graham's blog (#new zealand)

Caring About a Royal Family

2024-12-08T23:45:00.000Z

In college, I spent a summer doing an independent study on how to make a robot bird that could fly. I watched documentaries, I did wikipedia deep-dives, I learned musculoskeletal structures and how they varied across species, I studied the modes of flight among differently sized and shaped birds, and I looked at the state of the art in ornithopter-design at private robotics companies. I learned that the reason predatory raptors like vultures are often depicted circling overhead in cartoons was to do with the ways that they used static soaring from thermal gradiants to gain altitude without using much of their own energy. I also learned that the bird with the largest wingspan in the world^[1], the albatross, used dynamic soaring to build speed from taking advantage of the boundary of wind gradients. I planned to use slope soaring as a means to achieve lift, since my college had a gradual slope with a prevailing wind, and because it seemed to have the least amoung of moving parts.^[2]

As soon as I learned about the albatross, I was compelled: it's a bird that has trouble taking off compared to other flight-ful birds with smaller wingspans. For this reason, albatrosses tend to live in areas with high prevailing wind-speeds -- often islands with sharp inclines at the coast. I read that one of the main areas in the world that has both albatrosses and everyday human populations is New Zealand. Since then, I've always wanted to go and see one. When we were planning our trip to Aotearoa New Zealand, seeing wild albatrosses was one of the things on my list that I had to do.^[3]

To understand why albatrosses are viewable at the tip of the Otago Peninsula, it helps to understand the history of the area. Per previous posts, Aotearoa was and is a sanctuary for birds because of how and when it was formed geologically. The Māori established the Pukekura pā^[4] on the hilltop at the end of the Otago peninsula in the mid 1600s. Skipping forward a few centuries, Dunedin^[5] was founded by Scottish colonists in the mid 1800s. After gold was discovered in 1861 at Gabriel's Gully, ~80km west of Dunedin, the ensuing gold rush exploded the population. By 1874, Dunedin was the city with the largest population in New Zealand. In the 1880s, fears rose that the Russian government might attack New Zealand at any moment.^[6] With Dunedin as a major target that needed defending, the Pukekura pā was torn down and the peninsula tip was cleared of any remaining trees to make way for Fort Taiaroa, along with an Armstrong Disappearing Gun inside it.

The first albatrosses seen in the area were in the late 1910s. Wildlife experts believe that the clearing of forests and removal of any predators, combined with human-led displacement of albatrosses at other islands nearby to New Zealand is what led them to begin nesting by Fort Taiaroa. Dr. Lance Richdale^[7] was the man credited for helping establish protection for the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head. Part of these efforts eventually included the Royal Albatross Centre and turning the entire Taiaroa Head area into a predator-free zone. Doing so has made it an area where a number of other endangered bird species can roost safely.

The life of a northern royal albatross like the ones I saw starts when two albatrosses mate^[8] and lay an egg. The chick is taken care of by its parents, who alternate staying with the chick to protect it. As it reaches adolescency, chicks will begin the 1000km/day journey over the Pacific Ocean towards the West Coast of Chile. Along the way, these albatrosses also use slope soaring off of the ocean waves themselves as a way to further conserve energy. They drink salt water and their bodies process the excess salt out of it, leading to the remainder coming out the tube-shaped nostrils, down the beak, and off the curved tip as waste. The tubular nostrils are also able to smell their prey from great distances. For Northern Royals, their diet is 80% squid, but generally any small ocean animal near the surface is fair game. They'll make the return trip to Aotearoa and begin mating before continuing to do this commute back and forth pretty much every year for the rest of their lives.

I can't describe how nice it was to finally get to see the albatrosses in real life after all this time. When we first arrived at the viewing area of the Centre -- a small windowed building on the top of the hill -- we could see about three birds sitting by their nests in the grass below. I made quiet peace with the fact that this would be all we got to see of them, and through the binoculars it was really neat to see their feathers and bills as they looked around. But the real highlight for me was when, out of nowhere, we spotted a pair of albatrosses repeatedly soaring by before they too landed to begin nesting. It was exhilarating to see them actually flying in real life.

Ranging from wingspans of 2.5–3.5m (8.2–11.5ft) depending on species. ↩︎
I unfortunately bit off more than I could chew with that project, and never got to a completed flight attempt before running out of time in the class. The knowledge has stayed with me, though. ↩︎
Others included in no particular order: 1. See kiwis, 2. Ride the TranzAlpine train, 3. See Hobbiton, and 4. Go to Milford Sound. All of these are pretty standard tourist things to do there, so there's a lot of readily-made itineraries built around them. ↩︎
In this case, a settlement on a hill defended by palisade walls and barriers, though there are various other meanings and usages in other contexts. You can read more about this history of this particular one at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03036758.1978.10429379 ↩︎
Dunedin is actually Scottish Gaelic for "Edinburgh," and many of the street names and placements were just borrowed directly from the layout of Edinburgh. ↩︎
There was never any attack. ↩︎
The wildlife experts on our tour at the centre showed us a delightful number of photos of Richdale being bitten/mouthed by the bills of albatross on his clothing or hands over the years. ↩︎
Usually for life. There tends to be a whole unique language of both sounds and ways that albatross pairs like to squawk and click-clack their bills together that helps them find each other year after year. That being said, there are records of one member of a pair dying or not coming back to the area during breeding season and then the other moving on to find a new mate. The oldest on record was named Grandma and wound up mating with three different birds across her 60+ year lifespan, including one at the age of 62 in 2021 before she passed. ↩︎

The World's Littlest Penguins

2024-12-06T05:10:00.000Z

When I was planning this trip, I kept asking friends who had been to Aotearoa New Zealand for input on what to do. One of those suggestions was to "see the little blue penguins who come ashore around dusk on the East coast of the Southern Island." We had a few days in Kaikōura and a few more in Dunedin planned, so as soon as we arrived at the former, we began asking around for details on where to find the penguins.

