Kauri Forest - Big Trees and Little Defenseless Birds

Ok yes we are softees.  Accustomed to comfortable beds and warm sleeping accommodations, after many days on the road camping (well actually only 2), we were more than ready to stay in a motel! The Kauri Coast Top 10 hotel was just what we were looking for - 5 soft beds, a nice kitchenette and a heated room. It was quite nice to wake up and not have to deal with a very dewy wet tent and packing up all our camping stuff. Besides that, it had a cool playground with a giant trampoline, a flying fox (zip line)

and a stuffed Kiwi (bird not person from New Zealand).

The night we arrived we went on a hunt to see the elusive Kiwi (once again, bird, not human). Bob the Builder may be famous in the US but here it is “Bob the Kiwi Guide.” Yes this man is an ecologist who is wise in the ways of the national bird. He took our family and an older Australian couple on a night hike through the Trounson Kauri Forest.  It was a cloudy night, perfect for kiwi birds to emerge from their underground holes, since they like it dark.  Not as perfect were the "hiking" conditions, since it was basically pitch black under the kauri forest canopy (more on that later) and we could not bring torches (Kiwi word for flashlight) because the white light scares away the Kiwis. According to Bob, they run away faster than Oscar Pistorius looking for a defense team when they see lights. Ha ha. Bob walked in front of us, searching with a large red light (red light is not in their color spectrum I guess) while we stumbled along behind him. At one point, the Aussie almost bit it on a tree stump/root and unleashed a bad word or three but no permanent harm was done. Along the path, we saw a long fin eel, fish and crayfish in a stream, glow worms among the trees, and giant grasshoppers the size of a human hand. The Aussie guy exclaimed that you would NEVER take a nighttime walk in his country as you would either get bitten by a snake, attacked by small animals, or take down by a giant croc, but Bob assured us it was quite safe in NZ. (We were a little creeped by the grasshopper however.)

And then we heard it in the distance, the haunting call of the male kiwi. I will try to insert a sound bite here but it is like two high pitched notes, repeated over about 30 secs.

Here is a link to the mating call on Youtube (hope this works). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=498lYih-ycw

The female responds back with a low grunting noise (similar to Rod Stewart with a head cold). We heard both of these calls floating through the forest several times on our 90 minute walk and each time we stopped in our tracks while Bob scanned the forest floor with his red light, looking for small round brown things. We also tried to be as quiet as possible so we would hear the female kiwi scurrying to find the male.  Bob described that sound as something small running over corn flakes  (because of the leaves on the forest floor) but we didn't ever get close enough to hear it. Here are some kiwi facts for you:

-small brown colored flightless birds
-can live up to 60 years without predators but their mean age is usually 20
-grows to about the size of a football (rugby not American football)
-mates for life and is extremely territorial (a mating pair claim an area of about 7 soccer fields)
-passionate about All Blacks rugby (whoops, that's the kiwi human, not the bird)
-may look cute but as just soon peck your eyes out if you look at them twice (just kidding)
-actually they are quite defenseless, being flightless and have a small, weak breast plate, so they usually die from being crushed to death.

Now you are probably wondering how kiwis could even exist in the wild. Well, before the Europeans came, there were no predators on NZ at all. Crazy huh. But, due to the introduction of rats, stoats, weasels, possums, cats and dogs, as of 1997 there were only 1,000 kiwi in NZ.  Some of those animals actively hunt and kill kiwis, while some merely compete with them for habitat or eat their eggs.  However, after conservation efforts, the DOC believes the current population of this endangered bird has grown to 14,000. The DOC recently did a count and determined that there are 33 mating pairs and 14 juveniles in Trounston Park, which is 800 acres.

The final question that is keeping you on the edges of your seats, no doubt, is whether or not we saw a wild kiwi. Drum roll here…. Yes we did! As we were ending our tour, having heard but not seen the mysterious bird, we crossed a grassy meadow and behold, there in the distance was an awkward looking brown bird bobbing around in the grass.  Bob trained his red light on it, and we caught a fleeting glimpse before it scampered? skipped? lumbered? (I don’t know how to describe it but they move strangely) back into the bush. Sweet as!

The next day we did a 180 and went tramping around looking for giant trees. The kauri tree is the NZ equivalent of a redwood or sequoia. Well, the redwood grows taller and the sequoia grows wider but the kauri is pretty awesome. It is a protected tree because has been suffering from kauri dieback disease (which is a fungus that causes the tree to, you guess it, die back). So we had to spray the soles of our shoes with detergent upon entering and leaving each kauri forest in order to prevent its spread. The tramp through the forest was awesome, filled with these large trees.

The Kauri tree can grow to be over 2,000 years old.  Its first several hundred years it grows upwards, until it grows taller than the rest of the forest canopy.  Then after that it actually stops growing taller, drops its lower branches, and then just grows thicker. A cool thing about the trees also is that they are host to a variety of other plants and fungus.  So at the canopy you see orchids and all manner of plant-life in its upper branches.

First we saw an awesome grove of trees all in excess of 10 feet in diameter (picture above) and then we went to see Yakas, the 7th largest Kauri tree. It was our favorite because we were allowed to touch it. Behold the treelovers.

The climax was Tane Mahuta, the largest known kauri in New Zealand.  Tane Mahuta translates in Maori to Lord of the Forest.From Wikipedia...

According to the Maori creation myth, Tāne is the son of Ranginui the sky father and Papatuanuku the earth mother. Tāne separates his parents from their marital embrace until his father the sky is high above mother earth. Tāne then sets about clothing his mother with vegetation. The birds and the trees of the forest are regarded as Tāne’s children.

Our favorite part of visiting this tree was overhearing an Indian couple who came walking to the viewing platform, and the man exclaimed "Have you ever seen a tree so big? It must be hundreds of years old!"  Yep it's big, it's bad, and it's over 2,400 years old!  Unfortunately, this picture really fails to adequately depict the immensity and girth of this tree, as there is nothing to put it in perspective, and we were probably 75 feet from its base when taking this shot.