Geoff made us blueberry pancakes for breakfast and we bid farewell at ten and drove west through the park and reached the coast only 35 miles away.
At Hokitika, a small beach resort, we stopped at a sign for a Glowworm Dell. We walked the short walk to a damp shady grotto, but the dim daylight was too bright for the worms (larvae) that excrete a string of bioluminescent goo that attracts insects. In most places it costs over $100 for a glow worm boat trip and this was Free, but unfortunately too early.
Bob directed us inland about 10 km to large Lake Kaniere to look for the New Zealand Falcon. We saw a lovely family of Paradise Shelducks and the silhouette of a falcon sitting on a tree across the lake but couldn’t positively ID it as a falcon - there’s only one on NZ so we would just have to see it fly, but it suddenly dropped and disappeared.
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| Female Paradise Shelduck |
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| Male Paradise Shelduck with young |
We returned to the highway, driving through historic old gold rush towns and over many wide rivers of turquoise glacier water. And, as we went through an area of open fields, a falcon flew by so that Bob and Hil could see and identify it. We continued on and found the turn off to Okarito beach where we are going tonight for a kiwi walk just to check out its precise location, and then continued another hour down to Fox Glacier and checked in to the Rainforest Motel, a collection of log cabins with plain, modern interiors. It was only 5:45 but we walked next door to an old hotel and had dinner (lamb shank over mash for me and steak sandwiches complete with fried eggs for H & R) and tiny glasses of beer as there are no toilets on the kiwi walk.
We drove back to Okarito under clearing skies and met the kiwi man himself, Ian Cooper, and six others. Ian is very entertaining and enthusiastic and quite a staff sergeant! He took us into the forest, lectured us about kiwis, and the very rare Okarito Kiwi in particular, told us how to stand when a kiwi comes near so we all can see it. He divided us up into three teams with one radio each and spread us out along the track where we stood absolutely still and quiet for an hour in the cold wind. He knows all the local kiwis by name and has put radio transmitters on each one and he said the “B-Zed” was getting up (it was still light at 9) and would shuffle down the slope in front of us and cross the track. If we heard kiwi footsteps we would make chipping noises to our radio man who would whisper the message to Ian.
After an hour, Ian decided to move us along to “Fancy” and “Jolene’s territory which would have been fine except he marched us along at a very fast clip – fast, in the dark but luckily with small flashlights. We stopped suddenly and Ian pointed his flashlight on to a small owl, the Morepork, so called because he says “More pork” all night long, which we had heard elsewhere, but hadn’t seen. We got great views of this cute owl weaving his head back and forth trying to see what was bothering him! We continued marching; we had to keep up and in order and it was all I could do to move so fast in the dark.
After a mile and half we stopped and he listened to see where these kiwis were. Unfortunately they were in the middle of their territory and as we can’t go stumbling off the trail, we suddenly turned around and just at quickly marched back to “B-Zed’s” land. This was really exhausting and as we were wrapped up against the cold, we got really hot marching up hill!
“B-Zed” wasn’t cooperating - he may have gotten spooked by all of us - and we walked to the road to try another group. Four of us gave up at this point (11 PM), but Bob, Hil and I continued for a short time until Ian said it was hopeless this night! He gets 98% kiwi sightings for his tours so it was just our luck that we were in the unfortunate 2%, but there it was. We hadn’t succeeded with seeing the Kiwi unfortunately but we had fast walked 3.3 miles in the dark of night !
We returned to our motel at 1 AM and collapsed into bed.
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