New Zealand Wildlife - Part 1

The one thing I do miss is wildlife. As contrasted with Alaska, where one can encounter all sorts of animals in surprising places, there are very few animals here. When New Zealand was first settled by the Europeans, the only mammal on the island was the bat. The remaining species were insects, birds, and basically two reptiles. Unfortunately, with the Europeans came the rats and mice. To control them, they brought stoats, that eat bird eggs leading to the decimation of many species. To control the stoats they brought dogs and cats, that led to the further decimation of many of the species. And somewhere along the line they brought possums, rabbits, hedgehogs, and in the south island, wallabys. Now the governmnt is trying to exterminate the possums and stoats, and one part of the south island is completely free of possums - for now. The hedgehog, though annoying because it roots up people's gardens, eats bugs, which has a positive effect. We wondered why we do not see many people walking dogs - we know they own them, but apparently there are restrictions on where you can walk them. We have seen a few - but certainly not as many as we would see on a short walk in Wichita. And we have seen very few cats - again, I suspect one must keep their cats inside to protect the native birds. On our tour, however, we did see some of the native wildlife, as well as a lot of sheep, cattle, and deer. At our first stop, we saw the variable oystercatcher, the white-faced heron, a kingfisher, many pukekos, several plovers, black swans (which we introduced for food), and the Paradise Duck. The Paradise Duck is very interesting, in that it mates for life. If the female dies first, the male starves himself to death, but if the male dies first, the female finds another mate. Below we have a black swan, a white-faced heron, and an oystercatcher.

We saw the Paradise duck several places, but we only got one picture from our first day in Christchurch, so although it wasn't from our wildlife tour, it still walks like a duck and talks like a duck! It is the white-headed one at the front . . .