Chickens

I was reminded recently of the role chickens have played in my life when a stray one lolloped across the road ahead of me at Blackmount.  I braked but there had been a time in my life when I would not have.  As students we ate potatoes, cabbages and what we could run over.  Feral ones are a bit of a rarity in Southland.  Too many predators and a coolish and wettish climate – the same factors which have counted against the establishment of other related birds, the Californian quail, partridge and pheasant – have kept the population low.

In the North Island, however, there are feral fowls at every roadside layby.  They are a pest in parks, they probably harbour chook diseases and they forage in the bush where they can damage new plantings.  They appear for food whenever a car pulls up. 

In Niue I found twenty sorts of birds, the commonest of which was the chicken.  The roosters started each morning sometime between 1.52am and 2.03am.  I should know; I timed them!  Being interested in birds I enquired of the Ministry of Agriculture if there was anyone who knew about birds.  “O yes”, said the girl, “I know the birds.”  “That’s marvellous,” I said, “Can you tell me what they are?”  “Oh yes,” she said,  “They’re called chickens.”  “I’ve seen the chickens,” I said patiently.  “What about the others?”  “O yes,” she said, “They’re the others.”

In Tonga there was a sign ‘Moa and chips’.  Moa meant chicken.  The Pacific had chickens for a thousand years – one of several food species derived from Southeast Asia.  It is natural that the name was transferred to the new edible species in Aotearoa.

In Dunedin our scouts had a troop chicken called George Trigwell Johnson.  George wore a miniature scarf and earned the Buk Reader badge.  She was handy for testing cooking on, for rescuing from various dangerous situations in emergency training and for first aid.  Ever tried to put a sling on a chicken’s wing?  Instead of the usual things you see on a knotboard, scouts had to invent their own knots.  One was Brian’s Cacklebend for securing George to a peg by both legs.  There was also Jeremy’s Milo-hitch for tying a full mug to a rope so it could be hoisted up to someone trapped in the treetops and the Warren Knot which stayed firm if two enemy captives pulled the same way but released them if they pulled in opposite directions.

George’s first and only flight was as test pilot for the trebuchet.  Cackling hysterically from delight or something, she went up in a wide arc and dropped, flapping vigorously, onto the neighbour’s roof.  From a vantage point on a park above the city we aimed the machine.  A dead possum cleared the trees and the fence.  Spinning lazily and silhouetted in the evening sky, it vanished into suburbia below.

On a seabird count along Oreti Beach, one of the hikers arrived with a bulging sack.  “They’re chickens,” he said.  “Well,” I said, delighted at his innocence,  “we don’t call them chickens.  They are shearwaters, prions, petrels, shags and gulls.” He up-ended the sack.  They were chickens.  One sort of seabird is called a chicken.  These are ‘Mother Carey’s chickens’ which is a sailors’ name for the tiny Storm petrel.  They were believed to be the restless spirits of drowned seamen.  Mother Carey was the conscience of the sea, the female equivalent of Davey Jones.  Her name probably comes from Mater cara which means caring mother.

Back to the chickens…  I’ve kept odd ones.  I’m not particularly fond of them and it’s always going to be cheaper to buy eggs than to keep chooks.  Some people are simply terrified of them.  Alectorophobia is fear of chickens.  “Having to hold a chicken is my worst fear,” a friend told me.  I didn’t believe her.  “It’s your third worst fear,” I said.  Number two is appearing naked in public.  Number one is appearing naked in public whilst holding a chicken.

Hares

I was driving up the road near Hauroko Valley school recently when a hare came loping out of the grass.  We paced each other, glancing across to see who was winning.  I was hoping he would zip in front of me so I could squash him but he turned aside eventually and in the rear-view mirror I could see him sitting up on a bank; he raised a paw and gave me a cheery wave.  A cynic might say he was brushing a grass stalk out of his face. 

 When I was a student we used to rely on what we could run over for part of our food supply.  I remember hares, rabbits, possums and a turkey.  Of these the hare is the best.  Old ones get a bit woody but a young hare roasted in the camp oven is a great meal.  The custom in wealthier families in England was to hang the hare, guts in, until the fur came loose or the ears fell off or something.  In New Zealand they were not hung but jugged.  The hare was cut into small pieces which were marinated in a jar of port wine – jugged – then stewed and served with gravy and red currant jelly.  For those who arrived too late to enjoy their piece of the hare there was an expression – kissing the hare’s foot – implying that that was the only taste you would get.

We are familiar with the hare as the gingery and long-limbed creature, loping through the tussock and pausing momentarily to check that there is enough distance between him and us.   The hare elicits from us a different and more kindly reaction than if our encounter had been with his cousin the rabbit.  He bears the virtue of being a modest rather than a profligate breeder, carries himself with a little more dignity and shows himself as a lone spirit, a creature of the remote places, and independent of the company of his fellows.  He is a virile and sometimes stroppy animal and you will recall the diffidence with which Dog, the hero of the Footrot Flats series, approached his hare duties. 

British Naturalist J.G.Millais said of hares, “They are very gentlemen, just as the rabbit is a very cad." 

The hare has a place in folklore, representing speed, fecklessness and fertility.  

As with rabbits, the chief defence is flight and they are swifter – 72km/h for a short burst, it is said – and the marvellous zig-zag course of a pursued hare has made it a favoured game animal. 

The antics of hares can be amusing, with chasing, sparring and running in circles, the Mad March Hare syndrome.  These are the responses of uninterested females to the advances of males.  The young, called leverets, are born furred and with eyes open and reach independence earlier than rabbit kits. 

Two to five are born at a time and there can be a number of litters in a year.  Individual hares have much greater natural range than rabbits, feeding broadly rather than intensively cropping a small area.  Each occupies several hundred hectares while the typical rabbit range is about a hectare.  Rabbits are often seen in groups but the hare is solitary or as Ogden Nash says, ‘The hare is rare but the rabbit is a habit’.

Hare ranges are not territories and several hares feed in intersecting ranges.  They are particularly damaging to young pines where they nip out the growing shoot, spoiling the tree for optimal timber production.  

In 1922 George Thomson said that hares are said to tend to turn white in the colder parts of their range in winter and in 1921 this was reported to be a familiar phenomenon in Canterbury.  Turning white in winter is a characteristic of the related Mountain hare Lepus timidus and it is possible that some of these had been introduced with the commoner hares.  The phenomenon seems to be quite unknown these days. 

