In our area, the first Gambel’s quail chicks of the year usually start showing up in early May, clustered around their parents under the mesquite trees in the yard, pecking expertly at the ground like the precocial youngsters they are.  This year, since we weren’t around then, we missed the “nebula phase” of their development — when they’re so small and move so fast that it’s hard to count them: a streaky brown cloud of down orbiting the adults like electrons, running everywhere because their legs are so short.

Now that we’re back, the feeders are full again, and the parents are bringing their broods around.  For the past two days there’s been a family of six cleaning up nyger thistle that the frenzy of fressing finches let fall from the front mesquite feeder: two adult quail and four chicks.  The chicks are still quite young, but no longer downy — adolescent really, and they’re beginning to get little nubs on their foreheads where their topknots will grow in.  They are still cryptically colored buffy-streaky so that they’re nearly invisible against the soil in the dappled sunlight let through by the mesquite’s tiny compound leaflets.  Papa usually stands watch as the family feeds, which they do at a more leisurely pace than when it’s the adults alone.  This may be a clutch incubated in the spiky tangle of our fan-palm, where a hen successfully raised a brood of 9 last year.

Normally I’d snap a photo of the family scene above.  But because I can’t get a decent picture through the reflection-hazed windows looking out onto the feeders (I’ve tried!), and going outside would start the whole shebang to flee, I thought I’d sketch from life (above).  I’m just finding my way around watercolors again after a very long absence, and haven’t managed to loosen up as much as I’d like — at this point, I seem to produce tinted drawings, rather than acheiving a freer painting style.  One reason for that is that it’s such a different process than capturing “birdness” in the broad, unblended swatches of opaque glaze color, which is what I normally do, as in this Three Star Owl male Gambel’s quail wall tile pictured to the right.

A typical Campervan breakfast: instant oatmeal, manuka honey, instant cocoa, dried fruit, Sanitarium brand soya milk, and Vita-brits!  No paper plates here: note the nice “china” that’s supplied with the campervan — posh!

Still, some are never satisfied:

“What, no Arrow Squid?”

icebergs in Lake Tasman, Mt.Cook/Aoraki National Park

With a couple of exceptions, I haven’t really posted much about something that’s very plentiful in Aotearoa/NZ: amazing landscapes.  Although there’s lots and lots of pasture land, crammed with sheep and cattle and non-native trees and grasses, the islands have a plentiful supply of charming vistas, rugged and awesome terrain, and outright wilderness.  All of which is packed into what seems to people used to the sprawling American West to be on a convenient and compact scale.

Because of the high latitudes, mountains don’t need to be Rocky-Mountain high to be snow-clad, and towards the south, bush-line is usually just over 1000m, or 3400 feet in elevation.  There are places you can be hiking a glacier and look down onto a surfing beach.  The vegetation reflects this variety, and where native growth still exists, it’s exotic and extradordinary: temperate rainforest thick with tree-ferns, sub-tropical bush with cabbage trees, high-latitude Nothofagus forest, low-growing alpine mats.  We even found some stray prickly pear in bloom around the warmer spots in gardens on the volcanic lakes area, and the occasional Agave americana in landscapes.

Periodically I’ll post a sampling of some of the places we saw.  Here’s a few, with their captions beneath each one:

Tiri Tiri Matangi lighthouse, Cabbage trees, and native bush

Curio Bay fossil forest in tidepools, the Catlins

Mitre Peak at sunset, Milford Sound

treeferns in Trounson Kauri Park

Kaikoura Mountains and the Pacific Ocean

(all photos A. Shock)

(The third in a series: read the first and second parts)

It had been a while since I’d had a note from professor Harrower with Ganskopf numbers to illustrate, and there had been some changes at the Foundation since my last visit. Stanley was still at the front door in his epauletted shirt and ill-fitting trousers with the gold side-stripes, but now there was a sternly uniformed security guard at the Special Collections entrance.  He had no name tag and a sidearm.  Also, the old-school turnstyle had been replaced by a state of the art metal-detector.

