Offshore Islands - Ecological Restoration in New Zealand (1)

Despite the impression conveyed to the outside world, New Zealand's ample open lands did not survive colonization and successive waves of pioneer settlement in pristine condition. Even before the arrival of European explorers, fires spread by Polynesian settlers had dramatically reduced New Zealand's original forest cover. Conversion of land to agricultural uses and extinction of native species accelerated throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries, when sheep farming transformed vast tracts of wild bush into endless blankets of green pasture. Introduced mammals and plants have devastated remaining native ecosystems. In fact, the scale of destruction and loss is truly overwhelming when you consider how quickly it has taken place. New Zealand was among the very last places on Earth to be settled by human beings. Over the course of just a few hundred years, it has gone from being a unique, isolated remnant of Gondwanaland, to a tamed and familiarized landscape.

Many of NZ's native species have been severely outcompeted or predated by introduced birds, such as magpies, and animals such as stoats, rabbits, mice, rats, cats, sheep, goats, dogs, deer, pigs, wasps and possums. The problem is severe enough to have caused the extinction of more than one third of native bird species, and to have eliminated a large number of surviving species from their original habitats on the mainland.

Faced with the enormous responsibility of preserving their rapidly disappearing native animals and plants, conservationists here have developed several intensive and highly unique approaches. These include offshore island reserves, species transfers, pest removal regimes, and the creation of so-called "mainland islands", which I will describe in good time.

Offshore island reserves have been established on dozens of islands all around New Zealand, many quite close to the mainland, but distant enough to prevent pest species from easily colonizing them. Not all islands managed to avoid the problems of the mainland. Restoration efforts have incorporated a heavy investment in livestock removal, cat, possum and stoat trapping, and poisoning to eliminate rodents. However, once eliminated, island reserves have tended to remain free of pests.

At first, these islands were the spontaneous refuge of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects and plants pushed off the mainland by habitat destruction and predators. In recent decades, conservationists have taken the more drastic step of translocating entire populations of species on the verge of extinction (e.g. kakapo, saddlebacks, black robin, etc.) to predator-free offshore island refuges where they have never occurred naturally. Although risky, these transfers were essentially last-ditch efforts to preserve native species in the wild, and they have paid off by successfully establishing breeding populations of animals that would otherwise have been eliminated.

Kapiti Island, located just an hour up the coast from central Wellington (pictured throughout), is among the oldest of NZ's offshore island nature reserves. Despite its proximity to the city, relatively few Wellingtonians take advantage of the opportunity to visit. Entrance is strictly controlled by a daily quota permit system and overnight camping is not allowed. Jay and I were lucky enough to accompany the Victoria University Tramping Club for a day hike there in May.

Kapiti is famous for its thriving communities of rare birds. We had the opportunity to see and record the sounds of many of them on our four-hour wander over the island. Below and at left is the takahe, a flightless member of the rail family. These birds were thought to be extinct until the 1940s, when an isolated group were discovered in the high alpine tussocks of Fiordland. They are grass-eaters, and have been primarily threatened by the spread of deer throughout their mountain habitat. (Deer are considered a pest in NZ, and hunting season on them is open year-round.) Their numbers have been added to with the aid of a captive breeding program. This particular takahe is the matriarch of the group on Kapiti Island, literally mother or grandmother to every bird present (with the exception of one new arrival). We interrupted her enjoying her afternoon tea, one carefully-chosen blade of grass at a time.


Another flightless bird in abundance on Kapiti is the weka. Weka are very well camouflaged, and their presence is mainly betrayed by copious scratching and shuffling sounds in the dead leaves of the undergrowth. In other parts of the world, such sounds would lead you to expect a squirrel or a rabbit, but in New Zealand they are invariably caused by birds. Weka are gutsy and fast-moving. They are especially skilled at targeting unattended lunches, and are said to be able thieves of shiny objects that catch their eye.


The New Zealand robin is much smaller than its North American counterparts. A tiny, gray bird with a puffed, rounded body, stubby tail and thin stilts for legs, it offers an incredibly pleasing profile. Here you can see one with a leaf beside it for comparison of scale. Robins tend to hop along unobtrusively behind trampers, often approaching very close, looking for insects stirred up by our footsteps.