In 1867 three hares were brought from Victoria for the Otago Acclimatisation Society and turned out at Lake Waihola.  The Southland society imported some from Victoria in 1869 and liberated them at Benmore.  They were introduced for sport in the form of coursing which involved flushing a hare and releasing two greyhounds.  The one which nabbed or turned it most often was the winner.

Sharks

A really big dogfish

 Every time I do any length of a Southland Beach there is something to remind me that there are sharks not too far away.  Each whale carcase cast ashore has shark bites – often White-pointer damage where large chunks of flesh are torn away.  They also have scars from cookie-cutter sharks which take out small nips of flesh – ouch.  There are often skulls, lengths of vertebrae and whole sharks usually dogfish.  Some of these will have been hooked or netted and cast aside, and a few of the larger examples have been filleted.  There are several species of small dogfish which live in shallow water feeding on shellfish, starfish and other small critters.  These have tiny teeth.  A few times I’ve found a bigger shark – Seven-gilled shark, Mako and Porbeagle.

The Mako had a decent set of choppers on him and the group of kids I was with were keen to extract them.  He was cast up on a remote, rocky beach and had been dead a week or two – leaking, a mass of flies, bloated and altogether unfit for human consumption.  The first kid tried to wiggle a fang out but got his hand badly slashed on the vicious rows of teeth.  Found bandages.  Second kid got slashed as well.  Found more bandages.  My turn.  The only weapon was a blunt pocketknife but I dived in and got badly slashed.  Found the last of the bandages.  After that, we gave him up as a bad job.  I’ve picked up the occasional stingray and I’ve got five spines.  Vicious things, and you will remember that Steve Irwin was done in with one.  I guess if you annoy the wildlife enough you have to expect a reaction.   I haven’t found a White-pointer yet but I have one White-pointer tooth.  It came from the Tory Channel Whaling station where they harpooned the odd large shark and got a few Killer whales as well but found that the latter had no blubber worth processing.  Sharks of course have no blubber either;  being cold blooded they don’t need the insulation, and their large oily liver helps with buoyancy the way blubber does on a marine mammal.

Rays are related to sharks.  Neither has bones but instead, a skeleton of cartilage. About half the shark species and ray produce live young and half lay eggs.  Three sorts of eggs wash ashore once the baby has hatched.  Skate eggs are rectangular, Carpet shark eggs have long tendrils and Elephant fish eggs are massive, flattened, black oddities, sometimes cast up in large numbers.

An elephant fish egg case with a baby

Some of the local species are edible.  Lemon fish is skate and Elephant fish or Ghost shark goes into fish and chips.  Some are inedible and we had an encounter with one of these once.  On one scout camp we had, for some misguided reason, decided to have fish as our main, and only, source of meat.  Visiting the wharf, Phil spotted a large shark about five feet long lying on the deck of a fishing boat.  “How much?” he asked.  I think it cost $5.

We bore to camp, tail waving out the back window.

It was surprisingly hard but eventually slices were carved off the tail end and cooked in the camp oven where they solidified.  We tried boiling some of it but it had so much ammonia in it that we couldn’t stomach it.  The emergency food supply was a large tin of St George baked beans.  You may remember St George, a Dunedin firm that disappeared decades ago.  The tin had been around for many years and it had put in a fair mileage but it had always seemed a shame to open it.  We had got quite fond of it.  Also, because of the shabby nature of the tin, if had almost certainly rusted and become suffused with botulism.

The ceremonial opening proved that they made tins to last in them days and that the beans had survived their years of incarceration in good health.  We slowly ate our way through them over the next day.  They had a rich flavour I haven’t encountered since.  It was possibly the St George recipe, but perhaps they had matured like old cheese

We stopped at Waihola on the way home and pooling their funds, the scouts bought some proper food - $10 worth of fish and chips.  Mind you this was 1978.  It took two scouts to carry the package which was about the size of a fertiliser sack.  Back in those days 50c fish and chips was about all you could handle.  “We’re never eating shark again ever,” they announced.  I wonder if they knew what the fish part of fish and chips is?

We left the shark in Lake Waihola, carefully arranged to show that it had washed ashore after having been bitten in half by an even larger shark.  No point in wasting it.

Finally, some advice on what to do in a shark attack…

•     Don't swim in the sea.  99% of all shark attacks take place in the sea.

•     In the event that you are foolish enough to swim in the sea listen carefully for the music.  All shark attacks are preceded by `daah-da, daah-da'  which gradually becomes more rapid as the shark gets closer.

•     Swim with slow people.  This way you don’t have to swim faster than the shark, you only have to swim faster than your friends.

•     Play dead.  This won’t work as sharks eat dead stuff as well but you have nothing to lose.  When the shark continues to show interest you might as well fight back.  Try to get in a few well-aimed punches before you die.  This doesn’t apply to White-pointers as they are a protected species.

•     Don't panic.  This won't help you to survive but people on the beach will appreciate you not yelling as this is quite unsettling.

Sheep Thoughts

Thats really interesting

 I drove down the Waiau Valley recently and noticed the good numbers of sheep of all hues and breeds, except maybe merinos, despite an obvious move towards dairying.  It’s not good merino country but they may have done well when the high tops were grazed.  There used to be sheep up Mt Cleughearn and Mt Luxmore above the treeline, on top of the Longwoods and well up the Takitimus.  I understand chamois are moving into some of those areas now.

Perusing Google Streetview recently I found a sheep with its face blurred.  I would have thought that wasn’t necessary but maybe sheep are more sensitive than we suppose.  They always strike me as being unsettled.  Cows amble along and take life much as it comes but sheep are always looking for leadership which is why they look confused most of the time.  In nature they are very much a herd animal with a hierarchy, but any leadership qualities were bred out of them hundreds of years ago. You don’t want a troublemaker.  Mothers pass on a story to their lambs that one day a great sheep will come out of the east to lead the flock to a place where the clover is sweet and the grass is long and there are no dogs and no men, and the name of that sheep is Baaarry.  Sheep are always calling out for him in times of stress but he never comes.  

I’ve usually had two sheep, the carrying capacity of about a third of an acre which is reasonably fertile.  They’ve been old ewes who have passed through the various rankings – lamb, hogget, mutton and dog-tucker – to something a lion can blunt his fangs on.  At this stage it’s like eating mutton-flavoured string and until someone invents a way of cooking them other than fifteen minutes in the microwave, only the finest quality jaws prevail.  At least the meat is free.  One of them produced a lamb much to everyone’s surprise, but we would have been more surprised had she produced anything other than a lamb.  The latest pair are young wethers.  I’ve never met more feisty sheep.  I’m used to tipping over old ewes who seem to go into a trance as you trim the hooves, crutch them or scissor off the fleece but the new boys will have none of that.  They can clear the fence into the vegetable garden with a foot to spare but at least they don’t bite.  