Another difference was the librarian’s custodianship — after making sure I was settled, Miss Laguna left me alone with the day’s owls, which she’d never done before.  This may have been because for the first time since I’d been coming to the Foundation Library, there was another patron there, also viewing an item from the Collection.  When I asked, Miss Laguna emphatically whispered “That’s Dr. Danneru” and glided solicitously back across the room to his table.  I couldn’t see what he was accessing — the piece was sunk deeply into its black velvet cushion.  So while pretending to fuss with my lamp, I spent a moment studying the man instead, but couldn’t tell much.  An academic, probably (who else would be here?), although he emitted a mildly exotic sleekness (“Europeaness” Becca would call it snarkily, making it a point to pronounce it anatomically) that didn’t coincide with my experience of university professors.  Maybe this explained why Miss Laguna was overlooking the steaming cup of contraband on the table next to him — or maybe had even supplied it: while I was confined to dry media and a dry throat, “Dr. Danneru” had hot tea.

Still, I wasn’t truly jealous of Miss Laguna’s attention: it was easier to draw without anyone attending me, and I could focus on the current crop of “fetishes”. It was a mixed group of owls: two of stone, and one of a brass-like metal. Here is the finished rendering, along with my hasty notes.

From left to right:

• GKC/orn111a (3.23cm ht): carved red-veined marble cobble in the shape of an “earless” owl.  The Library catalog describes it as “alabaster”.  Feet hooflike.  Note to Professor Harrower: I don’t know what the backs of these pieces look like; without Miss Laguna’s once-again purple-gloved fingers nearby, I was not able to touch the artefacts to turn them over.

• GKC/orn98a (3.88cm ht): carved semi-transluscent green stone — jade, jadeite, nephrite?  also an “earless” owl, its ventral vermiculation or maculation indicated by a sort of checkerboard.  Chip in head above left eye.  Tail? toes? at bottom of piece indicated by five points.  Must be tail; why would there be five toes?  Didn’t GKC/orn335f also have 5 toes?
  

• GKC/orn399d (3.10cm ht): also “earless” although it gives the impression of having ears put back in irritation like a cat. This is the only metal owl I’ve seen so far; cast? brass? bronze?  The Library catalog uses the abbreviation “br” which is not helpful.  In brackets next to that are three characters in a stroke-character alphabet I don’t recognize except they are not Greek or Cyrillic.  When no one was looking, I tipped this one up just a little with the eraser end of my mechanical pencil, and could see a small loop on the back, as if it were meant to be hung on a cord or sewn to a garment.
  

My stay was shorter than usual: I worked rapidly to complete the pencil sketches and packed up in a hurry, burning my fingers on the lampshade. After indicating to Miss Laguna she could return the owls to their secret nests in the secure stacks, I rushed back to my hotel room and laptop — there was something I was eager to look up.

Living in Southern California as a kid, I was familiar with the massive, blade-leafed clumping plant widely used in landscaping called Flax, or New Zealand Flax.  So I shouldn’t have been surprised to see it growing everywhere in New Zealand, right?  Still, my first dim thought was, “Oh, they landscape with it here, too, just like in California…”.  But when I say growing everywhere, I mean everywhere.  So, after a bit, I realized that Harakeke (flax) is a native plant, and that Aotearoa is the True Home of Flax.

Not a grass, not a yucca, and NOT related to northern hemisphere flax of the genus Linum, New Zealand flax plants (Phormium spp.) occur naturally in a huge range of colors and sizes — supposedly over 2000 varieties — and grow on headlands, along rivers, at the beach, in the mountains, in beech forests, as single plants or in massive monospecific expanses. In spring, the blossoms on the long flower spikes are used for food by raucous Tuis and lovely olive Korimako, or Bellbirds (photo, right), or a handy perch the rest of the year.

The leaves have long been used by Māori to weave into creative and symbolic kete, bags or kits, and other articles of clothing and rain-wear, as well as amazing woven wall-linings in traditional buildings (photo below).  Very versatile stuff. Raranga, the art of plaiting harakeke, is laden with symbolic importance for Māori people, as an emblem of the survival of traditional culture.

