A Doctor Dolittle Moment
I was coming to the end of my fifth day of trekking in Kahurangi National Park, New Zealand, with another three days to go. As with most of the trekking here, shelter is provided by conveniently spaced, unmanned backcountry huts, but you need to carry all the food you’ll need for the entire trip, as well as everything else necessary to look after yourself while travelling through the bush.
Kahurangi (formally the North-west Nelson Forest Park), covers 4,520 km², and is the second largest of NZ’s national parks. I was trekking the Leslie-Karamea & Wangapeka tracks — an eight-day trip through Kahurangi that promised to be reasonably challenging (particularly the Leslie-Karamea), and relatively quiet. Indeed, coming to the end of this fifth day of travel, I hadn’t seen anyone for three days. As I was trekking solo, this was slightly concerning, getting me wondering how long it might be before someone found me if I came to grief somewhere along the way.
Having crossed the Taipo River on a swing-bridge, I was now climbing steeply up alongside the Karamea River again, through very dense forest, though on a good track. It was probably no more than another mile or two to Helicopter Flat hut, where I’d find my bed for the night, but I was knackered, and had to stop for something to eat. I stopped on a vaguely flat section of track, and dropped my rucksack heavily to the ground.
I was about to start rummaging around in the lid for food, when I became aware of an almighty commotion in the shrubs just in front of me. A robin was kicking off about something — they have an incredibly loud alarm call at close range — but that wasn’t all. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom under the thick canopy, I could see a couple of fantails, also agitated, and a group of maybe ten or so riflemen (Acanthisitta chloris) — tiny wren-like birds no more than 5 or 6 cm long — also showing signs of disturbance.
South Island Robin (Petroica australis)
And then I spotted what was causing all the excitement. Sat on a branch not 10 feet away, was an owl. I don’t know whether it was a morepork (NZ’s native owl), or an introduced little owl. Whatever, I’m pretty sure this was what was getting the surrounding wildlife all het up, though it seemed to have its eye on me. I tried to get a photograph (with flash), but with 50 ASA slide-film in the camera, it was pretty much a lost cause. You’ll have to do with a photo of a fantail instead (this one was taken elsewhere in South Island).
Fantail (Rhipidura fulginosa)
It did make me wonder just how many possible wildlife encounters I was missing day-to-day, with my head down, and eating up the miles. I was always on the look out for interesting comings and goings, but reckon that, as in this case, unless you actually stop and wait around for a bit, much can be passed by. Definitely a good reason to build in more “rest” days into trips like this, when it’s possible to drop the mileage, and take things a lot slower.
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Hi Paul
Well done on getting this up and running. We finished up with blogger because our ISP didn’t support the Wordpress database. I think perhaps you have more scope with Wordpress, but slightly different features.
Have you set up a widget to track and count visitors?
How do you produce the nicely captioned pictures – is that a Wordpress thing?
Anyway, enjoy the blogging – you’ll make new friends!
Best wishes
Martin and Sue
Thanks Martin, Sue.
One of the disadvantages of having more scope with a self-hosted Wordpress blog, is that there are almost endless possibilities re. what can be done with it. Wordpress strikes me as a CMS that happens to be very good at (and is fine-tuned for) running a blog.
I need to concentrate on content again now, having replaced the boring standard header with a photo (that’s Chris stood on the rock incidentally, in case you were wondering — there’s a beer in it for you if you can tell me where he is — closest town will do), and messed about with some other widgets. I should go back to sketching out designs as I intimated I would in an earlier post!
The captioned photos embedded in the posts are standard Wordpress. The animated enlargement effect when you click a photo is a plug-in (free for non-commercial use — I’m still waiting for a license key, so it pops up a “nag” message occasionally). I haven’t looked into tracking visitors yet (web analytics), but will add that to the list!
Cheers,
Paul.
Hi, Paul,
Martin wrote that if I like his blog, I’ll probably like yours, and I do. It looks terrific, and I’m looking forward to reading about your time in New Zealand, where I’m hoping to be in February.
Best wishes,
Mark
Hi Mark,
Thank you. It’s early days yet, but I hope I’ll soon have a decent number of posts and perhaps a few articles etc. to get the NZ guide going. The NZ trip you’re thinking of joining looks great. I’ll try and post about the Kepler, Routeburn or Abel Tasman tracks sometime over the next few weeks, and maybe look into putting a photo gallery on the blog somewhere. So much I could do — so little time!
If you’ve any questions about NZ I might be able to help with then fire away (re. tramping anyway!). I was out there for most of 2003, but I doubt things have changed too much in the interim.
Cheers,
Paul.
Mount Titiroa (1715m) – hey, I knew I’d get it in the end!
PS I think I still owe you a prize for getting the Postcard from Timperley header! But I think you cheated?
Have fun
Martin
Now Martin, how on earth did you work that out
.
And you’re right, I did cheat…