Holiday Haven birds

I'm going to concentrate on just birds with this post. We were lucky to see some during our visit to this coast.  Well, truth be told, I'll also throw in some pictures of things related to birds. Trees, and berries, and who knows what else.  Better to say I suppose that this post was inspired by birds.

I noticed this in a window in the living room when we arrived. I had thrown open the drapes and there it was.  

The very next morning, as Jeanne and I sat sipping coffee at the table on the deck, a couple of real wood pigeons arrived on the branches of a nearby tree. One flew off almost immediately, but I was able to snap several pictures of the other before it too, continued its morning's rounds elsewhere.  

Wood pigeons are native to New Zealand.    

These are cabbage palms.  The land on this side of the house falls away very rapidly so the deck is close to the level of the tree tops...  

...or even above them in some places.  This is a view of the forests and bay off the front, right corner of the deck.  

And here are our friends.  The one on the bottom flew away right after I snapped this. I caught just its tail feathers in the follow-up shot. 

I think they are intelligent looking birds.

 A tall karaka tree is next to the deck. In the lower center you can see some orange colored fruit.  

Wood pigeons are large enough to swallow the fruit whole. 

I read that wood pigeons love overripe fruit and will often congregate when piles of of it ferment. They'll eat until they stumble. They've been known to have to sleep it off a bit before they can fly home...  

(The flesh of the karaka is edible by humans. In fact, I have found karaka jam recipes on-line. Today, as I walked home from shopping and passed a couple of trees, I picked three to try. They were somewhat past their prime, beginning to be a little dried out. They didn't have much flavor.  However, if I was hungry and this was available, I know I'd find them more acceptable. (They did not taste bad, just not good) The kernels are edible ONLY after boiling them for hours or soaking in changes of water for many days to remove the toxins they contain. They were an important food for the early Maori.) 

This is a picture of a karaka tree just outside the mall in Henderson. 

(We're back at Nook Road now.) 

I took this series of pictures the same day as I got the morning shots.

Also as seen from the deck, this black tree fern is about 30 feet high. 

This tui was eating something from it but I couldn't tell what. 

This one doesn't show all it's characteristics in this shot so I've included a small picture below from a Wikipedia article.

The ubiquitous chicken.  A couple of them belong to the house and have their pen and coop across the garden.  I took a closer look at this bird after taking his picture. Definitely Not an intelligent looking specimen.      -djf

Holiday Haven, Jan. 2020

Allie has once again given our family a Christmas Holiday. This year, we'll be driving north and spending a few days relaxing at a home perched high above the Pacific Ocean. No city lights for us on this vacation. No sirens in the distance. No hot-rodders squealing their tires on Harvest Drive. 
We'll be at the end of Nook Road.  The very last house.  

As usual, you're invited to come along. 

As the roads we travel diminish in dimension, our expectations escalate. I hope you can share part of our pleasure as we arrive. 

 Heading north on the Motorway

Still on the divided highway, approaching the Pacific Ocean, peninsula, and islands.

We've turned on to a smaller side road, but one that is still fairly busy. 

Another turn off to a slightly smaller, quieter road. 

Farther back still. As likely to see horse riders here as cars. The peninsula we're on is high and rocky. 

Now the pavement has given way to gravel...

...which becomes noticeably narrower as we go. 

Finally, one last turn-off on to one-lane wide Nook Road. We approach the end of our journey at a walking pace...it's so hard to wait...

...until finally, we come around one last corner and arrive.  

Nook Road doesn't appear on this map but Jeanne has drawn an arrow that shows the  approximate location of our holiday house.

Let's go in...

Notice the plants on the left by the window.  

Yes, it's a very leggy tomato which has grown to the rafters above the room. It shares it's pot with a beginning banana tree. 

Here's the feature of the house I like best.  The very large deck. I'm going to spend a lot of time out here. 
I don't know if the land between the edge of the drive way and the ocean should be called a cliff or not. It's not bare rock. It has lots of trees and vegetation growing out of it, but is way too steep to climb down.  I'd guess we are 40 or 50 yards above the water.  

There were no boats in the harbor when we arrived, but 10 boats were anchored around it during our second evening there.   

I had fish 'n chips for dinner, my sunglasses are off, and my feet are up. I am restoring my tissues* with a beverage at the table on the deck. The sun is setting and a light, cool breeze quivers the cabbage palms.  

* A favourite P. G. Wodehouse-ism. 

What a feeling.  I would never have dreamt that I'd ever see such a sight. 

Our hosts have red lights on the walls. I think it gives the living room a cozy feeling.
See you in the morning.      -djf

A Yooperlite?

Every now and then, I take a short break from posting about Aotearoa. This is one of those times. I'll get back to looking at New Zealand with the next publication. 

Today, I want to share that unique treasure I mentioned back at the end of my New Year's Eve cave post. 

We got a Christmas package from Kathleen and Lee.  There was a jar of the very rare and exotic thimbleberry jam that we like so much inside and some teas of various kinds.  And then, down at the bottom of the package was a rock. It was labelled, from the U.P.  (Upper Peninsula of Michigan.)