One of my favorite campgrounds was at Curio Bay, where the flax stand on the headland was carved up into very private spaces.  From a distance, all you could see were the lids of the campervans (photo below) — a nice change from some of the parking-lot like “motor camps” you find everywhere.

(Photos A. Shock: flax on a seashore headland, North Island; Bellbird on old flax blossom stem, Tiri Tiri Matangi Island; flax wall-weaving between carved wooden wall panels from Te Puawai o te Arawa, a Māori carved house dating to the 1880s, now in the Auckland Museum; Curio Bay motorcamp, South Island)

You may be wondering about the much-posted Hen, a female Anna’s hummingbird, and her two nestlings, who were busy growing up in an Aleppo Pine in our back yard.

As far as we know, the Hen fledged her young successfully while we were in New Zealand. We’ll never know for sure, but the evidence supports a successful fledging. Two years ago, a nest failed when it was torn down by a predator, but this nest looks as if it lasted through a full nesting cycle: it’s intact on its branch and a little stretched out, the way spider-web-based hummer nests are designed to do to accomodate growing nestlings.  So, it’s entirely possible that the Stalwart Hen is sitting on a new nest at this time (although it’s past peak Anna’s breeding season in the low desert), and her fledglings are among the YOY (young of the year) Anna’s we see coming to the nectar feeders.

(Photo of female Anna’s hummingbird by M. Held, from Wikimedia Commons)

The human obsession with rapidly heating things like water makes no sense to Blupeng, although there is something oddly pleasing to him about the shape of the Sunbeam Express.

Right.  Since Peter Jackson filmed the Lord of the Rings trilogy in NZ, you can’t escape LOTR effects on tourism there.  Week-long coach tours and pricey four-wheeling trips to locations, picture books, tea towels, keychains, Gollum figurines staring out of the windows of the souvenir shops, and lots of posters of Legolas — it’s everywhere.  They say that LOTR put NZ on the map for many Americans, who all wanted to go to Oz before, Land of Crocodile Dundee.  The LOTR filming locations are even on the official AA national road atlas, with their own little unique yellow movie camera logo→

Now, in my day I’ve been as much as a Tolkienophile as the next person (maybe more; I know the difference between Sindarin and Quenya) and I enjoyed the movies.  But the LOTR thing was never a part of my desire to visit NZ.  Beyond the fact that it was an inspired choice for filming Tolkien’s story, the whole angle of being interested in an entire country with an astounding human history and complex natural history just because little bits of it stood in for a fantasy landscape made me mildly crabby, I’ll admit.  By contrast, the good-natured Kiwis are astute enough to have recognized the giant kiwi-sized golden egg that Peter Jackson, a Kiwi himself, laid on them, and (to scramble metaphors) they’ve run with it: Yanks want to visit the wind-riffled golden plains of Rohan?  “Nye problim — Paint a Hobbit on the Jeep then, mate!”  Good on ’em, I say: ka-¢hing!

So, there we were on a bright, blustery day driving along the Desert Road in the Tongariro National Park, the center of the Volcanic Highlands area, the most volcanically active region of all of NZ, when there it was, an ominously symmetrical volcanic cone jutting up all by itself from the arid tip-tilted plain at its feet.

What was my reaction?  Was it, “Oh, look E, there’s Mt. Ngauruhoe, the youngest volcanic peak on the island at only 2500 years old; its summit is tapu to the Māori, and it last erupted from 1973- 1975 when it chucked lava chunks 3 km and issued a 13 km-high column of ash that collapsed and flowed down the slopes in gaseous and destructive scoria flows…”  ?

No.

No, it was:  “Cooooooooooolllllllllllllllll!  Mt. Dooooooooommmmmmmmm!”

It was kind of like when the Company of the Ring was ambushed by orcs on the banks of the Anduin after leaving Lothlorien, and

“Yrch,” said Legolas, falling into his own tongue.

— these gut reactions are inevitable in moments of excitement.