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)

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.

The Bull kelp in NZ coastal waters is really robust stuff, and seems to be quite common along the rocky shores of the islands.  The photo on the right is of some moderate sized kelp-wrack.

After posting earlier about how Māori use kelp bags for storing Titi, I found I had a picture of poha-titi (Māori kelp containers) after all: it’s from a NZ Dept of Conservation (DOC) explanatory trail sign (which explains the odd quality of the photo) on the Ackers Point track on Stewart Island.  The track leads through fairly intact bush ringing with Tui and Bellbirds to a headland overlooking the Foveaux Strait, the water which separates Stewart Island and the South Island.  In season Ackers Point is heavily used for nesting by both Titi (Sooty shearwater) and Hoiho (Yellow-eyed penguin).  Because we were there so late in the year there was no evidence of any nesting by either species.  But the young Titi might actually still have been huddled hidden in their burrows in the flax and beech trees next to the trail under our feet, waiting for their adult plumage to finish coming in any day so they could take to the chilly sea.

So, this is what drying rimu (kelp) bags look like, on their way to being stuffed full of plump mutton birds.  According to what I’ve read, the kelp is selected carefully, then the wider leaves are split, inflated and dried, then re-softened by working, like split suede.  It’s at that point that cleaned and boiled mutton birds are packed into the kelp “bags” with the birds’ own rendered and strained fat, then the whole thing is laced together with harakeke (flax).  In the old days it wasn’t uncommon for a bag to contain 20 or 40 birds!  (Check out this brief page on Māori kai — food — basics).

Now, you can simply order muttonbird online, and it comes to you looking like this, with all the hard work already done:

(By the way, I’m definitely not endorsing ordering muttonbird online, and not just for conservation reasons.  In the US, sea birds are protected, and it may well be highly illegal to import it here, like buying marine mammal products in Canada — you can buy them there, but you can’t legally bring them into the US.)

Photos: kelp, E. Shock; poha-titi, A. Shock

Afterthought: is it possible that a teenaged mutton bird is called a hogget bird?  And if so, is young bull kelp called calf kelp?

The Kiwi crossing sign is frequently reproduced on teeshirts, keychains, pins and buttons (called badges, in NZ, if you ever need to ask), and other tourist stuff.  It’s certainly charming, but we found this other Kiwi crossing sign in only one place, painted on the asphalt adjacent to the yellow warning sign.  With a few basic lines, it really reads Kiwi, like a good cave painting.

There’s also a penguin crossing sign, delightfully species-specific.  This is a Yellow-eyed penguin warning sign, from Stewart Island.  Does that mean it’s okay to not stop for Blue Penguin?(Photos A. Shock)

One thing the Southern Hemisphere does well is sea birds.  Albatrosses, gannets, penguins, prions, storm petrels, diving petrels, gadfly petrels, giant petrels, shearwaters, skuas, mollymawks, and more occur in baffling numbers of species (and nomenclature).  Normally, many of these birds are found well out to sea, over the deepwater pelagic zones.  But in tectonically active NZ, there are places where the continental shelf drops off into deep water quite close to shore — like at Kaikoura on the east-northeast coast of the South Island — and in those places you don’t need to venture far from the harbor for excellent seabird viewing.

The birds are accustomed to following fishing vessels, and close-up views are possible if you just chum a chunk of frozen fish-liver behind the boat.  Above a gibbering mob of Pintados (Daption capense, Cape “pigeons”) is joined by Nellies (Macronectes spp, Giant Petrels) and a couple of species of Albatross to joust over gobbets of yummy chum off the back of a small net-fisherman.

I’ve seen Albatross in Antarctic waters, sitting on the surface at a distance from the ship, or skimming adroitly behind the vessel, drafting over the huge waves of Drake’s Passage.  They’re enormous birds — the largest Royals and Wanderers have a wingspan of nearly 12 feet (3.5 meters).  A big wingspan means long wingbones, and when these wings are folded, they jut out behind the bird with a gawky elbowy effect, visible in the photo above of this Toroa, a youngish Wandering Albatross (Diomedea gibsoni).  The “elbows” actually extend almost as far as the tips of the primary feathers, a characteristic I haven’t noticed in any other bird.

The petrels and albatrosses are Procellarids, or tube-noses: in other words, their nostrils are enclosed in one or two tubes along their strong, grooved, hooked bills, a trait visible in the photo above.

As puffins are still eaten in Iceland, some species of tubenoses are harvested for food in NZ.  At this time of year, Māori are entitled to collect Muttonbird chicks (Titi, Sooty Shearwater, Puffinus griseus) from their nesting burrows in the coastal bush and mountains.  (The adults have already headed out to the wintering grounds, some as far away as the waters off the coast of California; the young are left behind to grow in their adult plumage.)

Traditionally, cooked Titi were packed in their own fat in kelp bags, where they stayed fresh for 2 -3 years.  I couldn’t find a picture of a poha-titi, a Māori kelp bag, but here’s a photo of a Titi (Sooty shearwater or muttonbird): it’s the smaller all-dark bird at the top of the picture.  The large and handsome bird in the foreground is a Buller’s Mollymawk (Diomedea bulleri).

Nowadays Muttonbirding is largely a commercial enterprise, for sale to restaurants.  Later in the trip we found contemporary Muttonbird on the menu of a very nice fish restaurant in Moeraki, but I chose blue cod, thinking of the bird we’d seen on the sea in Kaikoura.

(Photos, top: E. Shock: the snow-covered Kaikoura Mountains are visible in the background; middle, A. Shock; bottom, E. Shock. All from the Kaikoura pelagic trip.)

Occasionally Blupeng experiences the Whiny Electric Heater the people are obsessed with.  Its function eludes him, as cold temperatures are not a problem for a soft toy sea bird.  (Overheating on land is more likely to be a problem for a well-insulated penguin body, and flipperwings more thinly feather-lined and held akimbo aid in radiating excess heat.)

Besides, it works hard to max out at 57F — that’s positively balmy for a penguin!

Left: Eastern Rosella feather (Platycercus eximius) with Kauri cone.  Rosellas are long-tailed, rainbow-colored Australian parrots who now live in NZ, too.

Below: Kereru feather (Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae, New Zealand Pigeon) on leaf.

The Kereru is a very large pigeon, much bigger than Rock Pigeons, whose striking white, iridescent green-maroon plumage and bright red feet and bill blend surprisingly into the shadows and light at the tree tops. It favors areas of native bush, especially where giant podocarp trees like totara or kauri still grow: big trees, big pigeons.  Kereru sallies out into the sunlight from the tops in a swooping display flight, its wings making a noticeable whistling whoosh.

(Photos: Feathers, A. Shock; Kereru, E Shock)

It’s not all about birds: NZ‘s hot waters are as unique as its birdlife. The islands are tectonically active, and strange fuming waters seep gently and sometimes violently blow to the surface.  We saw lots of these places; here’s a sample from Wai-O-Tapu, in the volcanic plateau near Rotorua.