It takes me 45 minutes to shear a sheep which is not a record but it means an hour and half for the entire flock, which probably is.  I’ve always called the ewes Florence except for a recent one called Stinker.  You could smell her coming.  Weeding the potatoes you become aware of the pong and glance around.  There she is, head through the fence staring at me and wondering if I am Baaarry. The new ones are called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  If it hadn’t been for a ram there would have been no Jacob at all and only a short existence for Isaac.  Ok, there’s only two of them but it’s not illegal to give them three names and it goes a small way to compensate for the lack of names generally.   Only .005% of sheepdom has a name at all.

I investigated a disturbance in the paddock one evening and found two drunk people who had befriended the Florences.  They were feeding them sheepnuts and beer.  Apparently they did that quite often.  I guess they believed the philosophy that there are no strange sheep, just friends you haven’t met yet. 

Gannets

I saw a gannet off the south coast just recently.  He was out to sea from McCracken’s Rest and easy to distinguish from gulls and mollymawks, even at a distance, by the brilliant white gloss of the wings.  I couldn’t pick up the black wingtips and certainly not the yellow head, but the way gannets fly makes them unmistakeable.

Gannets breed in small numbers on Little Solander Island, Possibly Big Solander and also on The Nuggets.  They probably nested along the south coast too, to the west of the Wairaurahiri mouth.  They are sparse down here which is their southern extreme in the world.  In Bay of Plenty and in the Hauraki Gulf they are abundant.

The gannet has a wingspan of 1.8m but like the mollymawks it weighs almost nothing.  Large air spaces in the body, hollow bones and surprisingly little muscle make the birds light and manoeuvrable.  We find the odd one dead on the beach.  Several of them have been wearing bands.  The young ones are speckled brown but the adults are white with that yellow feathering on the head, and black feet with a green stripe down each toe.  They feed by plunging from a decent height into a school of fish and snaffling one several metres down.  It’s great watching them.  The flocks of shearwaters feeding close to the sea have to keep a weather eye out for what’s happening upstairs.  Every now and again a feathered flechette plunges past and the odd unhappy shearwater has been skewered.  

 

I took a tourist group from a cruise ship to see the Hawkes Bay colony.  We are at Cape Kidnappers.  We are two metres from the closest of the many pairs of gannets nesting on the clifftop.  There are chicks of all ages.  It’s a moment of revelation for one passenger.  “Oh, they’re birds.”  Admittedly we may not have used the word ‘bird’ in the briefing but subtle clues like wingspan, migration, plumage and chicks should have suggested that we were not going to visit a worm farm.  Here come the questions...

“Where do they nest?” We are staring at a thousand gannet nests and it’s painful resisting a sarcastic answer.  “What’s the fence for?” I’m asked, so I say that it is a reserve.   “For Indians?” she asks.  “No, for gannets.”  “What are gannets?”  “These birds are gannets.”  Someone else wants to know if they come back to the same chick all the time.  “Yes madam, boring as it may seem that is the nature of parenthood – same house, same kids every day.”

Southland's largest land snail

Clockwise from top left: a very large species from Northwest Nelson, my late deceased Pupurangi, a Garden snail for scale, Travers’ snail from the Tararuas and the Guide badge featuring Travers.

Southland’s largest native land snail is the rare Fiordland landsnail Powelliphanta spedeni which gets to 3.2 centimetres, barely larger than the introduced garden snail.  Some native slugs exceed 6cm beating the snail into first place for the record as the largest native land mollusc in Southland.  They are protected from collectors, both by residing in the national park and being on the threatened species register.  This doesn’t stop them being predated by rats, pigs and possums and their future in the wild is uncertain.  They survive in captivity in the right habitat but need specialised conditions to breed.

I visited a school recently to talk about the Social Studies Fair which is being held in Invercargill in late June.  One of the boys said his project was on the Pupurangi or Kauri snail Powelliphanta busbyi.  I told him he was talking to the only person in the world who had kept one as a pet, this being of course before they were protected.  They are one of our largest landsnails reaching about 8cm across but that doesn’t stop them being the most boring pet in the world.  No amount of training would persuade the thing to jump through a flaming hoop.

 I lived in Auckland for five years while at secondary school and explored a lot of the Waitakere Ranges in that time.  We occasionally came across the snail shells – it was then called Paryphanta.  The expert on them was AWB Powell, the malacologist or conchologist if you like, at Auckland Museum.  I met him a few times and took him shells to identify.  He was particularly keen on landsnails, the largest of which were the two groups, Paryphanta and the Flax snails – Placostylus.  AWB was born on the day of the relief of Mafeking in the Boer War so not surprisingly the B in his initials is Baden, after Baden Powell, the hero of the siege.  It was the ideas developed during the siege and earlier in the campaign that Powell later turned into a small book Aids to Scouting, of which I have a copy.  In the front it says ‘The corrected proofs of this book accompanied the last despatches that got through the Boer lines’.  The book was a hit with English boys and soon afterwards was rewritten as Scouting for Boys, and thus the Boy Scout movement began.

Empty shells from near Green Lake

Back to the shells.  Powell was a copious collector and it has been unkindly suggested that he collected some of the rare forms and subspecies of Placostylus to extinction.  In a revision of the Paryphanta snails they were renamed Powelliphanta in his honour.  There are about 20 species and about 50 subspecies, vermivorous critters – that means they eat worms.  The large number of subspecies is the result of the separation of populations in Westland by rivers, slips and glaciers.  Isolated populations form distinct features after many thousands of years and become subspecies.  Powelliphantas get to 9cm across, the largest being the Superb snail.  I have seen them only occasionally – a few in northern Westland, in the Waitakeres and I’ve seen Travers’ snail  Powelliphanta traversi on the Pahiatua Track which goes through bush near Palmerston North.  Travers the snail was the icon of the Guide Jamboree held at Levin, a rare example of a mollusc being elevated to sainthood.  Hang on – what about the Bluff Oyster Festival?


Visiting the Waitakeres one day after heavy rain I found a Powelliphanta busbyi in a roadside ditch, near Huia if I remember.  I took it home and kept is alive for about a year living in a wire-netting topped wooden box in our fernery.  I put in worms but never saw it eating them.  Eventually, when there had been no sign of activity for a few weeks, I discovered the shell to be empty.