The locals told us that there was a Coast Guard station that was open to the public and that if you went there around dusk, that's where some penguins usually arrived each night. While traveling, we had been sticking to a pretty early bedtime (8 or 9pm) because we also tended to have early mornings, but springtime in the southern hemisphere meant that the sun was rising earlier and setting later, meaning civil twilight wasn't usually until 8:30.

We bravely stayed up late and drove the car in the dark for the first time^[1] to go to the coast guard station at dusk. It was a very small building^[2] by a beach with some areas to park nearby. There were some other cars next to ours with people watching the sunset. I donned our binoculars and began scanning the shore as we stepped onto the beach. No penguins, just waves.

We stuck around as it got chilly and darker, and we realized there was another beach on the other side of the coast guard station, which had a number of shallow rocks and tide pools because the tide was going out. A man wearing a camera with a large, telephoto lens showed up and asked if we had ever seen the penguins before. He mentioned that his tour guide told him this was the area where they usually came ashore in the evenings. We were reinvigorated because he looked seriously ready to see some penguins, so we perservered through the boredom and the cold for another hour or so.

Eventually, scanning the same area became tiring. We were just barely able to hear the chirps of oystercatchers or terns as they walked around or flew over the rocks. It was cold and late, and we couldn't tell if we heard anything nor whether the new shadows that appeared as the tide went out were actually penguins or just more rocks. We resolved to go home and try again later in the trip, but we didn't have high hopes from that night's failed search. To give us more of a guarantee, my partner looked online and was able to book some of the last spots in a viewing tour near Dunedin that said that it would refund you if you saw fewer than four penguins.

It was raining when we arrived in Dunedin. Beyond the Otago Harbour at the edge of downtown, and more specifically beyond the Otakou penninsula, is the open and vast Pacific Ocean^[3], which means two things: prevailing winds and frequent light rain.

From Wikipedia:

Dunedin has relatively low rainfall in comparison to many of New Zealand's cities, with usually only between 600 and 750 millimetres (30 in) recorded per year. However, wet weather is frequent, since much of this rainfall occurs in drizzle or light rain and heavy rain is relatively rare. Dunedin is one of the cloudiest major centres in the country, recording approximately 1,850 hours of bright sunshine per annum.

In summary, you can think of Dunedin as generally having the climate of Seattle. It has a long water-feature connecting the heart of the city to the open ocean, and it has frequent wet weather and clouds. Thankfully, the rainstorm of the day had finished before our tour began. We drove out to the end of the Otago peninsula and arrived at the conservency where the penguin-viewing would happen.

We were given a brief explanation about the penguin's habitat and lifecycle from the wildlife experts. The Little Blue Penguin^[4] is the world's smallest penguin, at a height of up to about a foot when fully grown. Starting at dawn, they swim out to the ocean, and eat small fish and invertebrates all day. At dusk, they arrive back home and usually call out to each other to cooperatively land on shore at similar times to help avoid predators. This was where and when we would get to see them.

The viewing platform was an elevated structure built by the conservancy so that penguins could waddle under it and get to their burrows, and so that tourists like us could safely view them from afar. In the blustery dusk wind facing shore, we stood as the sun set and our guides made hot coffee and tea to drink while we waited. They told us the same thing that the man with the telephoto lens in Kaikōura said: you're more likely to hear them before you see them, due to how hidden they are in the water because of their feathers. Below, you can see video of one group waddling up while another group lands in the background:

Penguins arriving on shore Link to the uncompressed video

When landing, a "raft" of anywhere from a dozen to several dozen penguins will all launch out of the water together and land on the beach, where they'll then waddle up the shore to get to their respective burrows. We were told that seals tend not to eat penguins unless the seal is juvenile. These penguins have such incredibly tiny and dense feathers that seals quickly learn to stay away from such a terrible and dry mouthfeel. Their number main predators tend to be gulls, eagles, seals, orcas, and sharks out at sea. At dusk, the same mustelids and other negative human-related animals I've mentioned before for the nighttime. Thankfully, as part of this conservancy's work, they created an almost entirely predator-free zone for the penguins.

Another reason for landing at night time is that the penguins have poor eyesight that can get even worse in bright light like sun or the flash of cameras. Before being led out to the platform, we were all instructed to test our phones in both camera and video modes to avoid any flash photography. The platform itself had some LED lights that shed constant, diffuse light on the penguins as they made their way to their burrows. According to the guides, these lights had been scientifically tested with this penguin population to see if they'd be less likely to return to their burrows if the light was on near them, and it had no effect on their behavior and was deemed safe. This meant that even after dusk, we were able to take nicely-lit photos of the penguins for about an hour before the lights turned off and we were encouraged back up the stairs to the parking lot.

