A Kiwi Thanksgiving

Happy first day of Summer!
Yup, that's right. New Zealand starts their seasons on the first of the month. We all slept outside last night under the stars. It was beautiful! There were tons of shooting stars, and we can see the Large Magellic Cloud and the Small Magellic Cloud and a bunch of constellations. It's kind of funny, but the skies are actually much more similar here than I expected... There are all the big constellations we see up north, like Orion, Sirius, Andromeda... They're all just upside down. Which is kind of funny, and a little bit disorienting. Of course, there are a bunch of stars that we never see in the northern hemisphere, too.
It was really nice to wake up with the sun (even though it was ridiculously early... ) and listen to the dawn chorus and go for a run. Now I've been up for almost 3 hours and it's only 8! So much time left in the day! Which is good, because I have a lot to get done. Directed research projects are going full steam ahead, and man do I have a lot of charts and graphs and tables to wrap my head around. But I think we made it over the hump, so now its just a matter of finishing everything before the deadline on Saturday. But with a start like this morning, I should be pretty well set.
    Last weekend we took a little while off from writing our reports to celebrate Thanksgiving Kiwi style. It was really fun. We were preparing for 50 people, and we made sure that absolutely no one had an excuse to go hungry, especially because not that many people actually showed up. Since we only have one kitchen, we started prepping for the Sunday feast on Friday, and kitchen activity continued basically right up to when we served Thanksgiving dinner three days later. This was partly a function of how much food we cooked, but also oven space. I was in charge of the pumpkin pies (I made four!) and helped out making pie crusts for everyone else, too. Everyone had a great time helping out... this group makes even doing the dishes a great time.

    Sunday was a really lovely day, and we turned the Wharekai into a really pretty dining room with all the food laid out and set up tables outside. I guess that California thanksgivings can be pretty warm, too, but for most people it was the first thanksgiving in short sleeves and sunshine. So we all dressed up and enjoyed the banquet.

Yummy apetizers... shrimp cocktails, cheese and crackers, baked brie and mussels. Yeah, we ate well.

Sitting down to enjoy the feast.

The dessert board. That's a summer berry cake in the foreground, the white things with kiwifruit and strawberries are Pavlova, a traditional New Zealand dessert made of merangue and custard and deliciousness, chocolate hazelnut pies, and my pumpkin pies in the background. Yes, we had enough food.

    We definitely made enough food.. we're still eating pumpkin pie for breakfast (the best way to eat it) and had plenty of other left overs, too. Which is how Thanksgiving is supposed to work. We certainly have much to be thankful for: good food, great company, and a wonderful time in New Zealand.
 smiles!


    

Bug Soup

So we've well and truely immersed ourselves in our Directed Research Projects (DRPs from here on out). I'm working on a project comparing the effects that pest control measures have on invertebrate populations, particularly beetles (Coleoptera) and Weta (Orthoptera, aka cricket type things). We collected samples from one mountain, Maungatautari, which has eraticated nearly all the invasive pests -- possums, rats, yada yada -- by putting up a big fence around the reserve and dropping poison, and from another mountian, Pirongia, which has only minimal pest control measures. Maungatautari reserve is incredible... walking though the gate of the Pest proof fence is like walking through a time machine. Pests have been excluded since 2004, so the forest has had the chance to really regenerate. It is so fully of life! Birds and bugs and plants and vines... it was very cretatious period. Oh, and also:

So yeah. There were kiwi birds. Our field leader, Jillana, used to work for the reserve as a kiwi bird monitoring person, so she took us on a night walk to look for them. They're hard to spot, but not that hard to hear... its like a mini elephant crashing through the underbrush. We didn't actually SEE a kiwi bird, but we heard a couple rustling around in the plants just a few feet from us! And we heard them calling. And since plenty of kiwis haven't actually seen or heard a kiwi bird at all, I feel pretty lucky about that (here, you have kiwi birds, kiwi fruit, and kiwi (New Zealanders)... kiwi always look at us funny when we say "eat a kiwi". anyways).
   So to get the invertebrate samples, we collected 96 pitfall traps that had been set out six weeks ago. Pitfalls are basically just cups sunk into the ground with some preservative in them and a cover to keep debris out. Ground-dwelling inverts fall in and can't get back out, and we have our samples. The pitfalls were in transects along walking paths on the mountains, so each day we'd hike up a mountain and go bushwacking to find the transects. And by bushwacking I mean crawling under vines, scrambling over treefalls, and clambering up nearly vertical slopes. It was fun.

John fighting the supplejack vines. And this was on the trail.

Cara collecting a pitfall.

The "trail" head.

 

 

 

 

Climbing back up to the trail. It doesn't look it, but that is one steep slope.

So after we collected all the bugs, we had to sort, measure and identify them. That took a while. As in three 12 hour days, sitting in a lab breathing ethynol fumes. And listening to music and learning all the weird latin names for all the bugs. It figures, however, that just as I was getting comfortable spitting out words like "leamostenus complenatus", "curculionidea", "leionidea" and the like, and figured out which bug went with which name, we were done. It only took me 1200 bugs to get the hang of it. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Now comes the even more fun part of writing the report. Which I'm going to go do now. yay!

 

 

 

 

FISH! so many fish....