The dominant sound chorusing throughout the canopy in all corners of Kapiti Island is the melodious call of the bellbird (at left). We sometimes hear these birds singing outside our windows at home, but their numbers are sparse (due to the city's high density of cats) and their presence is irregular. On the island, the trees fairly pulsed with their song. It was a small taste of what early visitors to the vast forests of this land must once have experienced. Amidst the bellbirds, we heard the calls of tieke, or saddleback, and hihi, or stitchbird, and the ever astonishing tui.

After hiking to the top of Kapiti's stark western cliffs and taking in the view over the Tasman Sea, we descended through the dense forest and back to the marshy flats near the island's seashore. In the bushes near our boat's landing site, we had a close encounter with a kereru, or NZ native wood pigeon (below). These birds may look somewhat similar to typical pigeons, but they are at least twice their size, much more lovely with their iridescent green and purple plumage, and very different in their comportment. Kereru are very silent and ponderous birds. They rarely coo, but they make an alarming racket whenever they fly, their wing feathers whistling and whirring with the strain of keeping their plump bodies aloft. The sight of such a large bird perching incongruously on a slender branch above your head never fails to give you a start. Unfortunately, although not endangered, these birds are becoming less and less common.


As we returned to the pebbled beach to watch the shadows lengthen and await our boat ride back to the coast, we passed a pair of pukeko watching from among the tussocks. These lovely birds are related to the brightly colored takahe, but they are swamp dwellers, and possess a wader's long legs. They can fly, but they do so in a very ungainly way, almost as if they were halfway to giving it up entirely.

Although our time on Kapiti was brief, the abundance of wildlife and rich biodiversity on this offshore island reserve made its conservation value immediately clear. These islands provide a measure of safety against the excesses of mainland ecological degradation and provide a supply of animals and plants for ongoing restoration efforts. More on those efforts to follow in my next dispatch...

Kiwi Radio - Here's your chance to check out a New Zealand-made radio documentary, co-produced by yours truly. It's about releasing captive-bred kiwi birds into the wild in an area where they have been extinct for several hundred years.

It aired today on Radio New Zealand's National Radio. It should be up on the Spectrum archive page soon. Look for the June 18th programme to appear there at the top of the list.

You won't hear me presenting the programme, so you may be wondering what I did to earn that co-producer credit? I got invited along for the field recording, on the hike into the Rimutaka Range, shadowing Jack Perkins who is one of Radio New Zealand's most veteran producers. He's been making documentaries here for over 30 years. I gave feedback throughout the editing process and contributed some of the tape I recorded in the field to help pull together the final piece. It was a great experience. Listen carefully for 3 cameo appearances from me throughout the piece (who do you suppose that girl from Minnesota is?)

Happy listening!

Antipodal Moon

Yesterday evening, Jay & I were walking along a high ridgeline in the parkland behind our house as the sun was setting. As we came around a bend, my eyes focused on the quarter moon's brilliant white semi-circle directly ahead of me, and I stopped dead in my tracks. My brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing. The moon was facing the wrong way!

Now some of you may not understand what I mean by this. You may also wonder how it is that I've lived in NZ for over two months without ever noticing the moon. Let me explain: when I was little, I learned a handy rule for remembering the moon's phases when it is waxing and waning. "If you draw a vertical line closing the moon's crescent, it will form either a 'p' for premier - first - or a 'd' for dernier - last." As a budding francophile, I immediately learned this by heart, and I have never been at a loss to know whether I am seeing the first quarter or the last quarter of the moon.

Since arriving in NZ, I have seen moonrise in the dusky rose of sunset, with the full moon blossoming fat on the far ridges of the Rimutakas. I have noticed the increased brilliance of the city's already bright stars on the nights of the new moon. I have glimpsed the crescent moon here and there in the sky without pausing to consider its celestial context. It was only last night that I finally, viscerally, realized that I am seeing the moon from a new perspective.

[The graphic you see moving above is how I have been used to seeing the moon. In the southern hemisphere, imagine playing the film backwards. See chart at right.]

A similar experience occurred soon after I arrived here. One of the things I looked forward to with the greatest anticipation was the prospect of seeing the stars of the southern hemisphere. The New Zealand of my imagination nestled beneath strange stars, entirely unknown to me. On a first clear night, I was shocked to see familiar Orion above me, doing a handstand, upside down! For a few moments I felt entirely disoriented, not because of Orion's novel position, but because he was visible at all! I had looked at the same stars above my home in Minneapolis just a week before. Traveling all this way had failed to take me out of their sight.