Lloyd

South Coast walking

Gemstone beach

I’ve done almost every inch of the Southland coast from Port Craig to the Catlins – Waiparau Head, in fact – which marks the Otago/Southland boundary at the end of Long Beach. Some of it is easy and some difficult. There are some magnificent bits of coastal scenery accessible only by a hike or a scramble. I’ve got to catch up on the bit between Cosy Nook and Wakapatu sometime. I’d appreciate a bit of local knowledge there and if anyone is organising a coastal walk I’d like to tag along.

 The Fieldclub does a fair length of coast each year and we’d be keen to get around that bit. It gives us the chance to look for bird nesting colonies, seal rookeries, unusual plants and strange bits of debris that the sea pushes ashore. We are fortunate in that the coast is legally accessible with a strip a chain wide (66 feet or 20 metres) above high tide. In most places this has been surveyed to provide landowners with a fixed boundary but the intent of the strip is to give walking access all around the coast. It can be a bit tricky where the coast is cliffy or where there are electric or deer fences right down close to the shore.

 The land is crossed irregularly by unformed roads. These are usually farmed as part of the adjoining farmland but they are public roads and accessible. I usually let farmers know if I am going to follow a paper road and they may suggest an alternative route if there is lambing, electric fences or some other obstacle. The paper road can be formed into a driveable road at the expense of a developer who wishes to put in a subdivision but it remains a public road. Councils can put a paper road up for sale to an adjoining property owner if there is no possibility of it ever being formed but councils are reluctant to do this as sometimes the road will be required in the future for alternative access to the coast or for a development of some sort or as the route for a walking track. Occasionally there is a grumpy farmer but it’s not his land, and his cows are probably right down to the high tide mark anyway, grazing on public land.

 Google Earth shows property boundaries and it’s a useful tool for planning an excursion. You’d be surprised how many paper roads and marginal strips there are. It’s not so easy to find out the owners’ names and numbers though, so you often have to make calls to people with a bit of local knowledge. What sort of cars would be suitable for a paper road? – an Austin A4, a stationery wagon and a Cardillac I suppose.

Omaui coast

 On the subject of stationery… I escorted a group of Texas students on a South Island tour. They were keen and enquiring. “What do you think is your best quality?” one of them asked. That’s a very American thing to ask. I’ve never been asked that before. That’s the sort of thing you get kids to talk about. I don’t need that at my age. I’m reasonably contented and well adjusted. I don’t need compliments. I told her about George. We had a group of kids for some extension work. They were aged about 7 – 9. One of them was George. A quiet lad, not conspicuous in any field and a bit behind reading.

 Sometimes you need to find a way to boost kids’ self esteem. We sat in a circle and they talked about their good points. Their peers supported them and made useful comments – I think she uses good expression, she’s a good friend, good at tidying up. That sort of thing. George was a bit stuck. He didn’t have obvious talents and he was a bit hard to categorise. “He’s a good stapler,” said one of his friends. George’s eyebrows went up a little and he sat up straighter. He’d never realised. “It’s true,” someone else said, “the best stapler in the school.” George got a certificate for his bedroom at assembly and he wore a gold star. “Best stapler in the school,” it said. He gained respect.

 The other kids had never realised before that they had such a rare skill amongst them. They watched him to see his superior performance on the stapler. Perhaps it was his stance, legs slightly apart, biting the bottom lip and squinting. Chunk, chunk. He was given the class stapling jobs, other teachers got him in for tricky stuff. The school secretary had him in from time to time as well to work the big office stapler and he used the staple gun – no one else was allowed. He fixed them too, he had his own long nosed pliers for unjamming them, oil, and the care of boxes of staples of every size. George was made. “It’s his staple diet,” was the joke.

 I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps he grew up to become a great stationer or an engineer, maybe he married an heiress to a stationery fortune, but it shows what happens when you find the right button and push it.

 I’m looking for contributions to my book on rabbits and possums. It’s coming out in November. I need to get photos and anecdotes. Lloyd Esler 2130404

Bluecliffs Beach

 A few weeks ago we had a trip to Bluecliffs Beach. The tide was out and the going was easy. Five years ago we made an interesting discovery here – a Leopard seal and a Hector’s dolphin. This time we found just a bit of a Hectors dolphin, six vertebrae still connected, enough for DoC to add another dot to the database that indicates one less Hector’s dolphin. There were a few odd seal bones as well, the humerus with a characteristic shape, and a shoulder blade.

 I was half looking for any of the remains of the nine Killer whales that had stranded and died much further to the west; whales can drift a long way before the carcase strands or sinks. When it loses buoyancy and slowly drops we have what is called a whale-fall. The carcase can feed a little ecosystem for 25 years or more, firstly with the flesh, then the oil in the bones and when the skeleton is gone there can remain the teeth and the earbones which are very dense and durable.

 You can see why it is called Bluecliffs. The clay banks, twenty metres high are bluey-grey, composed of sediment that settled on the ocean floor some millions of years ago. In places there are bands of fossil shells, mostly small clams. The cliffs are eroding back but that’s an ongoing process. Waves sweep up the gravel beach and gnaw at the soft base of the cliff. I wouldn’t want to be under when it collapses. Years ago there was an old grader on the beach, probably a relic from the time when the road ran along the top of the beach. Not much there now – we found part of the chassis; it’s being ground away each tide as the rocks are tumbled over it.

This sort of beach has the least marine life of any shoreline. The wave action is too strong for shellfish to live in the sand without being scoured out, the rocks are too small for anything to grow on them without being ground off and there are no rock pools, so the interesting part of the beach for a beachcomber is along the high tide line. That were you find the bones, the dried carcases of fish and birds, crab shells, driftwood and a few seaweeds.

 Next trip I plan to walk from the mouth of the Waiau to Rowallan. I haven’t done that stretch and it’s about the last bit of coast I haven’t walked between Port Craig and Waikawa Harbour.

The grebe hunt

Crested grebe

 Each year the Ornithological Society (that's birdology) does an assessment of the Crested grebe population. In January we checkout out the accessible lakes with not much success. Grebes are magnificent birds, worldwide but only sparsely distributed through the South Island and rare in the North Island.