As the first penguins came in, while everyone else was focused on capturing photos or videos of them as they made landfall or began waddling, I had an area near the side of the platform mostly all to myself when the penguins came waddling past the platform. The walls of the platform were metal railings with thin black nylon strings connecting the railing to the floor. This meant that you could pretty easily get a clear photo of the penguins in between the strings, while still respecting the distances for wildlife safety.

It's hard to get photos of them standing still at all. Even when they're not waddling, the heads are moving, they're preening their feathers, or they're otherwise trying to shake off the water from their recent swim. This was the best and closest photo of any I was able to take.

Over the course of the night, we easily saw about 150 little blue penguins. There were penguins who would happily just chill close to the platform, penguins who would go home to their burrows to tend to their young, penguins who launched themselves onto the shore only to dive back into the ocean again and repeat that process a few times.

As we were leaving, we had to walk up an elevated wooden path and some stairs. Every minute or so of walking, we would stop as the people just ahead of us gently told the penguins who had wound up on the elvated path to keep going and not block the way. We didn't take any pictures since the LED lights were off and we were just walking by the glow of dim red lights, but that was probably actually the closest we got all night. Our guides also recommended to check under your car before leaving, just in case.

I'm so glad that we listened to my friend's suggestion. These penguins were delightful, and as cold as it was out there at the beginning, we were warmed by the adrenaline of seeing the cutest little dudes surf onto the rocks and then waddle up the beach while squawking the whole time. I'd say the entire thing was well worth it, and I'm thankful we found a wildlife center that would allow us the opportunity to safely take photos of them too.

That being said, due to some technical details I get into in the footnotes, I'm also going to include another species as I continue my endemic birds of Aotearoa photos. Here's the red-billed gull, its chick, and its egg, photographed nearby to where I saw the penguins:

It was already difficult to drive on the other side of the road in the daylight, so we'd generally been trying to get all of our driving done before nightfall for fear that it'd be even more difficult then. ↩︎
When you're an isolated island nation the size of Colorado, there's only so much of a coast guard presence you need to be properly prepared. This may be another instance where US subconscious assumptions about things^[5] were not aligned with reality. ↩︎
The next body of land you reach if you follow the same latitude to the East is the West Coast of Chile. If you follow the same latitude to the West, the first body of land that you would reach is the East Coast of Argentina. Aotearoa is South of all of Asia, Africa, and Australia, which makes it exposed to oceanic elements. ↩︎
Technically, there were two subspecies of Little Blue Penguin: the Little Penguin (endemic to the rest of Aotearoa) and the Little Blue Penguin (endemic to Australia and the Otago peninsula). Pretty recently, (in 2015 and 2016) new studies of mitochondrial DNA showed a clearer delineation between the two subspecies, and it seems like they may be officially reclassified as different species within our lifetime. ↩︎
Like "how much military spending is reasonable for a country?" ↩︎

Listening on Hikes

2024-12-03T04:40:00.000Z

I like to go on easy, well-manicured hikes. My general rule of thumb when people ask if I want to go on a hike with them is I'm happy to for up to about three miles and a few hundred feet of elevation gain. I wish that I had the motivation to go on more of them and get better at longer ones. Too often, I find myself focusing on my own breathing, my nose running, my muscles aching, where I'm placing my feet, or how much I wish this type-2 fun was more type-1. But when I was hiking in Aotearoa New Zealand, I found it wasn't quite as bad as other hikes I've been on, and part of that was finding a new thing to preoccupy my senses: listening to birds.

Along the Northern Edge of the South Island is the Abel Tasman National Park, named after Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer credited with mapping out Aotearoa from his ship. There are a handful of hikes by the coast, and we selected one of the easier ones: a "seal view and beach walk" that we assumed would be a walk along a beach, perhaps in view of some seals. It turned out this was a "maybe view the seals from the boat you take to get to beach number one, so that you can hike up over hills through a forest to beach number two" situation, but thankfully we had prepared for that just in case with extra food and water.

We passed by Split Apple Rock in the ferry, and I began thinking about how many photos I had already taken of birds, only a few days into the trip. I realized that I had documented about two bird species per day^[1], so I took my phone off of airplane mode for the first time outside of a hotel and spent a not-insignificant amount of my roaming data budget for the trip downloading Cornell Lab's Merlin Bird Identification App along with the New Zealand-specific bird pack. With this on my phone, I knew that even without service, I would be able to take pictures or recordings of birds and look them up in real time.

As we landed, I immediately got to do so: there were several weka running around the beach, harassing tourists. Weka are flightless birds and more importantly, opportunistic scamps: they know that humans have food in their backpacks for hikes, and they know that humans leave backpacks on the ground to take cute photos for Instagram or whatever. While the humans are away from their backpacks, the weka will run over and either try to drag the pack away if it's little or unzip the pack and take what's inside if it's big. They're surprisingly fast runners and incredibly quiet.

Several times on our hike, a weka would pop out of a bush that we didn't realize it was in and frighten us in the process. We could be standing around eating a snack and then turn around and find a weka behind us a minute later that we didn't hear approach. I got to see two of them fighting over a piece of lettuce they found at the beach. I managed to capture a video of the chase and of one of them squawking as it ran away:

(Note: if you're reading this on an RSS feed reader, and it doesn't support video or audio html tags, you may need to go to my actual website to be able to see and hear them. To do so on inoreader, I just scroll all the way to the bottom and then keep scrolling and it loads the actual page)

Weka chase Link to the uncompressed video

Continuing up the trail, we gained elevation quickly, and I kept noticing about every 90 seconds or so that the calls of the birds would change as we rounded bends. In the past, I haven't really tried to look for birds as I'm hiking, but with this new-to-me Merlin "pokedex-but-with-real-animals" app, I found myself stopping to see where along the path I could go to get better recordings, and then using that triangulation to figure out what tree the bird was in. This meant a lot more stops as I started hearing new bird calls.

