things too.

But if you want to get a good look at an incredible array of gorgeous species, most of which are about impossible to photograph, head into the woods. We missed out on good pictures of fantails, tūī and saddlebacks, although we got blurry ones of the latter two. These things move too darned fast and won't sit still for us tourists. What are they thinking?


New Zealand wood pigeon. That is not a small tree. These things are bigger than your average pigeon.
I'm disappointed we didn't get even a reasonably bad picture of any of the many, many fantails we saw on Ulva Island (in addition to the ones we saw on Rotoroa Island and in Te Anau). While not brightly colored like some other species we saw, these birds as their name suggests are able to spread their tail feathers like a fan to draw attention to themselves. For me, they were one of the enduring images on New Zealand. Unfortunately, they flit from branch to branch so quickly that it's impossible to get a camera lens on them. I need to be a better photographer. 

But we did get some great looks at some parrots and some parakeets and that was worth missing out on a good picture of a fantail here and there. Parrots, you say? Aren't those birds found in the tropics, which New Zealand and particularly Ulva Island at almost 47 degrees south latitude (the tropics end at 23.5 degrees), are most definitely not? Well I'm sure they are but New Zealand boasts three species of parrot as well. We saw the kea on our trip to Milford Sound scampering up our car windshield. On Ulva Island, we hoped to see the kãkã, a mostly brown parrot with hints of red and orange on the head. 

And see them we did. They are all over the place, sometimes in twos and threes in the canopies overhead. The trees admittedly make it difficult to get a good look at these birds because they tend to stay in the highest branches which makes you look about straight up through tens of different limbs to see a darkish colored bird clambering about a long way from the where you are on the ground.



But stay after it and you might find one from the right angle on one of Ulva Island's paths to get a great look and some good pictures. We managed to do that with the bird shown above, who we watched clamber about the branches of trees for about 15 minutes until he or she decided to stop and strip some bark off the limb above, presumably in search of food. The lighting in the back of the kākā almost makes it seem like I've pasted the bird into the photograph but that's not true. Thank goodness for the fantastic camera that we brought with us. The Nikon COOLPIX P900 we bought a couple of years ago continues to pay dividends.

This is the first trip I have ever taken where I've seen parrots in the wild (and yes, we also saw some parakeets on our day trip to Ulva Island) and while the kea and the kākā do not have the colors that some of the more famous parrots from Central and South America, it was something I wouldn't have expected to see this far south on the globe. Need to make sure I make a note to see some of their cousins on a future trip, right below the toucans on that same list. 


New Zealand parakeet or kākāriki, Ulva Island.
If you make it all the way down to Stewart Island and Ulva Island, I'd suggest one more bird-watching trip and that's to hop in a boat and head out to sea a little. There are some pretty impressive birds out there on the right sorts of days.

I've seen plenty of seabirds on any number of trips out to watch whales or on ferries or fishing boats (I was way younger when that happened) or even on a massive cruise ship off the coast of Alaska and Canada. Heck, I've even seen plenty of them from the shore in many locations including most recently off the coast of Washington state. But I've never seen anything like we saw off the coast of New Zealand this past March.

All told, we spent about 90 minutes way out on the ocean off Oban in a small boat with a skipper, two other passengers and a giant orange bucket of chum. No, we were not out searching for sharks or something like that but we were looking for something with a voracious appetite. We also deliberately went on a windy day because the windier it is, the greater the chance of seeing some of the largest birds on our planet: albatrosses.

Not an albatross. Two shags on the way out to find the albatrosses.
New Zealand was not the first place on the planet I'd been where we had the chance to see an albatross in person. There are a species of these birds in the Galápagos Islands but unbeknownst to us when we booked that trip they are only found on one of the islands. And it wasn't one of the ones we were visiting.

There's a romanticism to the life of an albatross. I'm sure some of my personal fascination with these birds comes from one of my favorite poems ever, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the protagonist of the tale shoots and kills an albatross, a traditional bringer of good luck, with his crossbow and brings ruin upon his whole crew and himself. I was pretty sure we were in for none of that on our couple of hours ride out of Stewart Island.

Outside of the mythology surrounding Coleridge's slain albatross, these creatures are the ultimate ocean flyers. They can stay for months out on the open water, flying as much as 100,000 miles or more in a single year. Basically when they are not breeding or raising chicks, they are in flight or at rest on the open ocean. And that's over the course of 40 plus years for some individuals, meaning over a typical lifespan, they can travel 40 million miles or more. And they are enormous. Royal albatrosses can reach wingspans of about 12 feet.