This makes sense once you think about it - we see more than just the sky directly above us at 45 degrees latitude.

If you live at 40 degrees north latitude, and if you have an unobstructed view of the southern horizon, it's theoretically possible to see a star that would be overhead for someone at 50 degrees south latitude (40 + 50 = 90). From our view, such a star would be kissing the horizon. ...The point is, just because we're in the Northern Hemisphere, it doesn't mean we can't see stars in the Southern Hemisphere. We just can't see the ones that are more than about 80 degrees or so of our latitude. [source]

Our angle of view isn't so different from what we left behind, so we continue to share many of the same stars with those of you back home. However, the Big Dipper is gone, as is Cassiopeia. Perhaps you are curious to learn: What does our sky have that yours doesn't? For one thing,

All-in-all, the northern sky is rather devoid of light. By contrast, in the Southern Hemisphere, there are 11 constellations which are circumpolar and 6 first order magnitude stars! [source]

We have noticed that the stars are incredibly bright here, with the Milky Way visible even inside the central city. Whether this is due to brighter stars or cleaner air is hard to say. If you're interested, here's a link to get you started on learning the stars down under. And maybe you'll even be inspired to pack your bags to come see the antipodal sky.

Got my first NZ paycheck last week. That's right -- I am officially employed. I sent in squillions of CVs and cover letters in response to classified ads, hoping against hope that that old trick might work for me here. Never once in my entire, varied employment history have I gotten a job through such traditional channels. After about 6 weeks had passed without even reaching the interview stage with any of the CV recipients, it was time for a different tactic. I decided to go with my usual standby -- showing up unannounced at the front door and talking my way in. When I showed up, New Zealand Translation Centre happened to have a vacancy just opening for a Chinese Editor. And also a high demand for French and Spanish skills as well. And there I was. They didn't even have to post an ad in the paper.

So what is a Chinese Editor, you may be wondering? NZTC actually has quite laudable standards of accuracy and quality that they strive to uphold by using certain protocol, viz: 1) translators can only translate into their native language; 2) every translation must pass through an editor who knows both languages, and who is a native speaker of the original document's language; 3) the editor checks not only for errors and omissions, but also to make sure that the translator understood any ambiguities in the original correctly, and has conveyed the correct sense in the translation; 4) following comments from the editor, the translator makes final corrections and proof-reads one last time. We have an in-house Chinese translator, Yu Zhimin, who I partner with. He makes corrections on the odd Chinese-to-English translation I provide. Mostly, I edit his English-to-Chinese translations. In the last two weeks since I've started, we've worked on medical advisories, anti-gambling pamphlets, personal letters, on-line surveys, and a massive technical document for the mining industry. We never know what's coming next.

Kiwi Dispatch cannot resist commenting on things unique to New Zealand, so here are a couple related to the workplace.

• Morning and afternoon tea -- a communal and social event. An official announcement comes over the loudspeaker at 10 am and 3 pm. We all head down to the common area for Nescafe, strong black tea or Milo. Sometimes there are biscuits.
• Good Friday and Easter Monday -- both official holidays. Shops were closed, alcohol sales banned, everything shut down. Almost no one went to church.

Home... at last.
Shortly after Jay and I moved our four suitcases up the stairs and settled in at the Hannah Warehouse, we were surprised to find a flyer sitting down in the lobby with a picture of our flat -- for sale. We called the landlords (who had been strangely eager to avoid signing a long-term lease) who reassured us that, "Yes, we have have put your flat up for sale, but we're only just floating it on the market. We don't expect anyone to buy it at this price!" Three weeks and a dozen real estate agent-led showings later, of course someone did. Wellington's burgeoning housing market had claimed another victim, and we received our official 6 weeks notice to vacate the premises!

Wednesday and Saturday mornings, the local paper prints its major classified sections, both for housing and for jobs. The first several weeks of my life in New Zealand revolved around these two poles, with a flurry of flat inquiries and CV writing filling the mornings of these days. Since we have decided not to buy a car here, we were on foot for all of our increasingly far-flung visits to potential flats, and an entire weekend could easily be eaten up trekking from one hillside neighborhood to another to another. (From Kelburn, to Roseneath, to Thorndon, to Brooklyn, to Mt. Victoria, to Haitaitai, to Te Aro....) Crowds of flathunters met us at most sites. One open house, scheduled for a mere 15 minutes at a tiny 1 bedroom cottage, yielded more than 20 people trying to cram inside.