A silvereye | tauhou, a eurasian blackbird, and a common chaffinch Direct link to audio file

The app was fascinating: I could see a recording of multiple birds and the app would show which ones were which along with the timestamp of the recording. In the above recording of three birds, the short, high-pitched "ee"s in the background are the silvereye | tauhou, the melodical chirp that comes in secondly and sounds like it's posing a question is the eurasian blackbird, and then the third, repetative sotcatto chirping is the common chaffinch. I began to be able to place these calls among the others as the hike went on, which made identification easier.

As I started to focus more on the sounds of the birds and the rest of the forest that I was hearing, I also began to think about my interaction with those things online. I really enjoy reading blogposts about travel that friends do to foreign countries or even journeys they take around their cities. That said, it's one thing to get to read about them and see the pictures along the way, but I realized that I have very little idea for what the sounds of those places are, despite audio capturing being similarly easy as picture or video. In the forest of Abel Tasman National Park, I found myself in a soundscape, not only of generic forest with a beach on the periphery, but of specifically this place with these birds making their calls.

Tomtit chirping Direct link to audio file

It's helpful that the Merlin app stores the recordings locally by default. I kept using it to try to record birds as I got closer to them. In some cases, like the tomtit^[2], I was able to find it and get a nice recording, but it flew away before I could capture a picture.

Gray gerygone | riroriro chirping Direct link to audio file

Whenever possible, I'd try to whistle the call back while I was looking for various birds. I don't know if I did a good enough job replicating any of the bird calls for them to be drawn to my whistling, but at the very least, it helped my ear to keep focused on the bird call. That being said, the call of the tūī^[3] is so elaborate that I gave up pretty immediately.

I kept hearing that call as one I didn't recognize and saying "who are you??" under my breath.^[4] I tried recording a few times, but I found that the other birds were too loud to be able to hear anything over them. Eventually, I was able to find where the tūī was singing from and got any picture at all before it flew off. This wasn't the last tūī I'd see on the trip, thankfully, but none of the others were as photogenic, nor were any of them in quiet enough settings for recording:

Once we had reached the peak of the hill that we were ascending, we stopped briefly for our packed lunch and a "random" weka sighting as we unwrapped our food. Then we started to hear new sounds echoing off the valley below us as we made our descent.

New Zealand bellbird chirping Direct link to audio file

This one was beautiful and made a lot more sense once I learned the name: it was reminiscent of hearing the church bells go off across a town or a city. I never got to see it, but its sound continued to bounce around the valley every few minutes throughout the afternoon.

Continuing on, soon enough, we began to hear a new call that was easy for me to parrot^[5] with my whistling. We were down at a sort of in-between-beaches beach that was pretty close to where we were going when the sound began to be directly in front of us, and there was a new bird -- a kākā, perched on a branch high above the trail:

I was able to get a little bit closer, and snapped this next photo. But then a New Zealand pigeon | kererū^[6] arrived from behind us and the kākā was very upset and began dive-bombing it, so we made our exit to avoid getting caught up in the crossfire.

The uniqueness of there being so many birds to observe in a new place was enough of a distraction for me to lose track of the tiredness from hiking. I'm curious to go try to try some hikes now that I'm home, both in parks and beyond the city. When there's built-in stops because you're excited by something, that's a far different feeling for me from stopping because you're running up against a personal limitation. And maybe the motivation factor isn't the hike itself as much as the opportunity to go do that fun thing of cataloging birds again? Only time will tell.

This post has contained several endemic-to-New Zealand birds (weka, tauhou, tomtit, tūī, riroriro, New Zealand bellbird, kākā, kererū) already, but I also wanted to include one more that I found later on when we arrived at the beach at the end of our hike. Alternating walking around in the sand and washing themselves in the small stream of river water that was running directly down the beach and into the ocean were a pair of variable oystercatchers. One of them was sitting comfortably in the wind by tucking its bill behind a wing while the other walked about:

I managed to stick to this rate for all 18 days of the trip, winding up with 36 identified species, despite Merlin having trouble identifying some bird calls and despite me having trouble identifying some birds I couldn't take pictures of because we were driving past them so quickly. ↩︎
Among birds that I didn't know of at the start of the trip, the tomtit is the top of my list. I love when a bird is "blorby," which the tomtit is 100%, and I also love when it kind of looks like they're wearing balaclavas over their heads because of the coloring of their feathers. ↩︎
Link to a video of the tūī doing its calls. ↩︎
I did this again later on a smaller hike later that day when I heard this bird call that I've described as "unknown cackler". I tried looking it up on Merlin but got no results. After all, as nice as Merlin is for identifying, it currently only boasts being able to identify 30-40% of birds on Aotearoa. If you know what bird this is, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. ↩︎
heh heh ↩︎
Because of what I assume is island gigantism, New Zealand Pigeons are about 2x-3x the size of US city pigeons and you tend to hear them before you see them because of the sounds of their flapping wings through the foliage. ↩︎

Rightsholders and Theme Parks

2024-12-02T06:35:00.000Z

As someone who went to Aotearoa New Zealand for the first time, and as someone who grew up with the books and movies, I had to visit Hobbiton.