There are probably about 20 grebes in Fiordland, usually seen in ones and twos. There are several good spots to tick one off it you are a bird spotter, such as Kingston, Lake Hayes, Bendigo, the lakefront at Queenstown and the Te Anau waterfront. In Canterbury there are two good places for them‚ Lake Forsythe on Banks Peninsula and Lake Alexandrina near Lake Tekako. Two of us did the walk in to Green Lake and Island Lake without success, then the next day we checked out the Rakatu Wetland off the road between Blackmount and Manapouri. This newly formed wetland has yet to develop its full potential but the shallow ponds are becoming fringed with rushes and sedges and in time will be good breeding habitat for waterfowl. Predation by cats, stoats and ferrets is an issue but there is a trapping programme in hand. There were no grebes there but a pair nested successfully at Te Anau with the help of an artificial floating nest. Later, we looked for them on Lakes Gunn and Fergus, again without success.

In the distance grebes resemble ducks but closer-up you can see the longer neck and sharp bill. The adults have a crest and a chestnut ruff and are lower in the water than a duck. Grebes don't come on to land but spend their entire lives afloat. The floating nest is made from water weeds and anchored close to the shore. The diet is fish and water insects. Grebes can fly but they are reluctant to take to the air and as nobody has ever seen one flying they must do it at night, perhaps assisted by the light of a full moon.

 Conservation is difficult with nests vulnerable to changes in lake levels and the wash from power boats. The Grebe Valley takes its name from these magnificent birds but they are rare even there. Let's hope they don't disappear from our lakes entirely. Crested grebes aren't the only ones in New Zealand. The small Dabchick is a North Island waterbird, common on Lake Rotorua. The Little grebe and the Hoary-headed grebe are vagrants from Australia although both have bred here. A pair of the latter nested on the Lagoon Creek dam near Te Anau in 1975-76 and raised a chick but they didn't persist although odd ones of both species turn up on Lake Hayes from time to time. Any reports of grebes or any other unusual birds are welcome.

Beach Trees

Silver beech on the Wilmot Pass road

It’s hard to think about Fiordland without Beech forest coming to mind.  Southland has several main forest types – plantation forests which are pine and eucalypt, lowland podocarp forest dominated by kamahi, rata, rimu and miro, and beech forest.  Beech forest can be almost a monoculture and there are great swathes of forest which are just Mountain beech and little else. Beech comes away readily after disturbance such as fire or bulldozing and the growing seedlings form a dense crop which allows nothing to grow beneath.  Although 99% of the seedlings die, the solid canopy allows little light to enter.

 The entrance to the Borland Lodge Nature Walk is an example of this.     The land was cleared for farming perhaps 60 years ago and reverted first to scrub then beech as the numerous seedlings overtopped the bracken.  The trees are a uniform age, form a dense canopy and deer have effectively stopped palatable species growing beneath.  At first glance there is little there apart from beech seedlings and moss.  In reality beech forests host some of our best fungi, three species of mistletoe, numerous insects, spiders and orchids and a range of native and introduced birds. 

New Zealand has five native beeches.  Hard beech is a North Island species extending through the Marlborough area and down the West Coast.  Red beech is our tallest native flowering plant, seen at its best on the Milord Road.  Silver beech is a higher altitude species and Mountain beech is probably the commonest.  Red beech reaches its southern limit somewhere north of Lake Monowai.  The fifth species is Black beech from the top of the South Island.  It is similar to Mountain beech but has oblong leaves with more obvious venation although some trees seem to have the foliage of both species.  Red beech and Silver beech have toothed leaves, Mountain beech and Black beech have small untoothed leaves and Hard beech has bluntly toothed leaves.

a Mountain beech in flower

For those who have managed to remember the Latin names – Nothofagus menziesii, N. fusca and N. cliffortioides for Silver, Red and Mountain beech respectively – guess what?  Some scoundrel of a taxonomist has done away with Nothofagus and replaced it with Fuscospora fusca for Red Beech, Fuscospora cliffortioides for Mountain beech and Lophozonia menziesii for Silver beech.

Red beech reaches about 40m.  There are some very impressive ones on the Cascade Creek nature walk at Lake Gunn.  I saw what could be the record for a Silver beech last weekend when the Fieldclub had a hike in to Deep Cove from Lake Manapouri.  There is a very gnarled and impressive example on the roadside not far from Mica Burn.  I measured it at about thirteen metres girth, making it rather larger than the Motu Totara in the Dean Forest.  It was dripping with epiphytes.

Beech trees have been extensively milled for boards, furniture, brush handles and joinery where it is known in the timber trade as Maple beech.  The Beechmark website says, “Beech creates a modern, lovely warm look.  It is a sustainably harvested New Zealand native and can be used as an alternative to Rimu, Matai and Kauri.”

Beech trees grow readily from seedlings in the garden but be aware that it never stops growing so what might be an attractive sapling at five years may be a monster in 30 years, dominating your section.  For some truly impressive beeches, check out the European beeches in Hagley Park in Christchurch.  These northern hemisphere ones are deciduous in contract to the natives which lose only about a third of their leaves annually.  There is a collection of foreign ones in the Alex McKenzie arboretum at Otautau.

Butterflies

Red Admiral

The sight of a Red Admiral the other day reminded me that I was going to ask for unusual butterfly sightings over the spring and summer.  Red and Yellow admirals are around for much of the year, there is the odd one over winter.  They fly fast and settle on flowers, especially Buddleia, and their food plants which are several species of nettles.  I think they are in decline owing to the loss of nettles and the effects of the tiny wasp parasites introduced to take care of the White butterfly menace.

  The White butterfly has been around for 70 years, the parasites help but they attack other butterflies as well.  There is a new butterfly getting established in the north of the South Island "The Large White".  Lets hope the climate is too cool for it to get a foothold in the south.

 The Tussock Butterfly

  The common butterfly of rough country and tussock grassland is the Tussock butterfly.  It is brown with a slow wingbeat and it breeds from sealevel to the subalpine meadows.  It has a relative "The Black mountain butterfly" which only lives above about 1200m.  You see them on scree slopes and although not uncommon, you rarely get a chance to get a close look at one.

Copper Butterfly

  We have three or more sorts of Copper butterfly depending on how you classify them.  A recent study suggests there are dozens of species, each representing an isolated population, but superficially most of the proposed new species are hard to distinguish.  The caterpillars feed on three pohuehue (Muehlenbeckia) species.

Boulder Copper butterfly

  One is our tiniest butterfly, the Boulder butterfly, found in riverbeds and coastal gravel bars.  The others are brighter orange with varying black marks.  They frequent bush margins and visit urban gardens.  If you see a monarch, it is almost certain to have been bred in captivity and released,  They reach their southern limit about Christchurch where they are common along the herbaceous borders in the Botanic Gardens in Hagley Park.