"What a thoughtful gift," I said to Jeanne and Allie. Here is a little piece of Michigan, sent nearly half way 'round the world for us to treasure. A piece of home to hold. Later, when I told Lee that the package had arrived, he told me that there was much more to this rock than it first appears.

 He told me that it is a Yooperlite. That parts within it glow when lit by an ultraviolet or 'black' light. As soon as I heard that, I began searching for a black light locally, but quickly discovered that I would need to order one from an on line source. 




When my black light torch arrived, I put it to immediate use.  
These are the pictures I took of the rock under UV radiation.  

Below, you'll find a link to a video that describes the history of these rocks.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQnzUaTAXGc

This is a shot of rocks in a shallow cave on the beach I showed you in the header picture. If I had had a U.V. flashlight when I took this, who knows what we might be seeing?   

What an amazing world we live in.  I wonder what it would look like to us if we were were able to see in a wider range of wavelengths than we actually can?

Astronomers are able to "see" the universe in not only visible wavelengths, but also radio, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and even gamma-ray. The clouds of interstellar dust that make some areas of the universe invisible to us in visible light, become clear when observed with other wavelengths. I love reading about that kind of stuff.  

And since this short post is about an example of seeing, and the light that allows us to do so, whatever its wavelength, I thought I'd include a couple of videos I ran across some time ago that deal with light. That deal with slowing it down, or that deal with making it possible to see it, as if it were slowed down. 

I listed the shorter video first, in case you have a limited amount of time. It really is amazing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6HxdUQm5s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ys_yKGNFRQ

I hope you were able to enjoy both of these videos. They say it's important for us mature folk to keep our minds active and this sort of thing intrigues me. And I hope it does my brain some good besides.

This gift got me thinking once again about this world of ours. I talked about this back when I showed you pictures of Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel.  

We tend to be in awe of what we see here in New Zealand.  But to someone from New Zealand, our home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula would be equally awe inspiring. 

I once told someone here that the U.P. in places, can get 250 inches of snow per year. I converted that for them to 635 centimetres. I don't think they believed me.   

I was in a store recently that had a large vat of Canadian maple syrup. This is a rarity here and extremely expensive. Empty bottles were available nearby that you could fill from the spigot on the vat. A label on the vat described the natural wholesomeness of this exotic product and exquisite, dark, rich flavor. I guess they needed the label to explain the price they were asking.  (And U.P. maple syrup is even better, in my opinion.) 

When Jeanne and I were being driven up and down the hills of Waiheke Island just off shore from Auckland, we commented that we felt as though we were back in the Houghton-Hancock area. And pointed out that the Yoopers in those cities not only deal with hills every bit as long, steep and twisting as those on Waiheke, they do it when the roads are covered in ice.  

We have Lake Superior (82,103 square km).  We have our color season. We have pasties. We have the Copper Country with it's thimbleberries and now Yooperlites.  

I think the world is pretty much exotic everywhere. What is exotic to a person just depends on where he's not from.  

And thanks again Lee and Kathleen, for such wonderful treats.                     -djf

More of New Year's Eve at Muriwai

This is the last of three posts about our New Year's Eve at Muriwai Beach.  

We had arrived about an hour and a half before sunset and spent the time before it exploring. I showed you my sunset photos on New Year's Day.  Then,you saw the cave pictures in my last post. In this one, I have shots of Allie and the boys and of how the Muriwai blowhole has changed with time.  

One last picture as we leave the cave. 

Part of the gannet colony. 

Allie and the boys head off on a jaunt to the rocks below the gannet colony.

They're not climbing up to the birds, but they are across the channel from the rock shelf I am going to show you next.  

These next two pictures were taken on 04-03-15.  You can see the  blowhole.  

The rest of these photos were taken on New Year's Eve 2019. 

I probably should have hiked up to the top of the hill and taken another shot from the 2015 location so the comparison in the blowhole size would be most obvious, but I didn't feel like climbing all those stairs.  

Instead, these were taken on the blowhole rock shelf. You will see how much larger the blowhole has become.  It's pretty obvious. 

This is the channel that the waves follow in to the blowhole.

It's low tide so this puny little wave will hardly make it to the end of the channel.  It shows what the wave action is like though. 

 I think you can see that this blowhole is now huge.

Notice the 'bridge' of rock at the other end of the hole.

 The water would come in from the channel beyond the bridge and through the opening at the very center of the picture. 

 I'm now standing at the edge of the bridge, looking across.  

The open channel to the sea is on the left. The new expanded blowhole is on the right. 

I think if you go back to the first picture from 2015, you'll see a small hole next to the blowhole. The small hole in the 2015 picture is now the somewhat larger hole you see at the end of this bridge. 

I've started walking across the bridge. Look at how much rock has collapsed into the hole.  I don't know when we'll get back out here at high tide to see the action, but I doubt that this throws much water up any more. It's probably not a blowhole any longer, just a hole. Maybe a 'splashy hole' at best. 

This is the view on the opposite side of the shelf of rock from the channel to the blowhole.  Folks are snapping pictues all over the place. 

In the next picture, I'm going to be standing where the girl just above is now standing. 

I'm looking back toward the beach. 

I'm heading back to rendezvous with Jeanne and Allie and the boys.

We had a wonderful evening and kept our traditon alive. Thanks for sharing it with us.    -djf