First off, by the time this posts it will either be or close enough to the witching hour to wish everyone a Happy Halloween! This is the day I think about 364 days a year and then bask in all the orange and black the haunter’s day can hold. The day may keep the witches at bay, but it’s the night when the frights come out to play. While I finish carving the pumpkin for our annual burning, Brad is going to squeeze in one more bonus offering for our “Lifer” themed month. Enjoy everyone and I’ll see you again next month…assuming I survive whatever the local demons have in store for us.
Take it away Brad…
Apologies to Lawrence Welk right off the bat.
While on a bathroom break on our trek across New Zealand, we stopped at Huka Falls, the most visited natural attraction in New Zealand, at least according to their website. We had just beaten the “enemy” (other tour buses) to the rest area so we had solo access to the restrooms and scenic overlooks. As we were staring at the torrent of water rocketing through a narrow channel, I asked our guide, Graeme, if anyone has ever tried to run a kayak through there. He told us that a few try it every year, and most of them survive. Roughly 220,000 liters (58,000 gallons) of water per second falls 11 meters (33 feet) over the falls highly aerating the water. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic sized pool in about 10 seconds. The water seemed well past Class 5 for rapids and boiling, in my humble non-kayaking opinion. The rapid water flow is caused when the 100-meter-wide river is forced through a 15-meter-wide channel in the rock on its way south to Lake Taupo. There is so much air in the water under the falls that nothing really floats until a bit further downstream.
The rushing water was the second loudest thing we heard at the falls overlook. The first was the bird in the tree behind us. At first, it sounded like two birds singing two completely different songs.
Now this is taking ‘Down Under” quite literally – hit the jump to learn more about this Kiwi.
Our guide Graeme said that if we ever hear what sounds like multiple birds singing different songs at the same time, it’s probably a Tūī, pronounced “TWO-ee”. And there’s probably only one of them. We did see pairs every now and again, but usually we only saw one bird at a time. This bird has two voice boxes and can make two different noises at once.
A Tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) is native to New Zealand and is definitely a +1 (or is it a +two-ee) for us. Keen observers, er, listeners, probably know the sound when a catbird in North America can’t quite get a song correct; it resets and tries again. That’s what a Tūī sounds like all the time. Once we knew what to listen for, we heard them all over New Zealand.
Tūī coloring reminds me very much of the European Starling, except for the big glob of pollen on its forehead. Oh, and the white tufts under its chin. The tufts look like little feathered pom pons. Adults have stern looking brown eyes. Being stared at by a Tūī feels like being in the laser focus of a grackle.
Tūī, sometimes called the Parson Bird, or kōkō by the Māori (indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand), are described as a boisterous, medium-sized birds. I’d call them American Robin-sized for the North America birding community. Up close I could see the wide variety of colors and textures on the bird. From a distance, they look like a starling or a blackbird in color. They are members of the honey-eater family and will vigorously defend a food source. Tūī mostly nectar or fruit but won’t turn down insects during breeding season.
Their populations are not threatened. They are common and widespread around New Zealand.
Tūī inhabit both major islands of New Zealand, plus Stewart Island and a few others just offshore. As tourists, we quickly learned to avoid discussing a point of contention that’s been under the surface in New Zealand for a long time.
New Zealand is made up of two main islands officially called North and South Island. The two main islands are roughly the same number of square kilometers (or miles) as the state of Colorado. But since New Zealand is stretched out thin, it would reach from Florida to Pennsylvania. While the North Island has over 3/4 of the total population of New Zealand (about 4 million live on North Island and 1.2 million live on South Island), the North Island represents under 40% of the total landmass in New Zealand. The South Island likes to refer to itself as the “mainland” because it is the larger of the two main islands; endlessly ticking off the North Islanders. The Tūī really don’t seem to care what the islands are called.
A Tūī female will incubate 2-4 eggs for 14 days. Nestlings fledge at about 21 days of age and become completely independent a week later. With proper shelter and food, a Tūī can live 12 years or longer in the wild. They do not migrate, and seldom live further than 100km (62 miles) from where they were hatched.
A couple of days later, we were on a tour of the Wellington area, on the southern end of North Island, adjacent to the Cook Strait. Near the top of a mountain, our bus driver Tim, did a skillful job of backing the bus uphill into the visitor area. He could have pulled straight in, but there would have been no room to turn around once there. We climbed a further 20 meters (60 feet) to an observation platform where we had a great view of the harbor area airport below. Cook Strait was over the hill behind us, some of the roughest water in the world except for the Drake Passage.
Two days before our arrival, Wellington endured repeated gusts of wind around 140KPH (about 88mph) with waves over 3.5 meters (20 feet) tall in Cook Strait for a couple of days. Ferry service across the strait shut down for those couple of days. We arrived in Wellington two days after the wind storms when there was a mere breeze, a 30KPH wind (or 18-20MPH), the average every day all the time. This is why Wellington is known as the windiest capital in the world. It is also the southernmost capital of any country in the world.
Again, thanks to Graeme’s expert timing, we beat the “enemy” (other tour buses) to the parking area and had the park nearly to ourselves for nearly 15 minutes. Actually, many of the “enemy” were friends of Graeme’s and together they had a friendly competition to get their groups into places first. By the end of our 28-day adventure, we were all on the lookout for the “enemy” everywhere we went. Especially when we were pulling in for a break at one of the roadside restrooms.
At the edge of the viewing platform of the Mount Victoria Lookout, I heard two songs competing with each other. Not competing really, they were two different songs. Well, one was a song, and the other was almost like a buzzer, or a crackling, on a 1970’s alarm clock. It was a Tūī again, two of them this time, but only one was singing. How do I know both weren’t singing?
Only one had its bill open happily expounding. If you would like to hear a brief audio clip of a Tūī “singing”, go here. The city in the background next to the harbor is Wellington. There was quite a “breeze” at the lookout that morning. Remember, in Wellington, a “breeze” is roughly 32KPH (or 20MPH), enough to have a flag snapping at attention atop a flagpole. Jan and I enjoyed Wellington and will make sure it’s a stop on future visits to New Zealand. (This isn’t a paid advertisement, but if anyone from the Wellington Board of Tourism wants to put an ad here, please contact our Legal Department.)
A couple of kilometers distant I could see planes taking off from the airport about 200 meters (600 feet) of elevation below us. I have to say it’s a bit unusual to look down on planes in flight. Not knowing how rough crossing Cook Strait was going to be the next day, my backup plan would have been to catch a short flight and have them pick me up on the other side. As it turned out, waves were a mere 1-2 meters (3-6 feet) during our crossing, nearly millpond conditions in comparison to a few days prior. Yes, I had taken a double dose of Dramamine in preparation for the crossing. The ferry was moving around a bit once we cleared the harbor for what I consider to be a bumpy crossing. No one else in the group seemed to mind, or even notice the ferry moving about under them. When I say “ferry”, this one was nearly 200 meters (600 feet) long and held over 600 passengers (same metric or imperial) in various lounges throughout the 8 decks. The ferry also carried about a dozen tour buses and another dozen lorries (semi-trucks) with trailers and a couple dozen cars. The ferry was capable of transferring rail cars, but none were on our crossing.
In spite of the tourists crowding around, the Tūī seems unaffected by the paparazzi. I hear Graeme trying to herd us all back to the bus. With Tim’s masterful job of parking, our bus was headed in the correct direction to continue the adventure around Wellington.
Thank you for reading. If you want to see more Tūī photos, please visit here.
Credits
Thanks again to Jan for proofreading and editing. Thanks to Jan for many of the photos in this story.