Or, rather, I should say I had to visit The Hobbiton™ Movie Set. When J.R.R. Tolkein died, his intellectual property (the books he wrote, the characters he created, and the settings therein -- including Hobbiton) were all overseen by the Tolkein Estate. We were surprised that none of the tour guides were wearing any styled cosplays or in-fiction costumes of any kind -- just matching, red-and-white checkered button-downs to help them stand out from the crowd. If this place was being called Hobbiton, if there was a Hobbiton sign, and if everyone was coming here because of having seen the movies, then why not dress up to sell the experience the way another theme park might?

On the Hobbiton Movie Set's website, there's a disclaimer at the bottom reading:

SHIRE TOURS, SHIRE’S REST, MIDDLE-EARTH, GREEN DRAGON, HOBBITON, THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the characters, places, items and events therein, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC and used under license by Rings Scenic Tours Limited and Wingnut Film Productions Limited, which are independently owned and operated. All rights reserved

I'm not an expert on IP law, but I found the careful way in which this tour used such legally-defined terminology to be both fascinating and goofy. To me, it seems like the touring company really wanted this experience to be similar to theme parks based around other movie properties: your Star Wars Galaxy's Edges or your Transphobic Wizarding Worlds. That said, there's clearly a balance to be struck between:

The corporation that owns the trademarks to the Lord of the Rings franchise, Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC
The corporations that run the tours, Rings Scenic Tours Limited and Wingnut Film Productions Limited
The farmers that own the land where the tours are happening, the Alexander Family

Digging into that third one for a second: as part of filming those movies, the location scouts for the movies found the farm as they were aerially traveling over New Zealand while looking for "rolling green hills, a big tree, and a big lake" to match the descriptions from the books. They found the sheep farm of the Alexander family, which had all three, and contacted the matriarch and owner of the land. Over the course of the filming of the original trilogy, additional trees both real and fake were transplanted and installed, the Hobbit hole facades were constructed, and all exterior shots of the Hobbit area were filmed there. There were some that were built regular size and some that were smaller (like 80% or 40%) to allow for the illusory look of Gandalf towering over the door to Bag End.^[1] They even lit the actual Green Dragon Inn set on fire and let it burn completely to the ground to film the shot where Galadriel shows Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring "what will happen if your journey fails."

When the Fellowship of the Ring movie came out in 2001, our tour guide mentioned that fans on the internet managed to triangulate where the filming took place, traveled to New Zealand, hopped the fences dressed as Hobbits, and according to our guide, "were invited in by the Alexander family for a drink, once they realized the fans didn't mean any trouble and weren't there to rob the place." By 2002 the Alexander family began doing tours of what was left of the movie set.

When the Hobbit triology began production, they once again needed a set for Hobbiton, so they contacted the Alexander family, and this time around it was negotiated that the Hobbit holes needed to be more permanently built out. This is what led to where we're at now: a tour company is allowed to go onto the Alexander farmland under strict supervision of tour guides so that they can show tourists the Hobbiton movie set and allow pictures that look like you went to the actual fictional place of Hobbiton. This also has included the building out of interiors of a couple of dwellings to allow tours to go through.

When it came time to go to the gift shop and see if there were any souvenirs, we noticed that all of the stuff that was specifically referencing anything from the tour said "Hobbiton Movie Tours" or "I visited the Hobbiton Movie Set" on them. This was all next to licensed LOTR merch of action figures or maps or whatever that you might find being sold at a hobby store over the last two decades. The more I kept looking around, the more I realized how specific the language had to be for this ~~theme park~~ movie set tour to be what I assume was in legal compliance with trademarks and IP law.^[2]

Contrasting that with how I heard folks from A More Civilized Age and Jenny Nicholsen talk about the Galactic Starcruiser at Galaxy's Edge, it sounded like Galaxy's Edge was far more of an "immersive theme park experience" to whatever end it was successful. I couldn't help but think "they wanted this Hobbiton Movie Set to be a theme park, but this is as close as they can get for now."

Missing from any of these pictures is the constant chirping of numerous birds who live in the area. Our tour guide also mentioned that during filming of the outdoor scenes, which required microphones to pick up all sorts of noises from the actors and props, they needed a way to keep birds out of the shots and from making too much noise in the background. To solve this, they hired a falconer to come on set with a raptor for the duration of filming. Doing this kept all the birds away until the falconer left so that the crew could get clean takes. I thought that was a fun and non-damaging way to fix their problem temporarily, which was nice to see after hearing so much about how previous wildlife problems had been solved™ by humans historically.

While there were lots of birds on the Hobbiton Movie Set, I didn't capture photos of any that were endemic to New Zealand in this part of the trip.^[3] Instead, here's a photo of a white-faced heron I saw later on. They're endemic to Australasia, which is again technically broader than I've been aiming for, but the next few will be much more focused, I promise.