I've been on a number of nature trips where the conventional wisdom was that we would see tons of whatever type of animal or bird we were hoping to spot and found instead pretty much nothing. If there's a bird that symbolizes this sort of futility, it would be the flamingo, a bird I've chased on three continents without a close look at the species in mass. It would not be that way with the albatross this past March. After all, we had a bucket of chum consisting of some choice blue cod scraps. What could go wrong?


All eyes on the chum. 11 albatross waiting for a free snack. There are others off camera.
One of the things albatross have come to realize is that where there are boats, there are fish. So they have a habit of finding fishing boats and following them hoping to snatch their catch or benefit from the discarding of the undesirable (to humans) fish parts. There is every chance the boat we were on has been and is used for fish so naturally we drew some attention from a couple of birds. But once we stopped the engine and started tossing fish parts into the water, we drew a pretty good sized crowd.

I hate the notion that I am participating in any activity that turns wild animals into beggars but let's face it, that's pretty much what I did on this day. I guess we fed a good number of birds but we also did it to get a close up look at them, including the way they squabbled over the fish thrown into the ocean.

The albatross we saw that day were primarily lesser albatrosses or mollymawks, although we did see maybe one or two Buller's albatross. The mollymawks are not the giant albatrosses we had hoped to find but with a wingspan of about six to eight feet they are not tiny either. When they are at rest on the ocean, these birds are about the most serious looking, well put together animals out there. There is not a feather out of place on their entire bodies, but particularly on their heads. It's almost as if they have been made up super precisely. The eternally furrowed brow and the horizontal line each bird has on the sides of their faces almost makes it seem like their beaks are held on with string which has made an indelible mark on the birds' heads. They also all look exactly the same, although I'm sure all humans look the same to the albatrosses. 

Is this a serious face or what?
But we didn't travel all that way to see an albatross sitting on the water. We wanted to see them fly. And when they did it was truly amazing.

Our boat was followed by a number of different species of birds that morning. After all, it wasn't just the albatrosses that wanted a free meal. Some of these birds, like the shags and cormorants and gulls, worked hard to keep up, flapping their wings furiously to keep pace with the speed at which our engine was propelling us through the water. The albatrosses cruised, barely moving their wings while managing to easily outpace any other bird trying way harder than they were.

This was truly amazing to see. Sure there was a wing flap here and there with the albatrosses but by and large, they floated on the wind in a way that was embarrassing to pretty much every other species of bird out there.

Floated isn't really the right word because it's not like they hung in the air in one spot. They dove and soared closer and further from the water and sped up and slowed down as they wanted to without seemingly moving their wings at all. Now I'm sure that's not quite true. I am positive there were minor adjustments imperceptible to me, that took advantage of warmer and cooler air and strong and weaker currents, or something like that. Their bodies are so extremely well adapted to live in the air on the open oceans. At one point we watched an albatross chasing the boat for what seemed like five minutes (but was probably about three) and the bird didn't flap once. He (or she) just hung and followed. Fast.



If the wind had been stronger that day, maybe we would have seen some larger birds. While the albatross is a gorgeous bird in flight, its landings and takeoffs leave something to be desired. When you get up to 12 feet of wingspan it's pretty much impossible to take off from the surface of the ocean without a pretty strong gust of wind. We were told it would need to be much windier to make the largest albatrosses come close enough to get some free fish. Or we'd need to go much further out to sea.

Before I close this post...a word about penguins. Actually much more than one word. If there was a flamingo of this New Zealand trip, it was the penguin. And you know that doesn't mean anything good.

Yellow-eyed penguin. The one we saw. And eyes closed of course. :)
We had high hopes in the birds department for this trip. I hope that's obvious. By and large, they worked out well. Kiwis? Check! Flightless (land) birds? Plenty of those. Parrots? Yep, two of the three available species sighted. Wood pigeon? Didn't know there was a pigeon that big but yes, got it. Albatross? Very happy with the results. We just needed a few penguins here and there. And by a few, I mean a lot. Like tons. Expectations too high? Maybe. Thinking big with nature doesn't always work out.

There are a few species of penguin living in New Zealand, predominantly the little blue penguin, the yellow-eyed penguin and the Fiordland crested penguin. We visited Fiordland. We didn't see penguins.

