Glowworm Grottos and Fluffy Blue Dinosaurs

            I’m back from a very, very abbreviated hike on the Kepler track; walking approximately one sixth of the track, thanks to a knee injury from last week’s adventures in Milford.   The Kepler Track is a 60 kilometer tramp, and one of Fiordland’s three Great Walks, and is usually hiked over four days.   The trail climbs up the side of Mount Luxmore, follows an alpine ridge with views into the South Arm of Lake Te Anau, drops into the Iris Burn valley, follows the Iris Burn to where it empties into Lake Manapouri, then follows the Waiau River (famously rich in both vowels and brown trout) back to Te Anau.   The walk is famous for having great views over the alpine section, and is considered by some trampers to have both better and more varied scenery than any of the other Fiordland great walks.   

Waiau River, from a viewpoint near the Rainbow Reach shuttle bus stop

            In this instance, the best thing I’ve found about the Kepler Track is that, unlike the Milford Track, hikers can hike the trail in either direction, and spend as many nights in huts as they wish.    (On the Milford Track, everyone hikes in the same direction, and stays one night in each hut; no exceptions.)   

            The Kepler Track also has public transport, via bus and water taxi,  that accesses a few points on the trail, allowing trampers to trim a few kilometers off of the beginning and end of their hike if they wish.    I spent two nights at Moturau Hut, which thanks to the Tracknet shuttle bus, only requires six kilometers of hiking to get to.   The hut is very pretty, located right on the side of Lake Manapouri.   The place sort of felt like a lakeside resort, only without the resort.    I took most of the day to walk in, resting often wherever there was a convenient log with a view.   There were a few scenic vistas over the Waiau River, which doubled as the River Anduin in the Lord of the Rings movies.   Also, the wetland marsh that the trail crosses is billed as being similar to the nearby marsh that was the film location for the Dead Marshes.   (I’m told that the Hobbit movie film crew was back in Te Anau earlier this year, but I haven’t heard where, or what, they were filming.)   

Wetland boardwalk on the Kepler Track

            The next day at Moturau Hut, I walked a small section of the trail leading to the mouth of Iris Burn, but mostly I spent the day hanging out on the sandy beaches bordering the lake.   Right now, there is a lot more beach on the lake than there usually is, thanks to three weeks of dry weather, and an accompanying low water level.   Manapouri is very pretty, and is dotted with a number of small islands.   This lake was the center of a huge New Zealand environmental controversy in the 1970s, when plans were made to raise the level of the lake by thirty meters as part of a hydroelectricity scheme to power a smelting plant on the south coast.    In a dazzling stroke of engineering genius, the plan that was finally implemented involved not raising the lake, but lowering the hydroelectric plant – it is 200 meters underground, and the entire scheme was designed to produce electricity from the lakes, while still keeping their water level within natural levels.   It’s the second largest electric plant anywhere in New Zealand, and according to the signage at Lake Te Anau, there is no other hydroelectric plant like it anywhere in the world.  

Sunrise, Lake Manapouri

           The one epic failure of the Kepler trip was that the book I took with me was horrible, and there were only so many informative DOC publications in the hut…   I had ample time to read all of them.   I now know that there is a small kiwi population in the area of the Iris Burn hut, and the DOC is trying to increase their trapping program to entice kiwi to move into areas of the park closer to Te Anau.   Their aim in doing so is partly to allow more people to hear wild kiwi, without having to hike for two days to get into their habitat.   (There have occasionally been kiwi heard at Moturau Hut, where I was, off and on, but none that appear to stay in the area permanently.)   Also, the Kepler track is home to a colony of long-tailed bats, one of New Zealand’s only species of indigenous mammals.  The bats were discovered last spring by the kiwi researchers who, just for fun, took a bat detector with them on one of their kiwi surveys.   The colony is near Rocky Point, and that section of trail is now home to an intensive rat-trapping program – which has trapped as many as 70 rats in a month in the vicinity of the colony.   

