South Island, NZ

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Dec 1-5, 2019 catchup, Christchurch

I went to the New Zealand Ecological Society conference, held on the campus of an agricultural college just outside of Christchurch in Lincoln, largely because my supervisor was going and it was him I was coming to the South Island to see. I wasn’t giving a talk or going for a particular session; instead I saw it as a chance to sample different foci and ecosystems—eg the Braided River ecosystem, which had a whole session. I didn’t mind missing an entire afternoon of the conference to explore Christchurch one day.

That ended up being a bit of a draggy gray afternoon, but still interesting to see the city which I hadn’t really seen at all when we flew in there on my study abroad back in the day. Botanic Gardens had some well-presented/labeled NZ species, and then I walked to the city centre to see the lingering earthquake devastation—even in the midst of a newly designed square, lots of cordoned-off buildings and the cathedral still in ruins. I’ve heard a lot more about the earthquake this time around; someone was friends with a survivor of one of the collapsing high-rises, and I heard the sole survivor of a crushed bus give a talk about ecology at the NZES conference. 185 people died. I was also interested in the “Red Zone,” the residential area along the river near the heart of the city which experienced intense liquefaction and became uninhabitable, so houses were gradually condemned and demolished, leaving ghost suburban gardens and trees along the property lines and crumbling streets and sidewalks. They’re only just recently deciding to turn some of it into more wild parkland. It was a bit out of the way, but I was curious enough to ride an electric scooter for 45 minutes to get there and explore. It sounds kind of creepy (I questioned whether I should be going there alone on a scooter), and it is surreal, but people treat it as a green space really; there were people walking dogs, etc. It felt like walking through a vaguely post-apocalyptic orchard. You apparently used to be able to forage fruit and garden produce really easily but then they made an app so it got picked over and it’s more difficult to find stuff now.

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At the end of the conference there was a field trip day, and I went to Quail Island, a semi-restored harbor island reserve near Lyttleton that’s been used for farming, quarantine, and a leper colony in the past. It was fortunately a beautiful day, and though the setting was somewhat modest compared to more wild places, the walk led by a Quail Island Trust scientist was interesting and scenic enough. Lots of birds (mostly introduced species—they’ve gotten rid of most mammals but you can’t get rid of birds), some leaf-veined slugs, bunches of blooming manuka (teatree), V. salicifolia, V. strictissima, and tall “flax” (a broad- and pointy-leaved monocot with curved leathery tubular flowers on stalks, nothing like the Northern hemisphere flax, but also used for weaving material). Probably a hundred kids in a school group on the beach. The port we ferried from in Lyttleton Harbor was interesting too—a launching point for Shackleton and other Antarctic explorers. I took a picture of the plaque actually: Discovery under Scott in 1901, Morning under Colbeck in 1902, Nimrod under Shackleton in 1908, and Terra Nova under Scott in 1910.

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Another flight southward, almost to the bottom of New Zealand (an equivalent Northern hemisphere latitude would be mid-France). I picked up my real-time journaling again in Dunedin, so here are some real entries.

Dec 8, 2019, Dunedin

7:30 pm              My NZ supervisor, Bill, and his wife Daphne (a geologist) are very kind and are putting me up in their Dunedin hillside-perched home in the beautifully named district of Glenleith. They’re gone for the weekend visiting grandkids in Invercargill so I have the airy modern NZ nature art-filled place to myself. I’m sitting in the living room listening to and watching the rain thunder down on the garden and the hillsides—rain in anticipation of which I cut my tentative between-storms walk short, and was wondering if I had acted too soon because it was still such a fresh, light dusk, but I had been observing the mercurial changes all day and the forecast still said rain. Turned out to be right—I was only about 10 minutes ahead of the downpour. I had a perfect morning, so I can’t really complain. It was warm and sunny and I found the woods path Esther had pointed out from the car the day before and took it all the way to the Botanic Gardens. I didn’t have time to explore the gardens because I was getting picked up there for church, but the bush walk was well worth it. I didn’t have a map (just a blue dot on google maps but no trails) so I was feeling my way toward my destination along the network of gravel paths through the dappling trees/ferns/vines, nodding hello to passing joggers and dog-walkers, listening to bellbirds and tuis make resonant music (since I got to Dunedin I’ve been hearing this tuneful, slightly pensive song and finally figured out it was bellbirds). Wandering along friendly unknown paths full of plants and fresh air and birds, looking for the next unimagined turn or vista, is one of my absolute favorite things to do. I’ve gotten to do a lot of it on this trip. Some of the pleasing surprises on this walk included a small, sparkling reservoir (at the outlet of which, once I got down the switchbacks, was the most resonant bellbird haven of all), and a while later, a little spur into a sheltered grotto of trees against a tall mossy stone cliff, maybe left from a quarry, where an unabashed little black fantail sat and contemplated me a few inches from my face, flitting around a few times but never flying off.