View of Leigh Marine Laboratory and Goat Island Marine Reserve (and Goat Island)

So last week I got to spend pretty much all my spare time snorkeling. It was awesome. We stayed at the Leigh Marine Laboratory at Goat Island Marine Reserve, and learned about ocean ecology and did some samples of fish populations for our marine unit. But mostly we just snorkeled and gawked at the reefs. It is pretty amazing: the surface of the water does nothing to hint at what is going on below it. All you see is a grey-blue mask of undulating water until when you open your eyes underwater and see a completely different world. Snorkeling at the reserve was especially a treat, too, because the area is a designated "No-take" zone, which means, well, just that. So the marine animals that usually face a lot of pressure from fishing or what-have-you, such as snapper or crayfish, can live peacefully and grow really HUGE! We saw some 40 lb crayfish and snapper that were as long as my arm!

Little Barrier Island: This is a really hard island to access and thus is one of the oldest reserves in New Zealand. It has been "landing by permit only" for over 100 years. So there is a lot of cool stuff out there that hasn't had to deal with invasive species or people.

Harekeke Flowers

      After Leigh, we headed further north to Tutukaka to go snorkeling at the Poor Knights Islands, which is known to be one of the top diving spots in the world! And it was SO amazing. The islands are the remnants of an old volcano that has eroded away, so the cliffs just go straight down into the depths of the water. It's pretty incredible. There is just so much life, and so much color! Shock orange, neon yellow, lime green, bright purple, sky blue, deep red, shimmering iridescence... it was crazy.  I could have floated for hours just looking at one patch on the wall. There would be so many different types of plants and animals all crammed into one spot. The islands are about 15 miles offshore, so we headed out in a boat that took us to a couple of different dive spots around the islands. Poor Knights is also home to the world's largest naturally formed Sea Cave, Rikoriko Cave, and yes, we got to go snorkeling in a cave!! Which is really neat because stuff that usually only lives at depth comes up to the surface because it is darker. So we got to see some sponges and weird stuff like that.

Snorkeling through salp. So many salp... There were masses of them everywhere at Poor Knights. It was pretty neat, though, because we got to watch the fish have a huge feast!

Salp are a lot like jelly fish, but don't have stinging cells.  Sometimes they'd get stuck between my snorkel and my face as I was snorkeling through them... that felt weird.

Yup, that's me! I'm kinda lucky in that my dive partner had an underwater camera! (anything underwater I stole from her...thanks Tasha) It was really hard to tell people apart once we were all suited up (the water was definitely chilly!) so you had to learn what people's dive belts and fins looked like.

Demoiselles and kelp. These fish were everywhere at the Poor Knights, swimming around in massive schools!

Sailing away from the Poor Knights Islands

 We were given the weekend off up in Northland to go explore the upper regions of New Zealand, so we split into groups and rented vans from EcoQuest. My group's mantra was "we're flying by the seat of our pants"... and that definitely ended up happening. I can't exactly say that the weekend went off without a hitch, but on the bright side we now  all know the signs of a burnt out clutch. Yeah... literally 20 minutes after we left we noticed that the van was having some issues shifting, but we passed it off as just getting used to driving the new vehicle. So we went to a nearby town, Whangarai, for dinner. We got to know that town quite well, because as we were driving away to continue our adventures, the van started smoking. So we cut our losses and checked into a nearby holiday park (we got really lucky that they were both close and open at that time of night) and took the van to a mechanics the next day. He was really surprised we'd managed to drive it at all. So yeah. He didn't have time to fix it that day, so we spent Friday waiting for EcoQuest to send us a new van and pick up the broken one. Which meant taking shifts waiting in the mechanic's waiting room (the people there were SUPER super nice and let us use their business as a home-base for the day, even though we weren't employing their services at all. So that was kinda interesting.  

We're all unhappy as our van gets carted away on a truck because the clutch burned out. ):

Even though we lost our Friday, we still managed to have a good weekend. Once the replacement van showed up, we went to a small conservation park and went on a really nice walk out to some big Kauri trees, and found an awesome swimming hole. 

    We were a little limited in where we could go at that point, because a couple people in our group needed to be back at Poor Knights to go diving, so we dropped them off and then started heading back down south. We camped on the side of the road that night, just for kicks and because our driver got tired. Some people pitched tents, but I slept in the van... it was warm when we went to bed, but chilled of really quickly. But it was comfy once I smartened up and pulled my sleeping bag out... other people didn't do that and had a cold night.

    The next day we drove to Auckland and went to Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World, aka the most awesome aquarium ever. They had a super cool (pun intended) penguin habitat, with about 80 Gentoo and King Penguins. So cute! And even more adorably, the gentoo penguins were breeding, and had little baby penguins peeking out over their parents' toes. They also had a pretty neat shark exhibit. But the penguins were the highlight.

PENGUINS!!! Those are gentoo penguins in the front and King Penguins in the background. And... A PENGUIN CHICK!!!The Gentoos are breeding around now.

Puberty is awkward.

Janet, Denny, John, Drew and some excited little kids in the Shark tunnel at the Kelly Tarlton Aquarium in Auckland.

Crayfish in the aquarium...we saw comparably sized (or larger) ones out in the reserves.

 So yeah... it was an exciting week. I've also resolved to learn a lot more about cars. Now I have a paper to write and I've been procrastinating quite a bit, so I'm going to get on that.