            The Kepler Track is also close to the area where takahe were re-discovered in 1948, after being presumed extinct for nearly fifty years.   Takahe are a species of endemic, flightless birds, who graze on the high alpine areas in New Zealand’s more remote mountains.   At six pounds, they’re the largest living species of rail anywhere in the world, and have a huge red bill, and a natty blue sheen to their plumage.   Not having kept the ability to fly, the takahe have slowly evolved their way into something resembling a diminutive, fluffy blue dinosaur.   I was lucky enough to see several takahe at Te Anau’s birdlife park, which runs a breeding program for these birds.   There is still a beleaguered population of a few dozen wild takahe living in the hills above Te Anau, which has now been supplemented by introduced populations on four small predator-free islands.

Takahe; photo courtesy Wikipedia

            The first night at Moturau Hut was fairly busy – perhaps thirty people in the hut, a dozen of whom were American exchange students on spring break from a program in Wellington.   The next night, there were only five in the hut – most of the people who were walking down from Iris Burn hut elected to bypass Moturau Hut in favor of walking another six kilometers and catching the shuttle bus back to Te Anau.   This is the last week that the huts will be staffed.   Although the huts are available for use in the winter, DOC will be closing down the gas cookers and the plumbing.   Even around Te Anau, you can tell that it’s well and truly the beginning of the off-season.   I think Easter was probably the last gasp.

            I think Te Anau would be an interesting place to spend the off-season because it seems like there is a pretty active winter community.   I spent some time with a group of Anglican church ladies here - I set up their sound system for then on Easter Sunday, and they in turn invited me to a craft night. The ladies are already busy planning community dinner-and-movie nights, as  well as a ‘Christmas dinner’ to be held in June or July.   (This further strengthens my notion that holidays here ought to be celebrated during the season of the year they were originally meant to commemorate - i.e. Christmas in winter, Easter in spring – not on a specific calendar date.)   There are also community markets, and live concerts being advertised for the coming months.   On the whole, not a bad place to hang out, which is good, since hanging out is mostly what I’ve been doing the past few days.

            After returning from Moturau Hut, I visited the Te Anau glowworm caves.   The caves are on the far side of Lake Te Anau, accessible by a boat trip across the lake, followed by small-group tours of the cave itself.   Some aspects of the tour were pretty unique – it is not often that a visitor would willingly sit silently, for several minutes, in total darkness, all for the purpose of looking at bugs.   The glowworm cave itself was impressive – the passages were very narrow, and the bottom of the cave is still basically a river; this part of the cave isn’t old enough to have dried out.   There were a also number of small waterfalls, cascading from one pool to another.   The glowworm cave was discovered in 1948, and had already become a tourist attraction by the 1960s.   Judging by the early pictures, the cave was equipped with basically the same sort of set-up that is used today – raised wooden catwalks over the floor of the cave, and a boat  ride at the far end out to see some of the thicker constellations of glowworms.   

What the boat tours would look like with the lights on.   This is taken from Real Journeys' website, as photography, being disruptive to the glowworms, is not permitted inside the cave

            Our tour group crab-walked through a very low entrance, and through a few hundred meters of cave passages on raised boardwalks, arriving at the glowworm pier after about ten minutes.   There, we got onto small dinghies, and were ferried further into the cave in total darkness, lit only by the lights of the glowworms themselves.   We stopped under one of the thickest clusters, sat and watched for a few minutes, and then slowly boated back to the pier.   It must be interesting learning how to navigate a boat using only worm-light; I asked one of the guides later, and she said that they follow a rope that’s been strung along the wall of the grotto, using it to pull the boats along.   All other course corrections are made by shoving off of rocks, and bumping into things.   Of course, it would be hard to get terribly lost in the grotto – the passage isn’t very long, and there isn’t another exit, at least, not one above the water.   The whole cave system itself extends through seven kilometers of known passages, many of which can only be accessed with scuba gear.    

            Since the visitable portion of the cave is so small, and the dinghies only seat 14 people, there were actually five different cave tours making their way through the passages, all with slightly staggered start times.   The guides seemed pretty deft at juggling the groups around – but the guide I was with definitely sounded like she had been giving the same glowworm spiel dozens of times a day for a few too many months.    She wasn’t bad, or unfriendly by any means – just possibly a little too burnt out on glowworms.   Or a little too burnt out on tourists; sometimes it’s hard to tell.