Later, after dinner, despite continued forecast for rain, the sun was out again, shining in the dripping trees, and mist was rising from the hills, so as soon I got back to Bill’s, I returned to the woods path with an umbrella, planning to just dip in until rain started threatening again. And that’s what I did, savoring the verdant moist and foliar aromatherapy as much as I did the warm sun this morning. I was craving more of that friendly unknown, and it was painful to turn back after a brief foray, but it was getting grayer and I remembered the downpours. I’ll have other evenings to explore, I hope. I ended up with a bit of a dryness buffer still when I reemerged on the road, so I walked up the road a bit past the house and found a public trust site with the foundations of a historic settlers’ home labelled Craigieburn (Dunedin was settled by Scots), which I remembered had been the label for one of the intersecting trails I decided not to go up and turned back instead. If I had followed it, I probably would have emerged into that clearing in good time, and would have been even more delighted at the perfect unplanned loop. But seeing it in retrospect was decent too. And the dusky view of white and red-roofed Dunedin houses arrayed down the hills, with the reservoir I had visited this morning visible in the middle foreground, and the harbor and ocean at the horizon, was perfect.

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Yesterday’s exploring was entirely given over to a field trip to the Rock and Pillar Range with Esther, who suggested it so that I could see some Central Otago alpine and find some alpine hebes in the wild. Just to get a better feel for the ecosystem. I heartily agreed. She planned everything, even bringing me clothes to wear since none of mine were Otago-weather-proof (ie prepared for any amount of cold and wet or wind or heat), and drove as well. The trail (or track as they call them here) ended up being just outside of Middlemarch, which I had found on Wikipedia back when I read Middlemarch and found that there was in fact a town named that in NZ (post-novel). Nothing about it had made an impression on me when I read about it, and I could see why; it’s a pretty nothing town, except that the scenic/historical tourist railway makes a stop there. And it’s the gateway to this range…which also isn’t exactly a bucket list destination (relative to some places in NZ at least). The ranges rise low and brown out of pasture and farmland (the first 1.5 km of the track was through sheep pasture) ringed with invasive gorse, and the natural vegetation is also non-glamorous shrub and grassland. It’s certainly interesting to me, given my ecological interests, and it has a certain stark appeal, kind of like the Great Basin in Utah. The elevation gain also ranked with some of the more intense trails I’ve done, made especially demanding by the fact that the trail was often either crowded with prickly brush to push through and speargrass to avoid, or was strawed with dead Chionochloa grass debris which made it surprisingly slippery. On the way down we were practically surfing at some points. Chionochloa is a handsome golden tussock grass which is iconic in this part of NZ, and which I will always associate with my undergraduate mentor since he went to NZ to study them while I was his student and he was always talking about them, to the point that when I went on my NZ study abroad I was sure to get my picture taken with a tussock grassland in the background. The Chionochloa certainly thrive in this alpine—

9:15 pm              ^ I looked up mid-sentence and saw the sky mid-rainbow so I dashed outside (shoving on the first pair of shoes at hand, too-small crocs). It’s the kind of landscape-gift-moment I like to collect. Or rather, guzzle. The rainbow was full, from one hill to another over the house, hard to capture on camera—I haven’t cured myself of that—and it was gone within a minute. But the rain had reduced to a sprinkle (per forecast) and there was a luminosity around the edges of the sky promising a sunset, so I got my real shoes and went back up to Craigieburn. That was another big fat landscape-gift, the same view as earlier except swathed in sunset-painted storm wake. I watched the pink and gold pull back from the sky above the hills, revealing remains of day-blue, and on the other end of the horizon, purple hazing over the distant ocean and the city, which glimmered with streetlights like orange candles.

Back to Chionochloa—it dominates above a certain altitude, turning the landscape all lumpy and golden. That slowed down Esther’s plant ID parade—she can churn it out, and highlighted the diversity of the prickly shrub zone which I wouldn’t have appreciated so much otherwise. Coprosma (shrub with tangled divaricate branches and tiny round leaves hiding inside the tangle, a classic NZ growth form), Myrsine, Celmisia (paper daisies), Oelaria, speargrass, bulb onion, orchid, buttercup, marbleleaf (by the stream we crossed)…A while after the tussocks along with merciless wind took over, the star of the outing began to pop up—the pleasingly round and bushy and jewel-green hebes. They are really so aesthetically pleasing, even up on a windy range. Skimming your hand over their springy bunches with their tight repeating leaves is like tactile therapy (the kind of thing they would put on Youtube videos). Maybe it’s just me and my study-induced identification with them, but it was like encountering a bunch of friendly green pets scattered through the grasses. Most of them weren’t flowering to speak of, but Esther did find a sprig with a couple of tiny white flowers to take back and ID, and as far as I can tell from the Illustrated Hebes book which Heidi gave me in Wellington (I decided it was worth the weight in my luggage), the main species we were seeing was either Veronica pinguifolia or V. buchannani, though the round bushy shape looked more like V. topiara (but the book’s distribution assignment didn’t match). There may have been a second, smaller-leaved species but it was hard to tell.