Some of the things we learned during our search, mostly unique to NZ:

• Rent is paid weekly here. When you move in, you pay a "bond" of 1,2,3, sometimes 4 weeks rent (there doesn't seem to be any agreed upon standard) to a government body that holds the deposit. When you move out, you get it back after lengthy delays. In practice many landlords keep the bond themselves, or pass it directly to the outgoing tenant to speed things up.


• Fridges, washing machines and dishwashers are referred to as "whiteware" and in many cases are not included in rental properties. People "hire" their whiteware from special companies and pay a weekly bill for them.


• Some flats, like the Hannah Warehouse one, are listed as "fully furnished". These are at the opposite extreme from the bare, empty flats we found on the market. They are designed to be immediately livable, and provide everything including towels, sheets, can openers, tea pots, alarm clocks, you name it.


• Many of the best flats never get advertised...

Eventually we started to get savvy -- any flat wanting less than a certain amount of rent was guaranteed to be a) falling apart, b) mildewed to a toxic degree, or c) a basement apartment with no sunlight in an impossibly distant suburb. Flats like the one we were leaving were truly out of our price range for the long term, so we decided that our only real shot of a decent living environment was going to involve locating a room within an established house. Although we are used to living alone, it was going to be worth trading privacy for the chance to spread rent among several flatmates and to avoid the need to purchase furnishings for completely bare living rooms and kitchens.

New Zealand, sadly, does not have a well-established craigslist. It does have two sites that serve a similar function, Flatfinder and Trademe. We launched a multi-pronged offensive, involving daily checks of both sites, broadcast inquiries to flats that looked promising, and pinning down as many "interviews" as possible. The competition was intense, and households looking for a new addition could afford to be picky. Sometimes we could tell as soon as the door opened that it wasn't going to work out. Sometimes we sat down for hours-long conversations over cups of tea, only to be called back and told that someone else was more suitable. We started to become extremely discouraged, especially when people we genuinely liked and thought we'd made a good impression on told us they'd rather live with someone else!

After a particulary dismal Saturday, wasted entirely on unsuccessful interviews, we were at our low point. We had ticked through our entire list of prospects, the fruit of a hard week's labor, and we were down to our last shot. For over a week, we had been corresponding with Drake and Casey by email in response to a text-only lising for their flat on the web. By this stage in the game, we were acutely conscious that a good relationship with the people living in the flat was the only thing that was going to secure us a home. So, we'd agreed to put off this particular "showing" several times until it was convenient for Drake and Casey. We knew next to nothing about the house. It was located in our favorite neighborhood, Aro Valley. The rent was very reasonable, and their posting asked for a flatmate "who knows how to have fun, but is mature enough to clean up after themselves when it's over". When we finally learned the address, we decided to head over a coffee in the neighborhood and a sneak peek, even thought the "interview" wasn't until the following afternoon.

Our hearts sank as we counted the house numbers up to 87a Aro Street. This is what we found: Number 87 Aro Street was a creaky-looking fish and chips shop, and we could see the stairs leading up to apartment above it. Of all the places for a flat! We sat in the cafe across the street, crest-fallen. Should we cancel? They seemed so nice. Maybe it was a cozy paradise inside, despite appearances.

The following day, we received good news: one of the flats we'd seen was willing to take us. They were very far outside the city center, and it was going to take some getting used to. They wanted a commitment from us, and Jay was all for it, but I couldn't shake my intuition that it was the wrong choice. Against all logic, I was holding out for Drake and Casey. We decided to keep our appointment with them. We had climbed the stairs outside the fish and chips shop and were about to knock, when I had a sudden suspicion. Remembering Wellington's odd habits of numbering houses, I told Jay to wait while I ran down the driveway.

And our luck changed: A house with a garden, surrounded by roses, lavender and native plants. Drake and Casey turned out to be Kiwis around our age, with a lot of common interests. They were looking for flatmates to help them make a home out of a house. We sat by the gas fire drinking coffee and talking animatedly for hours. They showed us the room upstairs with windows on three sides and views of the hills, but we barely looked at it, we were so certain it was the right place for us. And so here we are now, finally moved in, settling in at last.