The Call of the Kiwi

            Last week, I drove up to Okorito, which is a West Coast town mostly known for being an even smaller town than Haast.   Okorito, though, has the advantage of being less remote, as it is only 25 kilometers away from the bustling tourist metropolis of Franz Josef.   (Cell phones still don’t work there.   It seems to be my destiny to spend large amounts of time in places where modern methods of communication don’t exist.)   I checked into my hostel, the Okorito Beach House, and as soon as I mentioned that I was living in Haast for the summer, the owner immediately offered to comp my bed for the night.   I suppose there’s a lot of love to be shared between tiny West Coast towns.   (The Beach House is a great place, by the way, and even comes complete with kitchen, beach views, and a very friendly dog.)   Okorito itself is lovely and tiny, sitting on the water between the Tasman Sea and the foothills of the Southern Alps.   I think it was love at first sight; I am already hoping for a return visit, (assuming that the aged Nissan passes its warrant of fitness inspection next month).   After I got settled in at the Beach House, I took off up the Okorito Trig trail, a 4-kilometer walk up one of the foothills to the site of an old survey mark, which also gives a great view over the Okarito area.   I didn’t actually mean to do the whole walk, as it was pretty late in the evening, and I needed to meet up with my kiwi tour.   However, after about twenty minutes of walking, I reached a sign that indicated I was already over halfway to the top, so I decided to go for it.   The weather was hazy, but the view from the top was still great.   It was even better considering that I didn’t even have to hike very far uphill to see the view - it helps when the whole landscape you’re looking at is at sea level.   

Looking north from the Okatiro Trig viewpoint

            I got back to the hostel around 7:30, and had just enough time to eat dinner and cover myself in bug repellent before meeting up with the kiwi tour at 8:15pm.   Okorito is one of two places in New Zealand, that I know of, that offers tours which attempt to see kiwi birds in the wild.   One might think that because kiwi are so well-known and adorable, that kiwi-spotting tours might be more common.   Not so.   It is really, really hard to see kiwi in the wild; kiwi tours are not typical wildlife-watching sorts of experiences.   Or perhaps it might be better to say, kiwi tours are penultimate wildlife-watching experiences.   Everything that you have to do on a normal wildlife-watching tour – being quiet and patient, listening to the guide, not approaching an animal too closely, and understanding that the wildlife are doing things on their own schedule, which is not necessarily compatible with yours – you have to do all of these things an even greater extent with kiwi.

            To start with, kiwi are nocturnal; to see one in the wild, you have to be up and about when they are – hence a tour that starts at 8pm, and can continue until well after midnight.   Also, kiwi are pretty cryptic, which is a fancy birder term for being very good at blending in with the scenery.   Kiwi are also territorial - you won't find a flock of kiwi all together in one place - and sadly, most species of kiwi are endangered, mostly due to the kiwi’s complete inability to compete with all of the mammals (cats, stoats, possums, dogs) that humans have introduced to their part of the world.    All of these facts, taken together, means that finding a kiwi in the wild is not a straightforward exercise.   

            The tour got together at 8:15, and right from the start, Ian attempted to explain the near impossibility of what we were going to try to do.   The plan was, we would drive out to a walking trail outside of town, where a network of footpaths crisscrossed the territories of three pairs of kiwi.  Five of those kiwi, helpfully, are tagged with radio transmitters, meaning that it is actually possible to locate them with an aerial.   Unfortunately, even knowing if you know exactly where the bird is, you won't see the kiwi if he's hanging out in the middle of the woods, away from the footpaths.   So, the idea is to use the aerial to figure out where the kiwi are, and what direction they’re moving.   Based on this information, Ian then tries to work out when and where a kiwi might cross one of the footpaths.   We, of course, would try to meet up with the kiwi at that point, remaining motionless and silent as the kiwi scuttles across the path and back into the forest on the other side.   Kiwi sightings (when they happen) aren’t measured in minutes; they’re measured in seconds.   At some points, the whole affair seemed like a very complicated setup to a ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ joke.   

            For me, one of the most educational parts of the tour was in seeing how Ian managed his clients, setting the expectations that we were potentially in for a long night, in a bug-filled forest, and that the entire group being patient, silent, and cooperative was absolutely essential to us clients being able to see a kiwi.   Group management and setting appropriate client expectations are both pretty indispensible skills for a guide – but in the case of a kiwi tour, they’re not necessary to run a tour well – they’re necessary to run a tour at all.    In a perfect world, I would love to bring Ian out to the Iceberg Lodge  and let our guide staff pick his brain about  how he manages tour groups, because he's very, very good at it.

