A Great Weekend For Biology

My friend Dawn from the ABL was here over the weekend, on her last stop on a whirlwind Antipodean tour. When we weren’t getting lost amongst similarly-named waterfront restaurants or discussing crushes on skydiving instructors, we were spending some very cool time at the gorgeous Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. We saw a lot of very cool stuff while we were there and managed to take some pictures of it, too.

The sanctuary is right smack in the middle of Wellington but you’d never know it: it’s green and quiet and peaceful, with lots of native birds and plants and other critters. It’s hard to believe it’s only like a twenty minute bus ride from my house.

We saw lots of native conifers and some gorgeous big tall tree ferns.

There was much mycology to be seen.

There were also cave wetas to be seen, by us if not by you, my dear readers. There’s an old goldmine shaft in the sanctuary and you get to put on hard hats and sneak around in the dark, shining very dim flashlights on some marvelously anntenaedly-endowed giant crickets. This was a lot of fun and I’m always glad to see invertebrates as tourist attractions.

Of course the real deal at the sanctuary is the birds. We saw many tui and three fantails plus a lot of others I couldn’t identify. I wasn’t quick enough with the camera, but here’s a picture of Dawn checking out some native ducks and trying not to get blown off the bridge as she does so.

You’ll be happy to see, however, that Dawn did get to fulfill her wish of seeing an actual kiwi. This wasn’t at the sanctuary but at the Wellington Zoo. His name is Tahi and he has only one leg as a result of having been caught in a possum trap a couple of years ago. Apparently Weta Workshops built him a prosthesis but he doesn’t like it and so just hops around on one leg. He’s very used to humans, according to the zookeeper, and for some reason didn’t mind being photographed. I’ve seen (two-legged) kiwi in enclosures before and Tahi (it means “one” in Maori) behaved a lot like those ones did: he sniffed around the leaf litter and stuck his beak in the dirt and ate worms. I was thrilled to see a member of the amputee community representing and even more excited to actually get a picture of a New Zealand bird.

Trees, ferns, bugs, mushrooms. Cool gray skies, green leaves overhead, dark twisty paths through a whispery, windy forest. All in all it was a great weekend for biology.