  Another butterfly was added to the Southland list recently. The small Blue butterfly is found throughout New Zealand except for coastal Otago and Southland.  In February I found a small population at Piano Flat, the first Southland record, but only by a few kilometres.  It could be more widespread so look for a small pale butterfly attracted to clover.  The other butterflies that might turn up are vagrants and something we can watch for.  We can expect them after prolonged westerlies.  It's only about four days flying time from Australia and the western parts of New Zealand seem to get the vagrants.  The hot spot is probably Haast but Southland will have its share if you know what to watch out for.

Painted Lady

The Painted lady is the world's most travelled insect.  It is related to the admirals and about the same size but with paler wings.

  The Blue moon is unmistakeable, you know when you have a Blue moon!  It's as big as a monarch and blue with black and white markings.  It is one of the tropical species bred in the butterfly house at Otago Museum.  The Meadow Argus and the Lesser Wanderer are known from a few specimens, mostly from the west coast.  Some turn up in New Zealand each year, possibly more than we imagine because of the unlikelihood of one being spotted by someone interested enough to catch it, photograph it or report it.

There is a single New Zealand record of the Black jezebel, an Australian butterfly which turned up in Waikaia a couple of years ago.  That's as far from the sea as you can get so it must have covered a bit of land first.  Perhaps it was bred there! In Australia the caterpillars feed on mistletoes so maybe we have a breeding population.  The prevalence of mistletoes in Western Southland might suggest that somewhere like the Tuatapere Domain the summer might be the right spot to look for a smallish black and white butterfly with red zig-zags on the wings.

For lepidopterists, that's butterfly and moth enthusiasts, there is a new book by Brian and Hamish Patrick "Butterflies of the South Pacific".  Before buying a moth book it might pay to check the contents.  I heard of a boy who found a book for his moth-collecting brother in a second hand shop.  It was a birthday present and the thought was appreciated but the contents left the recipient rather puzzled.  It was called  "Advice for Young Mothers".

Coastal Sites

  midden at Stanley town site 26

  Have you seen shells and blackened stones eroding out of a bank? There is a new project in Southland – SCHIPS Southland Coastal Heritage Inventory Project – which records Maori coastal sites. 

The pre-European Maori population spent almost all of its time on the coast.  The coast provided food and other resources such as whalebone, the best travelling routes and the vantage points from which to observe the weather and sea conditions and to look for approaching friends or foes.
 Inland it was swampy, thickly forested or dissected with deep rivers. There was food but it was harder to find. Food was collected on the coast and cooked in pits called umus. Heated rocks were placed in the pit and layers of leaves, food, more leaves, mats or bark were added, then buried and allowed to steam. After several hours the food was ready. The discarded shells, bird bones and fish bones were heaped in a midden and it is these rubbish heaps that provide our knowledge of the early diet.

 midden at Tiwai Point

 Much of our coastline is unstable, with erosion and accretion on an irregular cycle. Big storms, extreme tides and tsunamis bite deeply into the shore and windblown sand, suitable currents and tides, and flood debris carried down rivers can build the coast again. The erosion cycle takes away the midden sites; it also exposes new ones. This can be quite exciting, particularly if the site is very old or contains well preserved bones. Sometimes a burial is exposed – a skull perhaps, or a few toe bones. Human remains are a police matter, no matter what their age but the police will refer obvious old burials to iwi for excavation and re-interment.

 A new urupa has been established on Mason Road near Invercargill and some of the bones to be buried there have come from exposed coastal sites. Sometimes there are artefacts exposed as well, or more likely the flakes left behind when stone tools have been shaped.
 I guess each tool means about 100 chips. These can be very numerous and the stone-working site excavated on Tiwai Point before the smelter was built yielded tons of flake.

SCHIPS aims to locate and photograph coastal sites and monitor their deterioration. Observers have been trained and we aim to do perhaps twenty sites each in a year. I recently photographed two in Western Southland.
There is a well-known site near the settlement at the mouth of the Waikoau River on Te Waewae Bay close to the cribs. It has shells and a few rocks and fish bones. It is being eroded by high seas, and vehicle and foot traffic.
I found a new one as well, about a mile west of Gemstone beach. The eroding bank has cut an umu in half and you can see the cooking stones and shells. Let someone know if you find a Maori site on the coast.

Exploring Gemstone Beach

Scouts from the Riverton Scout Venture at Gemstone Beach

The Riverton scout Venture was held in early January.  There was a good turnout and despite one or two scares with the weather it turned out OK with the high winds and torrential rain by-passing Riverton.  I helped sort out the gear and took fieldtrips to Gemstone Beach.  We weren’t lucky with the tides but still had a great couple of hours each time fossicking.  The seas were high and surging up the gravel slopes and we all got wet feet.  It’s a bit risky I guess but the Venturer motto is ‘Look Wide’ so if they are swept away it’s their own fault.  They must have grown up with the scout motto ‘Be Prepared’ as well.  They were reasonably prepared for the Venture but most of the Venturers are from Australia and they can’t conceive of how cold and wet it can be in Southland in the middle of summer.  There were some quick trips to buy winter clothes when the temperature dropped.  This is a problem with overseas tour groups as well.  They are told they are coming from a northern hemisphere winter into a tropical land, only to find that there can be snow and cold winds.

Anyway the only casualty of the beach foray was a small dog – a ‘rat-on-a-string’ sort of critter which was swept off its feet and tumbled out into the surf.  Fortunately it was tethered and it was easily wound back in again.  It shook the foam off and carried on sniffing.  We were reasonably successful with the stones and everyone ended up with at least one garnet.  These are translucent green, amber or white and are noticeably glossier and heavier than the other stones.  One girl picked up a fist-sized pale green garnet.  Once, I would have been jealous, but advancing age changes your perspective on things, and I found myself being as excited for her with her treasure as she was.  The prize mineral from the beach is sapphire.  I’ve seen them in collections but we didn’t have any luck finding one.  Gemstone Beach ‘works’ because of the geography of the coast.  The heavier stones coming down the Waiau River plus the heavy sand – iron sand – with its speckles of gold and platinum, are concentrated by wave action along a relatively short distance.