Stewart Island was the furthest south we went in New Zealand so we figured we would have the best shot at seeing penguins there so we asked around when we arrived: where do we see these things? 

The answer in the town of Oban from everyone that we talked to (and I really do mean EVERYONE) was that you can spy little blue penguins returning from their day of fishing at dusk down by the town dock. It sounded like a sure thing. We spent three nights on Stewart Island at a hotel not far from the dock so we spent every evening from anywhere from an hour to 30 minutes before dusk to when we couldn't see anything any more alternately scanning the harbor and staring at the rocks near the shoreline looking for any sign of penguin activity. 

Know how many penguins we saw down at the town docks? Zero. And we weren't the only people down there. There was a crowd anywhere in size from 10 to 20 people each night. And nobody saw a thing. We are convinced the entire permanent population of Oban watches and laughs at all the tourists each night when they send us all down to the town docks. 


Penguin watching. Or more accurately not penguin watching.
Our last shot at penguins was our boat ride that was so successful with the albatross sightings and legitimately we did see some penguins. Like seven or so. At a great distance. Am I disappointed? Yes. Do I have any right to be? No way. Absolutely not!

Now admittedly, we did see two different species of penguin in those seven or so individuals: one yellow-eyed penguin and about six or so little blue penguins. The yellow-eyed penguin was a solitary individual standing on a rock with his eyes closed. Not that we were close enough to see the yellow eyes anyway, but I'm taking our captain's word for it on this species identification. The picture is above. He looks fluffy because he's molting. I assume the rest of the family was out fishing.

And the little blue penguins? Just heads in the water while they were out in the ocean, alternately visible and then invisible as the waves rolled and the boat turned. Never saw a whole one in the three days we were down on Stewart Island. The best look we got at these birds is shown below. The look was so poor that I had to post a picture with a piece of my finger in the upper left corner. 


Two little blue penguins.
I shouldn't complain like this. I know how fickle and unpredictable nature can be and I've said so many times on this blog. 

We came to New Zealand to see birds and we obviously saw tons. It is rare that I include 16 pictures in a single blog post but this one has that many (admittedly one is of a glass of beer) which I think is a testament to the quantity and quality of bird sightings we had. And I had to leave some pictures on the cutting room floor. We saw pretty much everything we wanted to see in New Zealand except for tons and tons of penguins. And even then, we did see penguins. By every account this trip was fantastically successful from a bird watching standpoint. 

I'm not sure when the next bird watching trip is. It certainly isn't likely to be in 2019 with our trips for the rest of the year planned. But one thing is for sure: what started in Africa got stoked here a little in New Zealand and I now have one or two more birding trips in me I'm thinking. Got to get some more toucans at least into my future. 

How We Did It
Our birdwatching activities in New Zealand ranged over the entire country but were pretty much concentrated in two spots: Rotoroa Island and Stewart Island. I've already detailed how we got to Rotoroa Island when I wrote about tramping in New Zealand so I'll refer you to that post for how we did it.

We stayed on Stewart Island for three nights which made our trip to Ulva Island and our morning albatross-watching trip convenient for us. We took the Ulva Island Ferry over to Ulva Island first thing in the morning (at 9 a.m. if I'm remembering correctly) and took the 2:15 p.m. ferry back which gave us about five hours on the Island itself. I'd say that was about the right amount of time over there. If you go over lunch, take your own and bring everything back with you; there is no food for sale on the island and you shouldn't leave any trash over there. The Ulva Island Ferry leaves from Golden Bay. Check the Stewart Island website for the latest schedule and cost before you go. There are precious few places to buy lunch to go first thing in the morning but the Four Square grocery store in town sells pre-made sandwiches.

There are also water taxis available from Stewart Island if you want to go on your own schedule. I can't recommend those because we didn't take one except as noted below.

For our albatross and penguin (barely) watching trip, we booked ahead before our arrival with a company who cancelled the trip on us due to weather. Or more accurately said they were thinking about cancelling and then never texted us as they promised. We switched to Rakiura Charters and booked their half day Pelagic Bird Tour which was outstanding. Everyone we interfaced with at Rakuira Charters was fantastic and our captain, Mack, took great care of us while we were out on the water. I can't say enough good things about this company. The cost of the tour wasn't cheap, but then neither is any other tour on Stewart Island. If you need a water taxi to Ulva Island, Rakiura can take care of that for you also.