Wildlife Sanctuary

Sunday night we heard the call of the Little-spotted Kiwi -- very exotic. We heard the tui bird -- a mimic with many cries As darkness fell, the daytime birds grew quiet, and we heard an owl that says "mo pork" and also the kiwis. We didn't hear the native frogs, as it turns out that they have no voice boxes; however, we were told by our guide that many frogs are in the sanctuary.

We also didn't hear the numerous extinct birds that once populated this very strange land. The huge birds like the moa and the adze bill are only remembered in reconstructions in the display cases of the museum.

We saw a weta-- a cricket like insect, and a white cormorant on a nest in the reservoir in the center of the sanctuary. Most amazing were the blue glow-worms in the hillsides and banks of the streams. The intense light from these creatures, though very tiny, creates the illusion that the landscape is covered with points of light. Because the trails are very steep, the glow worms were both beside us and deep below us.

The sanctuary where we saw all this is inside a huge fenced area that prevents predators ( i.e. mammals) from eating the rare native birds that have been reintroduced here. The fence is a tour de force of engineering and animal behavior research. The developers studied how mice could climb past many types of barrier, how opossums (the worst enemy of native birds) could give one another rides to the top, and get over a variety of barriers, and how vigilant the 400 volunteers need to be to ensure that there are no gaps. The photo shows the fence. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to figure out what we would need to do to photograph the glow worms, or if that's even possible.

We learned a lot on our 2 hour hike -- all in a penetrating rain. The only mammals originally native to NZ were a few species of bat; all the other niches were filled by birds of extreme types, most extreme being the moa and adze bill I think. Introduced mammals have destroyed large numbers of species here, and the sanctuary is reintroducing some that have only bred on islands since the arrival of the Europeans.

Our guide looked exactly like Pipi Longstocking: two red curls sticking out perpendicular to her head, and a turned up nose. And a total NZ accent -- she calls it a fince, not a fence. The other guide, Tony, could imitate all the bird cries in an uncanny way. Tony hates possums more than anyone I can imagine. He seemed appalled when we said they live in our back yard. The managers of the sanctuary hate possums so much they have a possum graveyard where we walked on the burial area of hundreds of them, and I think the guides hoped we would dance on it.