 A selection of gemstones

 The beach also has lumps of shale which I flaked with a pocketknife and burned with a match.  “Smells like burning oil,” they said.  No wonder – it is burning oil.  When you bang two quartz pebbles together they spark although you can’t see that in daylight.  The bang also produces a smell like gunpowder.  I tell kids they can carry on reading their good book after lights-out by the illumination of quartz sparks.  ‘Once upon a time’ – spark – ‘there were three bears’ – spark – etc…   My best find was a rhodonite pebble.  It’s a striking pink tone with black squiggles.  It’s not particularly rare but it’s the first time I have picked up rhodonite.  The last mineral worth mentioning is coal.  There are lumps of it there, probably from a seam just offshore but possibly from a shipwreck.  I find myself compulsively collecting coal from the beach.  I think it is a primitive instinct that hasn’t been purged out completely.

Thar’ she blows!!

Here’s a bit of a catchup on my whale investigations.  I’ve started looking at whales and whaling in Southland for a booklet coming out in about twelve months.  The most recent stranding in Southland is a humpback, at least the fourth in ten years.  These big guys don’t get stranded alive; they die at sea and drift ashore.  If the bodies get stuck in the inter-tidal zone they break down quite rapidly.  One which washed up on 1 November at Mason Bay on Stewart Island had largely disintegrated by 9 December with each tide bringing a new wave of crustaceans to nibble the flesh and wash away the loosed debris to expose more meat for the tearing gulls.  If it had been cast up above high tide by an exceptional tide, then it’s the flies that break it down and that process takes years. 

Pictures show the remains of a Humpback in November 2012
and the same animal six weeks later.

 Humpbacks were hammered by the shore whalers and it was this species that kept the last of the whalers – the Tory Channel ones – going until the early 1960s.  There had been an extensive humpback fishery on the Northland east coast until then.  The whales were trapped by huge nets across the mouths of bays, harpooned and dragged ashore for flensing.

Some of the vertebrae and other bones had separated from this carcass.  The back of the skull was detached and showed a severe growth of cancerous bone which may have contributed to the whale’s death.  Sea mammals suffer the human diseases of old age as they are amongst the few animals to actually reach advanced years.  For other species, advancing weakness or illness makes them vulnerable to predation and they are quickly killed and eaten.  Whale bones often show arthritis and osteoporosis.

The whale’s radius and ulna were protruding from the carcass.  These are the longest radius and ulna of any sea creature that ever lived - longer than the equivalent bones on the Blue whale and exceeding those of any of the giant marine reptiles.

Pilot whales stranded in February 2011 photographed three months later.

Further south along Mason Bay the last remains of the Pilot whales that stranded in February 2011 are slipping from view.  Here and there you see a rib or vertebra on the beach and there are still a dozen skulls, much battered after this time.

It was on this spot that Pilot whales, or Blackfish, as they were known, were herded ashore by Stewart Island fishermen.   The iron pots were brought around from Oban and the carcasses were boiled for their oil. 

From time to time the suggestion comes up for using stranded whales and dolphins for food – a cultural issue rather than one of necessity.  There is plenty of historical precedent for eating whales and dolphins and whale meat is available in Japan, Norway and other countries.  In wartime Britain canned whale meat from the Antarctic whale fishery supplemented beef and mutton although it was eaten unenthusiastically.  There is a big difference between the meat of baleen whales and toothed whales with the Sperm whale in particular giving a dark, oily meat with noted laxative powers, while the meat of the rorquals – Blue, Fin, Minke and Sei and Bryde’s whales – is milder, paler and better flavoured.

Whale meat is low in cholesterol and calories and high in Omega-3 oils but the prospect for the harvest of meat from stranded cetaceans is bleak for several reasons.

1)  The insulating layer of blubber on a large whale effectively prevents the carcass from cooling after death and the temperature rises rather than falls.  Decomposition begins rapidly in the hot lifeless tissues and the meat is inedible after a few hours.  Commercially harvested whale meat is removed from the body and chilled quickly aboard a factory ship.

2)  As the cause of death is usually not obvious, the whale may have died from a disease that may be transmissible to humans or may render the meat toxic.

3)  Being top carnivores, marine mammals accumulate natural and man-made toxins which remain in the food chain.  Pesticides, such as DDT, and heavy metals, especially mercury, can be at a dangerously high levels, as can the natural level of vitamin A in seal livers.

So there goes the case for eating meat from stranded carcasses.  They can provide other useful bits though.  Although whales dead and alive are protected, it is lawful to remove bones and teeth that have separated naturally from the carcass.  Bone, especially the jaw of the Sperm whale, is much prized by carvers, as are the teeth.  Baleen, formerly removed from Right whales to make corset stays, umbrella ribs and the springy bottoms of chairs, can be used for carving, and the large vertebrae are used for garden seats.  By the way, we don’t know why it is called the Right whale.  It was clearly the wrong whale to hunt as its oil was inferior and it was regarded with distain by the whalers, for whom the ‘right whale’ was the Sperm whale.

Waterfowl in Southland

Male Shovellor

The diverse aquatic habitats in Southland suit so many of New Zealand’s waterfowl that it’s easiest to start off with what’s not there. The Mute swan, the big white one, has never survived long out of captivity in Southland. Individuals show up from time to time but the bird doesn’t compete with the Black swan. The Brown teal, formerly abundant everywhere has disappeared from the South Island and Stewart Island, shot to near extinction, taken by mustelids and hybridised with other ducks. The Flightless goose and several species of flightless ducks did not survive Maori hunting nor the depredations of the kiore or Polynesian rat which swept through the country like a dose of salts about 700 years ago.

The other waterfowl are doing well with a couple of exceptions. A few Blue ducks or whio live in swiftly flowing rivers feeding Lake Te Anau and west of the divide and they have been reported from Redcliffs and a few other places. The Grey duck is in decline as its population cross-breeds with mallards. Genuine Grey ducks are scarce and largely confined to remoter, higher altitude lakes and valleys. They are quite distinctive with their strong eye stripe and green flash on the wing.

Dead mystery duck

Mallards are the commonest waterfowl in New Zealand. They breed rapidly and prolifically, tolerate water of any quality and rapidly colonise urban and agricultural ponds, quieter stretches of river and roadside ditches. Paradise ducks were nearly shot out but after a few years of protection the numbers sky-rocketed and they are now everywhere on lakes and farm ponds or in rough grassland near tarns.

 The Grey teal and the shovellor are lake species and the Black teal or scaup is a common sight on the larger lakes, often forming flocks of several hundreds. It is our only diving duck and the bird single-handedly responsible for ruining the mirror effect of the Mirror Lakes on the Milford Road. Black swans thrive on wetlands, building bulky nests. Small gaggles of white or grey feral geese live on scrubby grazing land.

