This is half-pie.

The sunsets here are insanely great. And the days are not far behind. There’s a simplicity to the autumn; the cool south-easterly transmuted by the mountains behind us into a humid breeze carrying the occasional fat raindrops. Out to sea, under the swing of the sun, it’s raining. We are on the Land’s Edge, here.

The girls have been cracking macadamias; but the bananas have been eaten by earlier visitors and the avocadoes are not quite ready yet. Rosa and Bella are in and out of their togs all day, begging us to take them to the swimming pool.

We haven’t even made it down to the beach. There hasn’t been time. The girls have done their reconnection tour though, first thing. Flying Fox: check! Trampoline: check! Mini-golf: check!

Later:

I walk up the hill behind where we’re staying. There’s a path through the bush to a lookout at the top.

The first time we came here I found a giant stick insect, mottled in shades of green like the fern runners clingling to the trees. I suppose I think I’m just going to find another one.

An opportunistic but welcome pīwakawaka follows me, hawking in my trail.

Further up, I get into a singing contest with a pair of korimako. They win, of course, though not without a certain amount of huffiness on their part at the impertinence of the challenge.

At the top the view is immense, and only a little can be taken in at once.

The sea is occasionally speckled with fishing boats; the island volcano lying coiled and quiet, not even steaming. There is a cool breeze from the endless rumpled hills of bush at my back, and the birds make a constant song. The only discordant notes are, as before, the ever-present buzz of wasps; trucks passing far below, and a dog, its bark snatched by the wind and passed far up into the air.

I can see the road as it winds up and down bushy hills; along flats planted in maize and kiwifruit; around rocky headlands where the pohutukawa lean out over the water with outstretched arms.

There’s more detail that can’t be seen from up here: but on that road is a sign that says “Pig Dog Training School”. Underneath, in a different colour, “Bookbinder”. I know that chickens peck the long acre, apparently unperturbed by the pig dogs.

Later again:

Apparently there was snow on top of Hikurangi last night, explaining the cold night; but yet this morning we are in t-shirts and shorts again, almost tempted to break out the sunscreen despite the lateness of the season. It’s hot, though a cool breeze is stirring the pohutukawas as I watch out for the tiny boat that they’ve gone to lift the crayfish pots with. I don’t like boats.

I’m also keeping an eye on a lovely stick insect, green with a creamy white stripe down both sides, that fell on to Rebecca while we dragged the boat out from under the tree. Though I place it in a pohutukawa tree, where it started tentatively munching a leaf, by the time I come back with the decent camera it was gone.

And we have fish for dinner.

In the bathroom, a lost boy had found someone to fight with:

This is a fairly common jumping spider, Trite auricoma. It doesn’t seem to have a common name, so you’d have to wonder how common it really is, but there are plenty of them around here.

It had wandered onto the mirror, and now refused to take notice of anything except its “opponent”. It started doing the same as I’ve seen them do when facing each other down for real: place its front pair of legs as wide as possible, and vibrate them slightly.

Eventually it did take some notice of the large flashing object getting in its face:

At this point I would have expected it to jump onto the camera but it turned and went back to its business with the other spider. And there it remained.

I should really have rescued it and taken it outside; but when this finally occurred to me (after I had taken all the photos and gone) it had disappeared.

Hopefully it will turn up again tomorrow.

Having just received today a very fancy new computer at work, and also having just uploaded all our holiday photos onto the iMac, I’ve been busy cutting new wallpapers to take to work tomorrow.

The sunsets in the Eastern Bay of Plenty are awesome. I made three of my favourites into wallpapers, and I thought I should post them here too.

April 7

April 8

April 9

I have more holiday tales to tell yet.

Last week – well, the last two rather intense days of last week – were all about Webstock, which I may or may not get around to writing up.

Immediately after the drinks on Friday night Rebecca and the girls picked me up and whisked me away for fish and chips on the Petone foreshore followed by a drive out to the Catchpool Valley for some camping with Ralph and Kathleen and their kids.

OK, so I have to admit I wasn’t entirely keen. It was a bit of a wrenching mode switch from webstocking to camping. In the dark, I was momentarily excited when I was able to name the bright stars using the Sky Voyager app on my iPhone. And luckily for me Rebecca and the others were being tolerant of my need to hold on to my techno-comforter.