Fall is definitely coming here. There are still warm sunny days, but some of the leaves are already changing and I can't ever leave the house without a jacket for when the wind picks up. Recently, the gray, misty weather has set in as promised, and we were treated to the dramatic sight of the clouds draping down over the bordering hills and slowly closing in to cover the city in spitting, delicate rain. Fortunately, the wind has been calm enough that my umbrella has only been blown inside-out twice so far. I can see why people don't use them much here.

Although rain seems to threaten frequently, we haven't yet developed the instincts to tell us if those dark, low-hanging clouds are actually going to pour on us (as we've experienced on a couple occasions) or just hang up there happily threatening all day without ever releasing a drop. The weather reports are consistently vague each day, with the whole operatic production in several movements we witness crossing the sky every day being summed up by one of the following adjectives: "occasional showers", "cloudy", "freshening in the afternoon" or simply "fine". The highs and lows they announce also rarely have bearing in reality. Watching our fellow citizens for clues doesn't help much. People here never seem to react to the changing conditions or even look up worriedly at the sky, despite its sometimes ominous appearance. We've witnessed many instances when half the passersby are wearing windbreakers and wool wraps, and the other half are in flip-flops and tank tops, all seeming perfectly comfortable!

Wellington is extremely hilly and the street maps never show the topography, so what looks like it will be right down the street can often be several hundred feet straight above you, or across a valley and back up again, for example. It makes getting around on foot a bit of an adventure. The really unique thing is all the pedestrian shortcuts that are built into the hills. They usually aren't on the maps either, but they are so common, that you can pretty much be sure if you are heading towards what looks like a dead end for cars, you will find a set of steps cutting between the houses in a narrow alleyway at the end of it, leading you up to the next terrace. Some of the shortcuts turn out to be fantastic little nature walks, with overhanging, mossy plants and steep switchbacks. One minute you're in the city and the next you're deep inside the forest. And then you pop out the other side on a little suburban street again. Many lucky homeowners have houses that can only be reached by these little hidden walkways -- you can't drive up to them at all. The wealthier folks have installed little automated trolley tracks that carry a few bags of groceries up the incline to their front doors for them.

Recently, we went for a long walk up into the "Town Belt" which is the extensive greenspace buffer surrounding the central city built-in by the original settlers and city planners. We started out at "Central Park" which, unlike its namesake is located in Brooklyn (yes, there is a Brooklyn, NZ) and it is very small. Wellington is known for its characteristic pine-covered hills surrounding the central city and harbor. It surprised me to learn that although these beautiful trees are mostly over a hundred years old, they are far from being native forest. The majority of trees are species imported from Monterey, California (chosen for their ability to adapt to the harsh seaside conditions) and planted during a massive beautification campaign at the end of the 19th century. Prior to that time, the Town Belt was mainly used for grazing sheep and cattle, and had degenerated into a band of brown, muddy, bare hills that largely detracted from the reputation of the city. In the valleys between the pines are dense, moist thickets filled with one of New Zealand's most unique plants: tree ferns. We mistook these fantastic plants for palm trees for weeks after arriving, and thought it strange that such a tropical plant could survive so far south.

Let me start out by saying...It is hard to imagine how else it could be possible to physically distance ourselves so far from our previous home and find ourselves in such a generally familiar environment. What I mean is, all of our concepts of how thngs ought to work and fit together -- how to navigate the city, what kind of food we can expect to find, what types of stores sell what types of things, what we can do to entertain ourselves -- are as similar to what we are used to as if we had just moved across the country, not over the Pacific Ocean to a new hemisphere. Many things are familiar to us from our time in Europe (such as the toilets that have both a flush and a half-flush option to conserve water; the little blue arrrows that point out curbs to drivers and the red-encircled kilometer speed limits; the large, safe public spaces and generally bustling foot traffic in the city). But many more things that I expected are familiar from the U.S., perhaps most noticeably people's attitudes (informal, frequently joking, irreverent, outgoing) and the widespread consumerism that enfolds us. I've found that if the actual brand or product I am used to buying isn't in the store (and quite a few American items are) then a Kiwi-made brand that fulfills exactly the same niche will be right where I look for it. My basic, daily desires can continue to operate along the old patterns. Of course, I find plenty of bonuses here and there (like my new love for fresh feijoa juice, flat white coffees and kumara). People here in Wellington obviously value high-quality things, in the realms of food, clothes, cars, art, design, living space, and they seem to willing to work to earn to spend to live well.

(Top photo shows me in our new apartment)