Grey Duck

The Canada goose has recently lost its gamebird status and can now be hunted freely. It remains to be seen whether or not we will end up with more of them or fewer. Without Fish and Game input into management it is likely that numbers will grow on conservation land and farmers, who are adversely affected by grazing geese, may struggle to keep numbers down. Oddities turn up as well – occasional Chestnut-breasted shelducks, Cape Barren geese and Wood ducks from Australia. I have a picture of a duck that looks about halfway between a mallard and a Paradise duck. Have a look and tell me what you think.

Borland Road Walk

 Coprosma foetidissima

A few weeks ago I walked down the last ten kilometres of the Borland Road. It was a good day with fog in the early morning giving way to a clear sky after the first hour’s walk. A light overcast developed later and there was a halo around the sun with a sun dog to the left of the sun. It is unusual to see that when the sun is high in the sky. The halo usually portends a change in the weather but the succeeding days were fine. The walk, at botanical pace, took about three hours by the time we had explored some of the tracks leading from the main road into the pylons.

 The botany is good along the roadside, more so at the higher altitude. The montane Hebes – Hebe subalpina and Hebe odora give way to the common koromiko Hebe salicifolia as you descend and the Celmisias – the mountain daisies – disappear once you drop to about 400m above sea level. We could clearly see where there had been a huge growth of lotus or Birdsfoot trefoil and the tussock hawkweed Hieracium lepidulum, now both knocked back by the advancing cold weather. The hawkweed has spread a good deal in the last few years and it lives throughout the forest as it is very shade tolerant. There was a bit of Mountain tutu, still in fruit, and we squeezed out a few drops of juice. It has a pleasant taste but you have to be careful not to eat the tiny seeds or you will die.

Clubmoss with its spore-producing bits.

 We noticed a lot of celery pine Phyllocladus alpinus along the roadsides and some of the splendid Mountain inanga Dracophyllum menziesii. There was a a variety of coprosmas. The three that didn’t get below the 400m altitude line were Coprosma cuneata, C. pseudocuneata and Coprosma serrulata. The latter has large, leathery leaves with fine serrations.

 All three species grow in my garden. The genus seems to be quite hardy and I have 18 species growing at present. The one I have had no luck with is taupata Coprosma repens which is not frost tolerant and prefers to be near the sea. It is south of its natural range in Southland but it grows well around Riverton and Bluff where it is naturalised. Two of the other large-leaved species, C. robusta and C. grandifolia are widely naturalised around Southland and on Stewart Island. C. robusta or karamu hybridises a bit with other local species.

Coprosma rhamnoides

 Returning to the Borland story… the variety of lichens diminishes with altitude as well, and the bright red algae that covers the rocks disappears as you get into the lower and more shaded stretches of road. There were a few fungi on the roadside too but the season had passed and it had been too dry for the fungi to show themselves at their best. We checked the lancewoods hoping to find some of the alpine lancewood Pseudopanax lineare which I have seen there before but no luck this time.

 Later in the year I plan to walk down all the way from the pass. Let’s hope it will be good flowering season. I’m guessing that around the beginning of December will be best.

Rambling thoughts

Kids picking blackberries

 A bush walk with kids can be entertaining. There’s all sort of things that can happen and lots of surprises and odd discoveries as you lead them through the wilds. A recent occasion was a field-day for Southland Girls High School Y7 girls. Nice bunch. I asked them about their previous schools and they come from all over. There’s 100 schools in Southland and many primary schools contribute to Girls High with the rural ones boarding at the hostel. The red shoes? Half loved them, the other half hated them.

 My part of the day was to take them in small groups on a 40 minute bush walk. We did twelve of these over two days. Good weather both days luckily, but the blackberries ran out  at 1.23pm on the first afternoon. It’s been a pretty good blackberry year but nothing on last year which can only be called vintage. I collected 10kg in 2011 at a rate of about two kilograms per hour. This year they were smaller and less abundant and we had to work harder for them. The better ones seemed to be in moderate shade rather than in full sunshine or deep gloom. They weren’t the only things to eat. There were several fungi that are edible including the Sticky bun which grows only under pines and the Waxy laccaria which is nicer than a mushroom.

 We found a patch of the black orchid Gastrodia and dug up and ate a couple of tubers. They taste like raw potatoes. Normally I would baulk at ruining an orchid but they are actually very common in places. They were past flowering and hadn’t set seed. We smelled lemonwood and I told them I had tried a sprig with the potatoes. That had been a big mistake; I had to throw them out. About a square centimetre of leaf would be sufficient. Pikopiko or the koru, the coiled new frond of Hen and Chickens fern, is edible but it tastes bitter. Other fern species have an edible koru as well but none of them is very nice raw. The uncoiling bracken frond is called ‘bears’ paws’ but it is apparently somewhat poisonous so we don’t eat that.

 We pulled thistle heads apart and ate the thistle ’nut’. I burned most of them with pepper leaf, horopito, by calling it ‘sugar leaf’. The good thing about that is that the horrible burning only lasts about ten minutes. There is a toadstool that does that as well, the Peppery bolete, which grows under beech trees. In Europe it is harvested, dried and ground to a powder for flavouring. I found a few miro berries but I think the pigeons must have got most of them before they fell. You can suck them like peppermints. We caught cicadas. They tickle when hold their legs against your skin. One child wanted to see what it felt like on her nose . She shut her eyes and I popped it into her mouth. Some people sure make a fuss. My mother would have said “Just eat it up and don’t say anything”, her usual response when we kids pointed out the caterpillars in the cabbage. I tried my ‘toothache cure’ where you get someone to bite gently on a stalk of Yorkshire fog, then pull it away quickly leaving them with a mouthful of fluff.

 The commonest of the ferns is houndstongue. I got them to hold one in their teeth and pretend they were dogs with green tongues. No dogs have green tongues but the chow from China has a blue tongue. It is or was an eating dog. We don’t eat dogs in our culture but they were on the menu in many parts of the world. Maori used to keep kuris for food and on his first voyage, Cook celebrated rounding the bottom of Stewart Island by converting one of the ship’s dogs into a pie, a roast and haggis. I suggested that the poodle might be a good eating dog. I can picture a KFP shop in Dee Street. Tuatapere could become the sausage dog capital of the world and I can imagine takeaway shops throughout Southland selling hot dogs as well. Needless to say the suggestions were not received with acclamation.

 No dogs were eaten in the making of this story, but a good many other things were.