The next morning was lovely. However our sleep was not: between the pack of munters over the way who didn’t stop yahooing until 2:30am (and at one point we heard them discussing loudly their plan to take one of the kids’ bikes for a ride, but lesser yahoos prevailed) and the pigs, moreporks and other odd screechy things wandering about, and the hard hard ground I didn’t get much rest.

Can you tell? Yes, it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I went camping. And I’m a whiner.

In the late morning we hung out down at the creek. By this time I was dehydrated, caffeine deprived, and overtired. I needed occupational therapy, and then I remembered what my father used to do for us on the banks of the Pomahaka River in those hot summers of the 1970s. So I got out my pocket knife and cut a flax stalk, and I made a boat.

One waka was not enough, though this one was the most elaborate. Eventually all the kids had their own, and they floated them with intent smiles lit by the water’s reflections from the pools and rivulets they carved in the gravelly sandbars.

Meanwhile I was looking for spiders and other interesting invertebrate excitement; and the others joined in too. There was lots to be seen…

Beautiful pebble-speckled wolf spiders running fast across the stones, shying away from the water:

Smooth and sleek giant-jawed tetragnathid spiders surrounded by the translucent shells of their prey:

(and later, parked on their line and waiting for dinner to arrive, their undersides an unlikely stripe of yellow)

And crayfish:

This latter caused a LOT of excitement amongst the kids, some of whom had never seen one before (though our girls have encountered them up at Khandallah Park). I picked it up behind the eyes so they could have a close look; and they took turns holding on to it gently. It was much prettier than the muddy green brown ones we used to catch in the ponds and creeks around the farm. I have to admit… it actually looked edible. If it were a little larger.

There was lots more: dragonflies; little invertebrates scudding about in pools; lovely grey water-skating nurseryweb spiders. Shade growing across the water bringing relief from the sun. The kids starting catching things and showing them to me. It all was great fun.

But then it was getting on into the late afternoon, and we had to go home.

It was a pretty good way to start the weekend, all things considered. Curry at Petone’s Curry Heaven on the way home, and a whole Sunday to recuperate.

Though maybe next time we’ll bring a thermarests for sleeping on, and a billy to boil for coffee…

A nice thing about holidays is the chance to allow one’s obsessions to take their proper place among one’s daily activities.

Thus, when I spotted an interesting looking little jumping spider climbing up the wall of our family crib here in Hawea yesterday, I was able to drop what I was doing, capture it, and take some photos.

It was a very fast mover, and in order to get it to slow down a bit I had to cheat and put it in the fridge. About half an hour later I could take it outside into the sunlight for some shots.

OK, so it’s not hugely interesting, this one, but it’s new to me. It’s clearly a close relation of that large Black-Headed jumping spider (Trite planiceps) we see a lot of up north in Wellington and that I have photographed lots of in the past. However this specimen at least was quite a bit smaller (about 7mm long) and instead of a green stripe on its abdomen had an interesting, and distinctive, little cluster of dots.

Hopefully I can find another to see whether this is typical or not. But even if I don’t, at least I’ve found another jumping spider to add to my List Of Jumping Spiders I Have Found – and what’s more, one that’s not mentioned in my usual go-to book on New Zealand arachnids. Win!

Which is not quite right, because we are Finally Here, and not really On The Road anymore.

More pictures as and when I find either the patience or a better internet connection, but here’s a panorama of Lake Hawea centred on Corner Peak (which some of you may know from the Craig Potton calendar photo).

We came from the north, down through the Haast Pass and along the northern part of Lake Wanaka; over The Neck to be presented with an utterly flat Lake Hawea.

It’s not often that the lake is dead calm this late in the afternoon; but so it was today, and the southerly passing through yesterday appeared to have cleared the air of both dust and cloud.

A few more days like this, please.

Our cherry tree is now in full fruit, which makes it a pretty exciting place for the local blackbirds and thrushes. Usually we have lots of starlings and regular kererū too, but since we redid the roof last summer, we haven’t seen so many starlings about, and for some reason the big dumb kererū haven’t found the tree yet.