            We all loaded into a van at around eight forty-five, and drove to our chosen stalking ground.   Ian used the time before it got dark to get the group into position, and to run through what we  were going to do in order to (a) locate a kiwi, and (b) make sure that everyone in the group got to see the bird if/when the kiwi crossed the path.   Basically, once Ian located approximately where the kiwi was, we were going to be strung out along the path in a long line of human listening stations, fifty or sixty feet apart.   Our job was to stand there and listen for the kiwi walking around.   If one of us got a hit, we were to alert Ian and the rest of the clients  via handheld radios, and we would converge on the part of the trail where the kiwi was making noise.   Ian even ran through how he wanted us to stand on the path if/when the kiwi emerged.   Thus prepared, we took our assigned stations along the path as night began to fall.   

            I was monitoring the right-hand side of a small clearing to one side of the trail.   I didn’t have a watch with me, so I have no idea how long I sat there listening – but it seemed like quite a while.   The woods were almost totally dark – we had starlight, but the moon hadn’t risen yet - so mostly it was just me and the forest, and the mosquitoes buzzing around my head.   It was about five minutes into my listening stint that I realized that I no idea what a kiwi walking around in the forest actually sounded like.   This hadn’t been explicitly brought up, so I figured it must be one of those you-know-it-when-you-hear-it things.  All I know is, the forest seemed very quiet, up until the moment I was sitting alone in the dark listening for a bird to walk by.  Then, it seemed like there were noises all over the place – bugs, owls, rustling footsteps of other clients, and maybe, maybe, the footsteps of a foraging kiwi.   Twice in the course of perhaps half an hour, I heard a leaf crunch from somewhere off to the right, and making me clutch my radio a little tighter, but I never heard a repeat to the sound.   In retrospect, I think it’s possible that perhaps there was a kiwi walking around in the woods, but we wouldn't hear more of her until later.

            After maybe half an hour, Ian gave up on that section of trail and moved the whole group to another area.   Shortly after we were deployed in our new locations -we heard the kiwi.   Not footsteps, unfortunately, and not very close.   Instead, the kiwi were calling.   The male started out – a high yodel, and after a moment, the female answered him with a lower-pitched, growly noise.   Hearing them was awesome, but as Ian explained in a huddled conference, it did not particularly bode well for us seeing the birds.   The male kiwi, having gotten a response to his call, was probably going to try and meet up with the female – taking him further away from the footpath we were hoping he’d cross.   After more fiddling with the aerial, we set out for a new location, and ended up back at the wide clearing where I had heard the puzzling leaf crunch noises.   We waited in silence.   After several minutes, it became clear that something was moving around in the bushes just off the trail.   There would be a slight rustle of movement, a footstep or two, and then nothing for several minutes.   There was a kiwi, and she was close, but apparently not very happy about our proximity.   She’d take a few steps, and then freeze in place for a few minutes, apparently hoping we’d leave, and she could continue hunting for her dinner without an audience of foreign tourists hanging on her every footstep.   This was Husky, the one kiwi in Ian’s kiwi-spotting area without a radio transmitter.   According to Ian, this bird is so shy and retiring that not only have the DOC never managed to get a radio transmitter on her, but Ian himself, who spends most of his nights out here tracking the birds, only sees this particular kiwi a handful of times a year.   

            Husky was not interested in being visible in this instance, either.   After several minutes of listening to the bird capering through the woods just off the trail, Ian decided we ought to cut our losses, and try to locate another kiwi that might be more amenable to coming out of the woods.   Unfortunately, the other kiwi seemed even less inclined to hang out by the trail than Husky; we only heard the faintest of blips from the aerial.   In the end, we got back to Okorito around 12:30AM, tired, bug-bitten, and kiwi-less.   

