A few days ago, Marian was updating the joint Bird Life List she keeps for us and noticed that we were at #499. "One more new bird and we'll have 500," she said. This later turned out not to be so; her spreadsheet had 500 rows, but the first row is column headings, so we were at #498 actually. So today we went looking for #499.
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As we set out we noticed at the entrance to the RV park, we noticed a variant Pohutakawa with a yellow blossom.
Later on that run we noticed a perfect bottle-brush bush.
Truth is, these grow 200 feet from our home. But it was perfect. We also noticed that the Manuka was in bloom.
This is the stuff from which the bees are making the wonderful honey. Also we've been seeing a lot of a tree, probably a European import, whose new foliage is bright yellow-green. Don't know what it is but it sure stands out even on a cloudy day.
And twice today we noticed thickets of some probably native tree that is coming in lipstick-pink.
So we made a side-trip to Opoutere (no idea how to pronounce it) where there is a sand spit where breeds the endangered (1400 pairs exist) New Zealand Dotterel.
The green fence is to keep people and dogs away from the birds while they nest. We walked around and saw a lot of a very common shore bird, the Variable Oystercatcher. These guys are funny because they sometimes stride along together, yakking to each other, like businessmen in an intense discussion.
But no dotterel. Or we thought not, but it turns out they are just very well camouflaged for sand dune life. Pop! There he was.
Notice he's wearing four (4) leg bands? No wonder he's endangered, so many people prying into his love-life. So that was bird #499. We have hopes that bird #500, if it turns up in the remaining days of this trip, will be a Rifleman. It's a tiny, tiny bird with a stumpy tail that never stops moving, walking spirals around tree branches. We think we saw one once, but it moved too fast to be certain.
There are several things we could have looked at along the way to Coromandel, like the Hot Water Beach, where there are thermal vents near the low-tide line and you dig a pit in the sand and it fills with hot water, but instead we turned onto what turned out to be a narrow, rough, twisting and steep gravel road, highway 309.
Faster, Bwana, the rhino is catching us...
Tilted because Marian was bracing herself.
The point of this digression was to visit a grove of Kauri trees. (Remember them? see 20 Sept.) A little island of big trees that somehow escaped the lumberjacks.
You say they don't look big?
They really are big.
Really big.
They support a whole ecology on their branches.
In Coromandel we bought groceries for our last NZ meals. Tomorrow down the Pohutakawa Coast.
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