When we got to a herbfield (as Esther called it) alongside a ridiculously picturesque waterfalling stream, we also found a whipcord hebe, the highly derived form (ecology-ese for unique and different from the main group and so probably specially adapted/evolved) with tiny imbricate (pressed up against the stem) leaves. That was exciting—a new one for me (although I was so winded by the last of the climb that it took me a few minutes to get off my rock seat to go see). V. propinqua was the best match and even had a picture from the Rock and Pillar Range in the book.

That was the turning back point even though we hadn’t reached the top; would have been interesting to see if the final alpine band differed much, but we had to get back for dinner. And before that, second-rate ice cream cone at the single, well-advertised dairy (aka convenience store) in Middlemarch. I asked for a sample, which apparently is less common in NZ (unbeknownst to me), and the lady said sure and dished it directly into my hand.

Back in Dunedin we stopped at the bottom of Baldwin St, a contender for the steepest street in the world. I saw the other contender, Ffordd Pen Llech in Harlech, Gwynedd, Wales, earlier this year.

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Working backward: Friday was a motley assortment of arrival tasks in Dunedin. Bill showed me around the Manaaki Whenua office (Landcare—government ecology/conservation research institute where he works and I’ll be hanging out) and introducing me to everyone, driving me back to his house because I forgot my plug adaptor for my laptop, driving us out to Invermay to see another cabbage tree site. Bill and I visited two of three common gardens, one in Lincoln where our last conference was, and the one here. Both were in the middle of agricultural land, crowded rows of the spindly, spiny Dr. Seuss-like trees—tī kōuka, Cordyline australis, cabbage tree—a handful from each of 28 source populations all over New Zealand transplanted to three different latitudes to see how they fare. They vary in height, branching pattern, flowering time, whether or not they shed their dead leaves, and probably other things. A few papers have been published but not as many as you might expect for such a long-running project (30ish years), so I hope to use the data for one of my thesis chapters. They’ve collected flowering time and number data, but not fruit/seed data which would have been ideal (for measuring reproductive fitness, the ultimate test of adaptation/natural selection). We saw sheep by the gate and a bee swarm on one of the cabbage tree trunks.

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Thurs Dec 12 2019

6pm      The mood has been vaguely apocalyptic in NZ since I last wrote, for two reasons. Over the weekend, there was a lot of flooding which shut down the one direct route (Hwy 1) through the South Island between here and Christchurch for several days, leading to worries about fresh food shortages, and also took out the cell phone and internet networks for two major providers across the entire South Island. It didn’t really affect me except that I noticed the wifi outage (I have a different provider for my travel sim card that wasn’t taken out, but not very much data so I avoid using it), and since the wifi had actually been out when I first arrived, I assumed it was the same problem and texted Bill in Invercargill. It was only really a problem because Emily and I had made plans to call in the morning, which didn’t happen.

But the other reason was a tragic natural disaster off the coast of the North Island, about which Bill and Daphne came back full of the news on Monday: a volcano erupted on an island regularly visited by tourists, White Island, and 50 people were on the island at the time. Many were rescued, but last I heard, 8 still haven’t been recovered (presumed dead) and 6 died post rescue, and many more have critical burns that NZ doesn’t have enough donated skin to treat. Since the Landcare office is joint with the Geological sciences research institute, it’s practically all people have been talking about (especially the role of science in predicting the eruption or not, and the reasonability or not of the risk management on the part of the touring company) in the tearoom ever since. It’s basically either that or the network outage. Until the morning’s trivia quiz from the newspaper, that is. It’s quite a different vibe from morning tea among the millennials in my office in Cambridge, though there are enough millennials here that there was a discussion about what counts as one.