It's probably the most common photo shown by people who go there, but here's a bonus photo of Bag End, the dwelling Bilbo left to Frodo at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. ↩︎
I suppose it could also be to try to legally differentiate for search engine optimization reasons? After all, I guess they got me to talk about it, and maybe it would be a similarly interesting conversation piece if I had a momento that said Hobbiton Movie Set on it? ↩︎
I did see a few mallards, but this post already has too many pictures, so here's a link to a bonus bird photo if you so choose. ↩︎

Pre-human History of Aotearoa

2024-11-30T21:00:00.000Z

I keep saying "New Zealand has a lot of unique birds" but to really understand why, we have to go back prior to any humans living there. Sure, birds like the Eurasian Blackbird and the House Sparrow were eventually introduced, but there are plenty more species that are native to the area.

This post, I'm going to start with the bird photo instead of ending with it. Here's a Pūkeko | Australasian Swamphen (endemic to New Zealand and parts of Australia) with two of its chicks that we saw walking around in a public park in Rotorua:

I'm no expert on this history, but from what I've read and heard from tour guides, the real history of Aotearoa started back when the Zealandian continent and the Australian continent both broke off from Gondwana some 80 million years ago and then subsequently began breaking apart from each other, finishing around 50 million years ago.

During that time, the K-T major extinction event wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. Elsewhere in the world, some mammals were able to survive the event, but the story goes that bats were the only surviving land-based mammal of Zealandia.^[1] All other mammals found today on the islands (sheep, rabbits, humans, cows, dogs, cats, mustelids, marsupials, etc) have been introduced over time, or must have been able to swim long distances in the sea like seals, sea lions, dolphins, and whales. I mentioned previously that the first Māori settlements weren't until the 1300s, which gives millions of years of time for different types of birds to arrive and evolve.

The largest of these birds was the moa: a flightless bird that could grow to be up to 12ft long and 510lbs. It grazed foliage in the bush, leading native trees to evolve to have smaller, denser leaves or tougher, more resistant ones. Moa only had one natural predator: Haast's Eagle, the largest eagle to have ever lived. When the Māori first landed, they began hunting the moa^[2] for food, and burning the bush to make room for settlements, which led to the moa going extinct prior to European arrival. Haast's Eagle also went extinct around that time, since it was so dependent on moa as its sole food source.

When the Māori landed, the polynesian rat came along with them, which led to the eradication of several bird species and several insect species that had never had predators before. Once the Europeans arrived and found land that looked just as farmable as the sprawling English countryside, they decided to bring over the classic English staples: sheep, cattle, dogs, and rabbits. Rabbits, being known for breeding extremely efficiently in good years, wound up reproducing out of control. These rabbits decimated local vegetation and drier areas of the South Island have still not recovered, over 150 years since the boom in rabbit population.

In a sort of "old lady who swallowed the fly" situation, Europeans then brought domesticated ferrets and stoats and weasels to the land in hopes that they'd be able to curb rabbit populations. Despite there being debate about the negative effects these mustelids would have on the local flightless bird populations, a few months later, thousands of mustelids had already been released. The problem was that this 'natural enemy' of the rabbit in Europe had found much easier prey: local fauna that had never had natural predators before.^[3]

In addition to this, Australian possums^[4] were introduced in the mid 1800s for fur trading. Given that they're also nocturnal omnivores, they competed with local bird populations over food, including over-feeding on local insects, seeds, fruit, and flora, leading to overhwelmingly negative effects for local wildlife.

Among others, the kiwi and kākāpō are examples of birds that evolved on Aotearoa with no natural predators. Whereas moa filled the ecological roles of larger grazing mammals like giraffes, antelope, or bison, the kiwi and kākāpō are nocturnal foraging birds that fill the niches of smaller mammals like hamsters or sugar gliders.^[5]

Kiwi birds have huge eggs^[6] that are occasionally left in burrows for short amounts of time when the father needs to get food. During this time, stoats will happily come and eat the egg or the chick if it's young enough that it can't effectively fight back.

The role of the National Kiwi Hatchery that we went to in Rotorua was to take unhatched kiwi bird eggs, incubate them in the safety of a lab, hatch the birds, vaccinate them against the most common bird-releated diseases, and feed them until they reached a certain minimum size (usually reached in a few months). After that, they were moved to predator free enclosures until they reached another minimum size, at which point they would be safe to be in the wild and could have powerful enough kicks to ward off mustelid attacks. The conservency also puts foot bands on all the kiwis for census reasons and then trackers on the male kiwis, since the fathers are the ones who incubate the eggs in the wild. With this, they've been able to grow the wild kiwi populations over the last decade, though there's still a lot more work to do. I also got to see a couple of day-old kiwis during my visit to the hatchery, which was incredible.

No photos or videos were allowed around the kiwis because their eyes and ears are so sensitive to light and sound. All it takes is one aloof tourist not realizing the flash on their camera is on to do lasting damage.

The kākāpō population fell to a minimum of 49 birds, which means that they're in a similar problem to cheetahs in terms of low genetic diversity. While all kākāpō currently live in predator-free areas off the coast of the main islands of New Zealand proper, there have been attempts to reintroduce them to the wild as well as sequencing their genome to try and use cloning or CRISPR to eventually improve their genetic diversity in the future.

Today, there's an ongoing campaign to rid Aotearoa of the three introduced predators representing the gretest threats to local wildlife, called Predator-Free 2050. By 2050, if everything goes according to plan, there will be no more rats, stoats, and possums. This has already gotten underway, and you can see stoat traps on major hikes fairly regularly.