This morning was lovely and sunny, so I stationed myself quietly on the deck with the camera and waited.

Shortly there came a constant squeak, which turned out to be a very hungry baby thrush, looking very fluffy and with only half grown tail feathers:

(That’s just a rather inexpert montage of three photos, not a picture of three thrushes.)

Sure enough, up in the tree there was Mrs Thrush (though it is dodgy of me to name it so – both the male and female thrushes look the same so it could equally as well be “Mr Thrush”):

“She” flew down to the lawn, and presented the cherry to the chick:

(That’s a female blackbird flying out of shot there. At any one time this morning there were usually three or four thrushes and blackbirds working the lawn for worms and other insects.)

Before hopping off again to find some more:

Lovely, just lovely. I could have watched for a lot longer… but I needed to cook lunch for my own.

Later, I swapped stories with my Mum down south; much the same story I’ve related here, plus our kārearea (Falcon) sightings over the house from a couple weeks ago. She trumped all that by telling me about the pair of Tomtits she’s seen in her garden, which is some thirty kilometres from the nearest decent sized patch of bush.

This is something of a mystery, which I hope to investigate a bit further when I’m down there at Christmas time. Could they be nesting nearby?

As we get further into spring, not only do we get outdoors more, and at the same time the outdoor fauna becomes more active.

For example, the House Hoppers are becoming more active on the outside of the house, and I caught both a male and this very beautiful female, surely as pulchritudinous as some cartoon representation of a homely, anthropomorphic spider:

The male was a cheeky wee chappie, like all his jumping spider kin – they remain my favourite kind of spider. I’m assuming he was a “he”, and of the same species, but I’m just not sure. His legs were much stripier, but I’m not enough of an arachnologist to have any idea what to look for.

Not so pretty was the large female tunnelweb spider Rebecca found under a sack of bark chips that had been undisturbed since last summer.

These are very common around our house; the most pleasing thing about them is that they are not wanderers and are seldom seen inside. However they are very large, from head to end about three centimeters not including the legs, and I never like being surprised by them when I’m in the garden. It is said they have a reasonable bite on them too, though I am not very willing to test it.

In my last posting, on the mantis hatchlings, I mentioned the large black-armed jumping spider we had inside. I took it outside in case we get any more hatchlings overnight tonight.

These, particularly the males, are common inside during the warmer months (and their cousins, a smaller brown stripy species, seem to be year-round indoor visitors). With their binocular vision they do like to turn to face objects of interest, which allows us to anthropomorphise their actions to a shameful degree. But whatever – these are cool spiders.

No doubt I’ll be taking more photos over summer, particularly on sunny days when I have a decent amount of light. You have been warned.

Mantis babies, we’re talking about.

Though we never did get around to removing the mantis ootheca (egg case) from the car – it’s still there now – Rebecca did find another one on a piece of rosemary she’d pruned back in Autumn; and since then it’s been sitting on the windowsill.

Finally, this week there was some action.

On Thursday when the blind was rolled up for the morning the sill was aswarm with about a dozen little mantises. Two got squashed flat in the roller blind, where they remain (I must get them out of there), but Rebecca and the girls released the rest outside.

They noticed a colour change occurring: when newly hatched, the mantises are a sort of translucent green; but over a couple hours they darken up and gain their juvenile brown stripe down their back.

On Friday: another six new mantises, and the girls took three each to school to show their friends and release there.

On Saturday: another six or so. One problem we didn’t think about with having the windowsill as a hatching space is spray residue from years of using flyspray there, not that we use much of the stuff. Worse was when they dropped to the floor by the french doors, a well used ant pathway and consequently fairly heavily sprayed by us over time. Any small mantis wandering there we would see die in about half an hour. Not so good.

Also problematical indoors: our other wandering fauna. At the moment there is a large black armed jumping spider roaming the area, who would like nothing better than mantis for breakfast. Not to mention the inevitable Pholcus that seem to be impossible to get rid of.

So I gathered our babies up fairly quickly and took them outside.