Dec 13, 2019 catch up

~I didn’t write in my journal at the time about my exploration of downtown Dunedin and the Dunedin Botanic Garden. Dunedin was settled by Scots in the 1840s and got rich on a gold rush in the 1860s, so it’s an interesting transplant of Scottish culture and sumptuous Edwardian architecture. The prestigious University of Otago and the Dunedin railway station are two examples of the iconic “gingerbread” architecture in Dunedin, dark brick adorned with elaborate white trim. I wandered around these areas, also spotting churches, monuments to Queen Victoria (recently vandalized) and Robert Burns (his nephew was a founding Reverend in Dunedin), Art Deco halls, and hipster street murals, and enjoyed the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

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The Dunedin Botanic Gardens rivalled the Wellington as my favorite. They similarly mixed manicured plots with wild hillside, where there were boardwalks over “Fern Gully” and winding paths through “Rhododendron Dell” carpeted with crimson and fuchsia-colored petals. I also found a nice patch of hebes. I got a little extra time at the garden when I missed (ran after) the once-an-hour bus back up into the hills; I bought some chicken-salt-flavored fries at the corner dairy for dinner and went back to explore the South Africa section, where I watched a tui enjoying some exotic nectar.

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Dec 14, 2019, Dunedin

I made a final excursion to the Royal Albatross Colony via a tour shuttle, which was expensive enough that I’m still thinking about the price, but it was a beautiful day to drive out on the Otago Peninsula, which I hadn’t seen since my dusky glimpse of it in 2015 on the first day of the BYU study abroad. We saw yellow-eyed penguins then, leaving me to go for the albatross colony this time. It was fun to remap the images of the curving harbor and hills crowded with colorful houses and winding road onto my initial impressions; I also remember us driving around in some desperation looking for a petrol station (none to be found out on the peninsula). The albatross colony was a worthwhile destination for me since I always have an itch to scratch for seeing new birds, and I don’t think I ever spotted one on my last trip here. They don’t come inland, and this species is only found on land at this colony and on the Chatham Islands. Back in 2015 on the ferry to Wellington, I had many hopeful sightings of gulls that seemed especially big, but they didn’t have the wickedly graceful blade-like span of the dynamic soarers, as I finally visually confirmed on this trip. At the Albatross centre, which was built around an albatross-initiated but human-maintained beginning of nesting in the early 20^th century (the albatross couldn’t withstand the disturbance and predators of a human-modified landscape without more human mediation), we saw from the blind a handful of nesting albatrosses big and white and pink-beaked in the grass, as well as a young courting couple nestled close together (reminiscent of Provo). It was a warm and calm day, so we weren’t too hopeful to see them in flight, but as we were leaving the wind had picked up and the guide burst out with the sight of one wheeling among the raucous gulls, followed by another one. They cut inspiringly elegant and effortless figures, like sculpted ideals of birds, or artistically rendered hang-gliders. I’m glad I got to see them.

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I also did my final souvenir shopping, and went on a bush walk with Bill and Daphne’s visiting daughter Fiona, which was supposed to be a lovely view but fog rolled in and completely snuffed it out. Bill had already told me when I was on my way back into Dunedin proper, where it was still sunny, that there was a nor’easterly blowing in that would probably make the wildlife sanctuary I was hoping to go to unpleasant. But a bush walk would be ok. We braved some spitting rain and wind, hoping to beat the latest forecast of rain, and saw some nice forest and a hillside view of the city, but as soon as we got up past the trees (via much toiling), the fog rolled in and I was none the wiser for a view of any kind. The tussock-flax grassland had burned in the last year, so it was quite an eerie landscape, charred tussocks in all directions within the limited field of view, whiteness beyond that. Cool, though not quite worth the steep climb without the view.

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Kia ora, New Zealand!

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Māori words (all of which I heard used at the conferences or in the museums, and some in casual conversation) ~ Sounds: Wh = F ; ā = aa, longer sound ~

Aotearoa – New Zealand/ long white cloud

Kia ora – hi/ bye/thanks/ good health

Kia ora koutou katoa  (Greetings, Hello to you all – 3 or more people)

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tatou katoa  (Greetings, Greetings, Greetings to us all – the speaker and those being spoken to, 3 or more people)

Whakapapa – a line of descent from one’s ancestors; genealogy

Manawhenua – the right of a Māori tribe to manage a particular area of land

Manaaki Whenua – Landcare (govt research agency)

Tangata whenua – people of the Land (Māori)

Pākāhe – non Māori

Iwi – tribe

hapu (clan, sub-tribe; to be born )

Rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty

Mauturanga Māori – Māori wisdom/knowledge

Taonga – Māori cultural treasures

“Kaitiaki is a New Zealand Māori term used for the concept of guardianship, for the sky, the sea, and the land. A kaitiaki is a guardian, and the process and practices of protecting and looking after the environment are referred to as kaitiakitanga (source to sea)”

Te – definite article

Waka – canoe

Moana- sea

mahi (work or activity)

Pātai – questions

Papa – box, chest (for holding prized feathers, etc.). (Te Papa: National Museum)

Ngai Tahu – largest iwi in South Island

http://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/50-maori-words-every-new-zealander-know/