Wrapping it up: Birding

Bird-watching is a highlight of all our trips — especially this one, where we expected to see many birds we had never seen before, as well as those we saw in our prior trip to New Zealand and Australia.

We took with us The Hand Guide to the Birds of New Zealand and information about various wildlife tours. New Zealand has many nature reserves (like U.S. National Wildlife Refuges) set aside to protect endangered birds, animals and plants. Guided tours are available for each one, and are sometimes the only way to visit one. We toured as many nature reserves as our schedule and the weather allowed.

In some ways, birding in New Zealand is ridiculously easy, because there are relatively few species. For example, there is just one kind of sparrow (House sparrow), one swallow (Welcome swallow), one warbler (Grey warbler), one large accipiter (Australian harrier). There are three kinds of gulls — the little one with the black bill and legs (Black-billed gull), the little one with the bright red bill and legs (Red-billed gull) and the big one (Black-backed gull) — no problem deciding which one you're looking at.

The seabirds are a different story. There are 11 kinds of albatrosses, 13 shearwaters and 36 petrels! We wouldn't have seen any of those, much less known which one, without the guided tours.

The rare birds are very rare. Again, we wouldn't have seen and identified any of those without the guided tours of nature reserves. An exception: We found and identified our 499th life bird (New Zealand dotterel) all by ourselves — an especially satisfying experience.

The trip met our bird-watching expectations. In a bit more than seven weeks, we saw 77 different species of birds, 39 of them for the first time. Here are photos of about half of them.

Wrapping it up: Money and Prices

New Zealand money is fun. The bills are made of a polymer material, are of different colors, have pretty pictures, and each bill has transparent sections. (A Wikipedia article gives details of these anti-counterfeiting measures.)

The only bills are the $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100. There are no singles; instead they use $1 and $2 coins. These are fat and solid-feeling.

The only other coins are the 10¢, 20¢, and 50¢ pieces. No pennies or nickels. How do they make change? They don't! All unit prices are in multiples of 10¢. When items like groceries and fuel are priced by weight or volume, the calculated price is rounded off to the nearest 10¢. This seemed very sensible and we'd like to see it done here, as well. Get rid of the nickels and pennies.

Credit Card PINs

One difference that came up every day, sometimes several times a day, was the way credit cards are used in NZ. Every business that takes them has a little 10-key numeric pad on the counter, connected to their credit card validator (the "swipe here" thing). NZ natives never sign for a credit card purchase. After swiping their card and hitting OK to agree to the price, they key in a PIN. It's much faster than signing a receipt.

We couldn't do that; our US credit cards don't have PINs associated. So we'd hit the Enter key instead and the clerk would give us a receipt to sign. And almost always, they would check the signature against the card.

Prices

Marian very correctly says you cannot make a reasonable price comparison when you don't take into account salaries, tax structures, etc. etc.

We did not keep records of what we paid for things and we did not agonize over (or indeed, pay any attention to) any prices under $20. We bought a couple of larger items—Marian's jade pendant, David's merino sweater—and in each case, gave the price enough thought to realize, "that's a good deal."

Just the same, there was a general impression that common things cost more than at home.

Fuel did, for certain. Similar to European prices, diesel cost $1/litre, plus or minus a penny. (Gasoline was closer to $1.50/litre but fortunately our van used diesel.) That's us$3.80/gallon (us$5.60 for gas).

Today (16 Nov) David went online to woolworth.co.nz (Woolworth runs a chain of supermarkets in NZ) and got the prices of some randomly selected grocery items that are similar to their US counterparts. Then he got prices for the comparable items from safeway.com.

All prices were then scaled to dollars per liter or dollars per kilogram, as appropriate, and nz$ converted to us$ at the rate of nz$1 == us$0.75. Here are the results (details on request if anyone cares).

Product	NZ price	US price
Chicken	us$12	$11.95
Bread	us$4.20	$6.89
Ketchup	us$7.03	$3.69
Coke	us$2.19	$1.69
Milk	us$1.15	0.79

So there you are. Coke, milk and Ketchup cost quite a bit more, bread is quite a bit less, and chicken is a wash. So there's no clear evidence that Kiwis pay more or less, on the average, than we do.

Wrapping it up: Equipment for blogging

We took all our photos with our Nikon D50 equipped with the Nikon 18-200mm zoom. We had along a pocket Canon A670 for backup but we never used it.

Oh thou good & faithful servant...

This Nikon is a horse. We've been hauling it around with us since 2006. It should fly free, it's been on so many planes. It's gone thousand of miles riding on the floor between the seats in our RV; it has crossed Russia on the TSE. Its battery is good for three days of shooting. It comes on instantly and focuses even faster. If you see a picture you can pick it up, slide the power switch to "on", aim, and shoot all in one continuous motion, grab-swing-click. Try that with your average pocket camera. By the time it has finished booting up and stretching out its lens, your picture is long-gone. We've been using the Nikon so long, the rubber strip on the zoom ring has stretched out of shape and wants to slip off.

The Macbook Pro 13-inch, on the other hand, was bought new just before this trip. Unlike David's prior Macbook, the screen of the Pro has good enough color it can be used for accurate photo editing. Its sale-clinching feature was that it has a slot in the side for an SD card. No need to carry an external USB reader to input the camera chips.

"Mr. Fusion" reading pics from an SD card.

Every night we uploaded the day's pictures from the camera card into the Macbook, where Adobe Bridge stored them in a new folder named for the day, e.g. 20091031. A typical day produced 100 or so pictures, with a low of 20 and a high of 250.

We would sit together over the Macbook and cull the pictures, choosing on average one in five to keep permanently. The selected ones got moved into a separate folder for the week and David would go through them and add keywords for cataloging.

Then David would select from the day's "keepers" the ones to show in the blog. These he would work over lightly in Photoshop, typically spending no more than two minutes on a picture. Mods were kept to a minimum. Almost every blog picture needed to be straightened and most were cropped a bit. The Photoshop "Shadow/Highlight" tool was sometimes applied to bring out shadow details in a dark scene. And pictures taken on gloomy days got their contrast and brightness boosted a bit.

The "road pictures" that Marian took through the van windshield had to be color-corrected. Here is part of an uncorrected road picture.

The windshield makes things too green and gray.

Fortunately, New Zealand lines every road with white plastic markers that have little reflective stripes in them. Those stripes are perfect gray-scale references! All we had to do was get a Curves adjustment, and click the mid-gray eyedropper on one of those reflector stripes, to get an instant correction of the color.

Windshield color corrected - whites are now white and grays, gray.

The windshield also drained contrast and life from the scene so a little Photoshop Brightness-Contrast adjustment was in order to make a road picture look like what we saw.

Photoshop chases the clouds away.

But again, that was for pictures shot through the windshield. Pictures taken in the open, under full sun, never needed anything done to them. The amazing greens and brilliant flowers, foliage, and ocean waves came out of the Nikon, bless its pixels, looking just like how we saw them.

After being buffed-up in photoshop, David scaled each blog picture down to either 1024 pixels (most) or 1280 pixels (the super-good ones) and uploaded the scaled version to our Smugmug album. Once there, links to each pic could be put in the blog text.

When David finished drafting the blog entry he turned it over to Marian for proofreading and rewriting. Then it got posted and we could go to bed!

Batteries and Charging

We had two laptops, the Nikon's battery charger, and a charger for the cell-phone. Fortunately all of them were perfectly happy to take 220-volt 50hz power. We had two adapters to connect US-type plugs to NZ's sockets. The van offered two outlet sockets that of course were only live when the van was plugged in at a powered campground. Both outlets would be occupied all evening charging laptops, camera, or phone.