A few weeks ago Sue asked me what I wanted to do for my significant birthday so far away from family and home. No need to think. Penguins Please. Wild Ones. Deal. Sue's Phil was away in Canada, so it was a girls day out.
First off the morning of the sixth, we were drinking a cup of tea standing in the kitchen and discussing the game plan. A few minutes later we were crouched out side of her house jibbering -- what was that? A 5.6 earthquake, just what a girl needs to start her birthday off with a bang. We eventually gather our wits and our stuff and left the house around nine thirty. First of all found a neat growing thing in the dirt of a cement block by Sue's driveway. Fungus Foto Op. This specimen is called a Basket fungus. It starts off as a little puffball at ground level, and undfolds itself rapidly from there. Found in forests and places where wood chips have been used, it generally disintigrates in about 24 hours. The Maori call it 'ghost droppings' as it appears so suddenly--almost overnight.
Sue and I drove for quite a while. The Little Blue Penguins, known as Fairy Penguins in Austrailia, (gotta love those Aussies) are found in Oamaru, a healthy hour away from Timaru which is a couple of hours away from Darfield. We stopped off at a grocery store and purchased a picnic lunch. Sue'd had the forsight to pack a thermos of coffee and one of tea. We also purchased a sheep skin each. Had we known they could have been bought for 39 NZ dollars, we may not have spent such a lot of money at Huron college--however I digress. We ended up eating our picnic in the sunshine at the Penguin colony in Oamaru. The feast consisted of some delicious dip made with oil and tomatoes and basil, a good sized container of mussels, some crushkits (our token nod to low calorie) and oranges and a peanut chocolate bar for dessert. We found that we had quite a bit of time before the penguin show at dusk, so we drove over to Bushy Beach about 2km away and walked there for a while. We found quite a few Seal lions on the beach. Thankfully we had read the
notice board where we had our lunch that said there were sea lions, and not to get within ten meters of them, or to get between them and the edge of the water. Apparently they know how ambulate\ rather quickly. We got to within 30 meters of this particular lion, and it was not happy with us. He (I am saying he, because it seemed that the was watching over the other six sea lions.) had been at the edge of the beach near the water when we got on to the beach, but quickly made sure that he was between us and the other sea lions before we got to them. I do not really know the differnce between a fur seal and a sea lion yet, but the folk at the Omaru Penguin Colony told us that the easiest way to tell was the Sea Lions pefer to lie on the beaches while the Fur Seals like the big stones. Although this seemed to be a stony beach, it must have felt comfy for the sea lions.
Here was an unexpected sighting. There are several pairs of Yellow eyed Peguins (called so because of their bushy eyebrows). The Blue penquins come in at but these perfer to come to land a little earlier. They are more solitary that their littler cousins, and are quite a bit more leery of humans, so every human must be off the beach before three, or they won't come ashore. We only saw two that day, but it was better than nothing. The birds sharing the beach with the penguin are oyster catchers. When we returned to the Oamaru site, there was a fur seal having a snooze on the dock.
It was quite noisy and spent a lot of time rolling about on the cement having a good old scratch. Dusk finally came, and wouldn't you know it, one is not allowed to take photos of the little blue penguin when they come in. The site is lit up with sodium lights so they are quite easy to see, but any flash will disorient them and they can fall down. That, and too much noise, will also prevent them from landing. Here is a picture of them from that place taken from another web site.
http://www.penguins.co.nz/userfiles/image/image3.jpg
The penguins apparently spend most of their time at sea by themselves. When they decide to come in aroung dusk, they swim to about 50 meters off shore and wait till there are several of them and come in together as a "raft". They hop up to the rock and spend some time cooling off and grooming their feathers, sometimes this can take up to ten minutes, then they all scoot over to the nests in the colony at the bases of some rather large cliffs. A of these nest are made up boxes, but a few are still natural. There is room for about 700 penguins. But, generally, there are a lot fewer than that. Most of the penguins we saw that night (135--not bad for winter) were banded but quite a few weren't. Penguins who are not actively in charge of young don't mind doing 'sleep overs'--even wild, unbanded ones. They are extremely sociable, unlike the yellow eyed penguins and sit up all night till just before dawn, chatting and cat napping.
Great birthday, and I had some wonderful cards from Mike and Yvan, my sisters and my friends.--thanks guys.
Wednesday this week, I got an opportunity to go to see the Dalai Lama at the Christchurch Arena. Susan and I met up at noon and got to our seats before the event started. The Maori started off with a sung greeting and a welcome. Bishop Victoria formally welcomed his holiness to Christchurch. He talked for about 30 minutes. It was frequently hard to hear him as his voice occasionally dropped, and he was not there to talk about Buddhism, but to encourage the folk of Christchurch. I would definitely go to see him again. I include this picture--from Sue's camera. The lone woman in purple sitting in centre stage is Bishop Victoria Matthews.
Somebody said I should go to Geraldine. I don't remember who said that, but there was a certain amount of emphasis on it. So, June 17, early-ish. Sue and I got into the Vitz and trundled off to Geraldine. She drove this time, as I planned on rubbernecking. We went back to the Raikara river where Mike, Sue and I have visited last spring. Although it was officially winter in this place, the weather was a lot gentler than it was when we were here in the Spring of last year (October/November 2010).
Driving down the road, Sue pointed out that the little clod of dirt near the centre line was most likely a hedgehog. Heaven. I have looked frequently while travelling in the British Isles for even a glimpse of one. There wasn't a lot of traffic, so Sue did one of her famous 'U-ies' while I was walking on the side of the road to get a close up view. Thankfully only a couple of cars went by in the five minutes it took for the tourist to get her fill and photos of the imported wild life (New Zealand has only one mammal native to the islands, that being a bat). A few days previously, I had mentioned to a New Zealander that I was hoping to finally see a hedgehog this trip--good thing I had, as the person told me not to touch one without gloves on as they had ringworm. Although the traffic was quite slow that day, it seemed a good idea to get this little fellow off the highway, so we stamped our feet at it and he rolled into a ball. The picture below is not Sue playing football with a hedgehog but trying, ever so gently, to roll our DLF (Prince Caspian in C.S. Lewis series) to the green verge.
Meanwhile, at the church in Darfield there were some snow drops blooming like mad the day we went to Geraldine. They were still there last week when we walked to market.