            Despite the fact that we never actually saw a kiwi, the kiwi tour made for a pretty interesting night.   I think it helped that I am possibly less vested in seeing a wild kiwi than the other clients, as I’ve already gotten up close and personal with kiwi at the DC zoo where I used to volunteer.   But it was interesting just to be out in the forest at night.   It was also neat to hear the kiwi calling –which happened two or three times.   And possibly, being stood up by Husky the kiwi makes up for all of the times I had to wake up the zoo’s kiwi in their burrows to do our daily checks.   (I was supposed to make sure all of the birds were alive, still in their enclosures, and looked reasonably happy and healthy.   For the kiwi, since we were waking them up in the middle of the day to check on them, ‘happy and healthy’ nearly always meant ‘sleepy and pissed off’.)

Kayaking down a tidal stream near the Okorito Lagoon

            After snatching about five hours of sleep, I got up the next morning, and rented a kayak from Okarito Nature Tours to go out and explore the Okorito Lagoon.   The lagoon, according to my guidebook, is one of the largest unmodified wetlands in New Zealand, and is a local hot spot for shorebirds and waterfowl.   I had hoped to see white herons, which have a breeding colony on the far side of the lagoon.   In order to visit the heron colony itself, you have to go out with a jet boat tour from Whataroa .   It’s probably a great tour – but I decided I would rather pay half as much, skip seeing the nests, and be able to paddle my own boat.   The lagoon is also a great place for shorebirds because so much of it is shallow – I could be paddling fifty yards from shore, and see an oystercatcher standing in three inches of water forty feet away.   In addition to the oystercatchers and herons, I also saw stilts – which are just as tall and gangly as their name implies, black swans, and bar-tailed godwits – a totally amazing bird that I did not think  I would be able to see on this trip.  Godwits spend May through September in my part of the world.   They breed in western Alaska, and migrate across the Pacific to take advantage of a second summer in the southern hemisphere.   Migrating across the entire Pacific Ocean sounds intense, but a surprising number of shorebird species do this (or make even longer migrations from Alaska or Canada down to Brazil, Patagonia, or the Antarctic).  The amazing thing about the godwits isn’t that they cross the Pacific, it’s how they cross the Pacific.   During the trip from New Zealand to Alaska, the birds take a westerly route, stopping to rest at wetlands in Australia, the Korean peninsula, and Kamchatka.   After this leisurely circumnavigation, the birds are in good enough shape after their migration to start breeding immediately.  (Summer is short in the Arctic, so the birds don’t have much time to waste.)   For a long time, it was thought that the godwits flew back to New Zealand using the same route.   In fact, they don’t – in the autumn, the godwits leave Alaska and head southwest, embarking on a nine-day, nonstop flight direct to New Zealand, flying over most of the Pacific Ocean in the process.    At 11,000 kilometers, the godwit’s epic journey home is the longest known nonstop migratory flight of any animal.

            In addition to the birds, I also got to explore some tidal streams flowing into the lagoon, where I saw a group of native scaup (a small duck with a blueish bill).   Paddling in the lagoon has gotten me excited about doing some more river kayaking in New Zealand while I’m here.   Kayaking in Alaska is mostly about big, huge, far-off vistas – mountains, glaciers, and sea cliffs.   (Disclaimer: sometimes kayaking in Alaska is also about sideways rain, sea fog, and mild hypothermia.)   There’s a lot of great scenery, but you usually don’t get close-up looks at the areas you’re passing unless you actually get out of your boat.   It’s almost like the Alaskan sea coast is too big to be able to see it in small sections.   It was nice to be able to paddle down a river where I could get right up to the bank, and see moss-covered tree branches dropping down right into the water from above my head.   

Up a creek in Okorito...

            After returning my kayak, I loaded up the Nissan and headed back to Haast.   Before I got going, a very nice guy from Okorito Nature Tours helped me disengage the choke on the Nissan using a pair of pliers.   (Yes, my car has a choke knob.   Or rather, had a choke knob.    Previously ’ve only seen these things on snowblowers, and other machines with very tiny engines.)   I loaded up on groceries in Franz Josef, (their grocery store has items that are difficult to find in Haast, things like bread, fresh fruit, and yoghurt) and drove back down the highway in intermittent rain.   Okorito is beautiful, and I am already looking forward to a return trip – to paddle more tidal waterways, and perhaps actually see a kiwi on a kiwi tour.