I find it to be a really compelling series of questions, as someone who has never previously owned any fur from an animal that was killed to make the garment: what should the New Zealand citizens do with the caught and killed wildlife as part of this campaign? Would you as a tourist buy wool that has possum fur incorporated into it? Obviously the sheep wasn't harmed to get the wool, but the possum very much had to die to make the garment. Is protection of endangered species a good enough reason to kill possums? Is it less wasteful to use the animal coats from animals that the government has decided need to be killed for conservation reasons?

The discovery of the Saint Bathans mammal fossil indicates otherwise, but I get not changing scripts of tours that started prior ot 2006. ↩︎
Moa is the Māori word for domestic fowl. One of our tour guides figured they named them that way because moa had a similar role to chickens: bird that feeds you. ↩︎
You can read a lot more about the history of this whole situation at https://teara.govt.nz/en/rabbits/print ↩︎
Not to be confused with the American opossum ↩︎
While the kākāpō cannot fly by flapping its wings, it is very good at climing and it can glide or parachute after jumping out of trees, which made me think of sugar gliders or flying squirrels. ↩︎
The single greatest egg-size to bird-size ratio of any bird. They also have the smallest bill of any bird because bills are measured from nostril to tip, and the kiwi bird's nostrils are practically at the tip of the bill rather than near their face. No other bird's nostrils are like this. ↩︎

The Layout of Art Galleries

2024-11-30T06:13:00.000Z

I arrived in Auckland at 6am local time and was determined to not sleep the first day of my trip away. After checking out the waterfront and the Sky Tower, it began to drizzle, which timed pretty nicely with our plan to visit the Auckland Art Gallery (AAG), a moderately large, public, free art gallery that's open every day in the heart of the city. The closest I've come to this level of convenience in going to museums was when I lived in NYC and could go to the Met for free.^[1]

From my experience with art museums, especially on the East coast of the US, I was expecting to see art from old Europeans chronicling the first times Europeans had interacted with the land or with the people who were already there. I planned on rolling my eyes at language around "tradition" and nationalism, the same way I would about portraits of the founding fathers in the US.

I remember visiting the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle in mid 2018 and finding an exhibit full of Native American art from local tribes that was tucked away in the basement where it seemed like the average visitor would have missed it entirely. Maybe that's changed since the renovations finished in late 2018, but I haven't been back. So much of what I've seen of US confrontation of Native American history in museums is having relegated space far from the main entrance where it feels quietly acknowledged just how poorly the Native Americans have been treated over the centuries. Even the American art wing of The Met does this, to some extent. Look at how far into the exhibit you have to go to reach Native American art:

What I found at AAG was vastly different, which is part of a broader continuing theme I've written about where my assumptions were wrong. Here, as in other places around Auckland and the rest of the country, there was English and Māori written text side-by-side, and it felt like history that the country was willing to discuss openly, warts and all. I found that admirable and a nice change of pace.^[2]

I unfortunately didn't take many pictures of the gallery space itself, but I was able to download the online map of the building. As you enter the gallery, you enter the green area below of Aotearoa New Zealand Art and are immediately confronted with several pieces spanning topics of ecocentrism, celebrating the landscape of New Zealand, and a birds-eye video of someone humming what I assume is a Māori tune while rowing a boat.

It seems impossible to me to go to this gallery and not come away with some understanding of the influence of Māori culture on NZ history, and I think that's incredbly cool.

Once I realized this contrast to my experience of US museums, I began keeping a closer look out for the intentionality of how the space was arranged and decorated.

An example of this was in the Threads of Time Installation on the Mezzanine floor of the AAG, where this wall had centered an oil painting, Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni (circa 1625).

The details about that painting, provided by the AAG, read:

Forbidden by the Catholic Church from depicting saints with a ‘beauty exciting lust’, Baroque masters of figure painting like Guido Reni found ways to cover their nude subjects without compromising their sensual beauty. Saint Sebastian was a 4th-century Christian soldier who was shot by archers of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As he writhes against a tree, Sebastian’s twisted loincloth sinks under its own weight, suggestively revealing what it is supposedly intended to conceal.

We noticed immediately that the painting to the upper right^[3], middle right^[4], directly below^[5], and the far bottom left^[6] among others had all been placed in ways such that their subjects tended to look at the center of the wall towards Saint Sebastian. What better way to show the kind of "'sensual beauty' that was bordering forbidden-levels of 'lust' according to the Catholic Church" than to have so many other paintings on the same wall directing their subjects' gazes towards him?

This might be a 101-level lesson about art presentation, but it hit my "3-hours of sleep on a 13-hour flight" brain like an incredible epiphany. Your art doesn't just need to be presented according to which part of Europe nor which century it came from. And even if you do sort it by time period or country or artist, you still have so much control over the physical space the pieces take up. You as a gallery owner could choose to communicate things to the people looking at the art by placing that art within the context of the other art in that same room!

This happened again as we reached the Modern Women: Flight of Time exhibit on the top floor, which had artwork by and celebrating women throughout.

From the plaque beside it:

The underlying messages of A Lois White's mysterious 'female allegories', in which women cavort, dance or simply sway in unison, are often ambiguous. What might the rhythmical Trio, 1943 mean?
The answer lies in the artist's fascination with classical mythology and Renaissance art. Trio is like a modern interpretation of the classical myth of the Three Graces, made famous in such paintings as Botticelli's Primavera, 1477-82. White depicts the Graces Aglaia (splendour), Eufrosyne (joy) and Thalia (abundance) inside a compressed space, abstracting the goddess's bodies to construct a play of curves and sharp angles, which interlocked together like the sections of a frieze.