On Sunday: no new mantises. But today, there were another fourteen. These too, are now outside. Not that outside is any safer for them, but at least there’s no flyspray there.

The ootheca looks empty now. But I’m still wondering how so many managed to be packed in there!

Note: yes, I know that the polls have closed for this year… but I found this draft posting which I was going to enliven after the article I wrote for the Forest & Bird website went live. But for various reasons that didn’t happen for a of couple weeks after I wrote this, and then I forgot about it. For my own records, there’s also the Facebook page, and a posting on the Wellingtonista too… but as we know, in the end, the Kiwi won, though the Kārearea did get into the top 10 for the first time ever…

It’s time once again to vote for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year over on the NZ Forest & Bird website. Voting starts tomorrow and goes through until October. (I’ll get the link sorted out when the voting page comes live.)

This year I’m taking a more active role in all of this: I am officially the campaign manager for the New Zealand Falcon, the Kārearea.

As part of all this I’ve convinced one falcon to join Twitter. While he may have entirely the wrong idea about Twitter (to him I think it sounds like the perfect place to find food) he’s happy to talk, for now. Follow @kakarapiti.

I’ve also had to write a campaign opening “speech” for the Forest & Bird website…

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Kārearea

No animal should to be anthropomorphised – but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Kārearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.

It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Kārearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children. Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles’ Harrier?

Luckily the Kārearea is not as large and physically threatening as these birds, though it still has its moments. In defense of their nests the falcons are utterly fearless, and will remove hat, hair, and chunks of scalp tissue from any human daring to get too close. (There’s many a back-country musterer become unhorsed from accidentally riding across a nesting territory, though you’ll seldom hear tell of it. Their dogs get a fair share too: I’ve heard of one dog being unable to shake the falcon gripping its back until it jumped off a bluff into the nearest creek.)

Unlike most of our native birds, they actually seem contemptuous of humans. Once I tried walking up to one sitting on a fence post. It let me get to within about five metres of it before it gave a couple of wingbeats, enough to lift it over to the next fencepost; and all the while its eyes were on mine. I advanced on it, and again it beat to the next post. After a couple of repeats of this though, it took off, slowly flying away as if it felt I was of little interest and even less threat.

In hunting too, they are fearless predators, taking on much bigger birds on the wing. I’ve been told of watching a duck, trying to fly up out of a creek; it was high above the water when the falcon slammed into it from above. With talons jammed into its back and the weight of the falcon bearing down on it, all the duck could do was allow itself to be ridden down to the ground, and certain death.

Once, I walked across a ridgeline and paused for a rest, looking into some dead trees in the gully below, full of noisy roosting blackbirds. Over my right shoulder a dark silent shape sped past and down, at the last minute voicing its hunting cry “ki-ki-ki-ki-ki”. An upwards startle of birds met the falcon at equal height and a catch was made, as easy as that.

So by now you must be thinking: why should I vote for this steely-eyed assassin? Why should the Kārearea be 2009 Bird of the Year?

It’s simple. We need the wild.

New Zealand is not a garden: it needs the feral and free along with the pretty and cute. It needs a hint of danger, sharp of eye and red of claw, to leaven the sweetness of voice and plumage of the other candidates.

Yet there’s fewer and fewer falcons about, with the usual catalogue of introduced predators, together with newer threats like power lines, reducing their population. Falcons need our help.

And, help given, think of the benefits of a larger, stable population! Even us city dwellers might start to see more of them as permanent residents, more than just the occasional visitors Blenheim, Palmerston North and Christchurch have enjoyed recently. And while possibly not everybody would be happy to see them, to many people they’d be a fantastic addition to the avian fauna of our cities.

A resident falcon could:

• sort out, permanently, that rooster next door that wakes you up in the morning;
• dispose of those hooligan sparrows destroying your cherry flowers;
• scare off that juvenile tuī that mimics a car alarm;
• render to pile of windblown feathers the starlings nesting in your roof; and
• clean its beak on that blackbird that crapped elderberries on your clean washing.

Bring it on, I say. Vote Karearea!

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So. I think you should vote too. Hopefully for the kārearea; but then again it’s all about having a little fun and raising awareness, so vote for whatever you like. Just vote though, OK?