Pukaha Mt Bruce (2): tuna and kiwi

After the walk to the lookout, the plan was to go back home and do some work, but first I stopped to look at the longfin eels (tuna) swimming under the bridge. 

These eels travel incredible distances during their lives. In late autumn, they swim downstream to the sea (a journey in itself) and then travel 5000 km north to their spawning grounds in the Pacific. If you ever fly to Fiji, Vanuatu or Samoa, just think about those eels covering the same distance way below you. They don’t even eat during their marathon swim (think about that while tucking into your airline food) and they die soon after spawning. The larvae travel back to New Zealand on ocean currents and develop into 60mm ‘glass eels’ which swim upstream into estuaries, streams and rivers all over New Zealand. Years later, some of them will set off for the Pacific to repeat the cycle.

It’s an amazing story and Ali Foster wrote about it in The eels of Anzac Bridge (illustrated by Viv Walker), drawing a clever and thoughtful parallel between the eels travelling so far and the local soldiers going off to war.

An even bigger distraction was the kiwi house. When I saw the kiwi road sign by the Anzac bridge, I thought it referred to the Kiwi house at Pukaha Mt Bruce. I didn’t realise that in the bush behind, there are about 90 kiwi living in the wild, protected as much as possible by a programme of trapping and pest control.

Inside, the brown kiwi, Turua, was having a snooze under a tree while Manukura the white kiwi ran about searching for food and digging a burrow. (The Pukaha staff reckoned that perhaps she is practising her nest building techniques.) She’s lovely to watch and Joy Cowley has written about her in Manukura: the white kiwi (illustrated by Bruce Potter).

Most captivating of all – and where the rest of my afternoon went – was watching the kiwi egg hatch in the incubator. As more and more people gathered – staff and visitors – we became like an impromptu family group at a delivery room, cheering with each wobble and new crack in the egg. 

Can't resist some more kiwi egg-and-chick photos:

Live camera action

Very new chick!

Pukaha Mt Bruce (1) The Miles of Bush

Yesterday I spent the morning at Pukaha Mt Bruce. The original plan was to climb the hill to the lookout, which I did. It is a beautiful walk up through the bush, with a stunning view from the top. Every few hundred metres I broke through spiders' webs strung across the path, so I knew that I was the first one up there that day.

Just before the main viewpoint, there’s another lookout over the bush. I’d heard about the 70 Mile Bush and 40 Mile Bush, but the signboards at the bottom of the track helped to get them into context. They explain that an ancient forest used to stretch between Norsewood in the north and Masterton in the south. This was the 70 Mile Bush, and the 40 Mile Bush was the “particularly impenetrable section” south of the Manawatu River.

For local Māori (as shown in a short video in the Pukaha Mt Bruce film room), this forest served as food storehouse, medicine chest, a place of learning and their home, connected to Tane Mahuta, god of the forest.

But to the European settlers in the 1800s, the forest was an obstacle that needed to be cut down to provide farmland and make way for roads and railway lines. It would be a tough job, and to carry it out, they recruited settlers from Scandinavian countries who were promised a free passage and at least 10 acres of land in return for their work on bush felling and road and railway construction.

It was hard, isolated work but gradually the bush disappeared, all except for a few remnants, one of which is the bush at Pukaha Mt Bruce, set aside as a reserve in 1888.

So my walk ended up giving me much more insight into the local community here, where many descendants of those first Scandinavian settlers would still have been living during the years of World War One. 

Memorial plaque by the former site of the Scandinavian camp
at the southern limit of the Seventy Mile Bush, now an empty field. 

Kiwi interrruption!

I have lots more to be writing about the bridge project, but this morning I went down to Pukaha Mt Bruce to do the walk up to the lookout, and ended up staying there all afternoon to watch a kiwi chick hatch out of its egg. How amazing is that?