In my opinion, when you put a Trio of women in the wing celebrating the lives, experiences, bodies, etc. of women, and when your Trio of women look like their bodies "construct a play of curves and sharp angles, which interlocked together," there is no ambiguity. The context of the space answered the question for me.

I look forward to bringing this newfound appreciation of spaces and the contexts they give their art pieces into museums and galleries I travel to in the future. Maybe I should revisit my local city's one over the next month sometime. I wonder if I can get in for free by being a resident?

Per my previous post, Aotearoa New Zealand has a lot of endemic bird species and I took lots of pictures of them during my travels. This one was the first on my trip, and while it's not technically endemic, it is only found in the South Pacific. Perched on the lamppost in this picture from Albert Park is the Kōtare | Sacred Kingfisher:

As far as I could tell, the smaller bird soaring in the background is probably a Warou | Welcome Swallow, given the shape of the wings and tail, but I didn't notice I had even captured it until we had left the city, so there was no way to go back and double-check.

Could have gone for free, had I actually gone while I lived there. In my defense, there were only a few non-winter, non-covid months before we fled the city. ↩︎
To date, Columbus Day is still a federal holiday and is celebrated in 36 / 50 states, despite the Biden administration recognizing Indigenous People's Day in 2021 and being the first presidential administration to do so. ↩︎
Virgin in Prayer by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato (17th Century). ↩︎
The Annunciate Virgin (Santissima Annunziata) by Unknown Artist (17th Century) ↩︎
Study of Holbein’s ‘Dead Christ’ by Tony Fomison (1971-73) after Hans Holbein the Younger ↩︎
St Carlo Borromeo in Adoration by Unknown Artist (1620s) ↩︎

I Went to New Zealand

2024-11-29T06:22:00.000Z

I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.

To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I'm using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:

New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado^[1]
Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado^[2]
Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado^[3]
Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR^[4]

Throughout the trip's downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a little more context than we were getting from tours and museums and talking to folks. I figured that to understand the history of a place, it was good to understand who had lived there previously and how they had interacted with each other. The Māori people sailed to the islands and settled there in the 1300s, and while there were Dutch explorers mapping the islands in the 1600s, European colonists didn't arrive until the 1700s, the English colony of New South Whales wasn't formed until 1788, and New Zealand's declaration of independence wasn't signed until 1835.

A huge part of New Zealand history was The Treaty of Waitangi, which was a bilingual, written agreement between the Māori and the British that ostensibly sought to make both parties happy. As is often the case with British treaties with indigenous peoples historically, this wound up with the British largely getting what they wanted, and everyone else being unhappy, to put it lightly.

As some words in the English treaty did not translate directly into the written Māori language of the time, the Māori text is not an exact translation of the English text, particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty. These differences created disagreements in the decades following the signing, eventually contributing to the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872 and continuing through to the Treaty of Waitangi settlements starting in the early 1990s.

This treaty is also what led to Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke ripping up a proposed bill while performing the haka in Parliament in Wellington during my trip, which I loved as a means of protest. I cannot imagine an equivalent thing happening at the federal level in the US for a number of reasons, but maybe a state-level protest from indigenous tribes might happen here some day in my lifetime.

A major throughline I found as I read the timeline was that there are unconscious assumptions I tended to make as a USAmerican that don't necessarily have historical parallels in New Zealand, despite both countries being former colonies of England and all that that implies. There are parts where the difference in histories is obvious:

The piecemeal way that the US added states to the union over centuries compared to NZ being the collection of islands on the singular continental shelf
9/11 happening in the US and not NZ^[5] and how that colored the last few decades of military history

And then there are parts where I was really surprised at first when I learned of the differences:

Laws granting universal suffrage^[6] and minimum wage in NZ well before the US
Anti-nuclear legislation in NZ rather than the development and use of nuclear arms and nuclear power in the US

Besides the human-centric historical overview, I also learned that New Zealand has a lot of bird species that aren't found anywhere else. For that reason, my plan is to include a photo of a bird that's endemic to NZ in each blog post I do. Here's a black-billed gull near Avon River / Ōtākaro in Christchurch.

I plan to do a handful more posts about parts of my trip over the next few days, now that I'm home and can spend time organizing my photos and thoughts. Various topics include but are not limited to: the organization and layout of art galleries, pre-human history of Aotearoa New Zealand, the razor's edge of rightsholders who want to do a theme park but don't own the theme, birding as a means to interact with sound during hikes, the littlest penguins in the world, and the only royal family in the world that I care about.

New Zealand 5.223 million (2023) | Colorado 5.878 million (2023) ↩︎
New Zealand 103,483 mi² | Colorado 104,185 mi² ↩︎
Colorado's southern edge is 37°N ↩︎
Portland is 45.5152°N, which is a little further, but a coastal city I had been to that was pretty close felt good enough. Apologies that it couldn't be related to Colorado in some way. ↩︎
And not just because in NZ it'd be 11/9 because it's DD/MM/YYYY format like in Europe. ↩︎
New Zealand passed universal suffrage in 1893, nearly 27 years before the Ninteenth Amendment in the US. That means there were likely NZ children born after 1893 who grew old enough to vote before suffragates in the US (who had been fighting prior to 1893) were granted the same right. ↩︎