After a pancake breakfast and cleanup, we paddled to shore for the loop hike on Urupukapuka Island, while the sun was still shining, before wind or rain or something else could spoil our plans.

Nearly all of Urupukapuka Island is a park and bird sanctuary. The Island Songbird project has made great strides restoring native songbirds - chiefly by eradicating invasive rats and stoats, and by restoring grazed forest.

The five mile loop was I little ambitious for me in my condition. But walking doesn’t hurt, just standing still does. The walk proved worth the effort.

The series of loop trails are meticulously laid out and maintained. First we walked through the curious forest, past the next beach. A side trail led to a birdwatching blind by a wetland, where we sat gazing for fifteen minutes.

Following the loops around the island, we tramped up open meadows to lofty lookout hills, down past gullies with rocky cliffs open to the blue green pacific at the bottom, then back up to the hilltops.

My overall impression was of a place uncannily familiar yet wholly unfamiliar, as if we had been transported to a parallel Earth with a temperate forest that was sort of like but completely not like the forests of the northeast.

Familiar invasive wildflowers carpeted the trail - queen Ann’s lace, yellow dandelion-like flowers, sweet pea. In the damp fields a bird sort of like a red-winged blackbird sung a raucous but more melodious call sort of like a blackbird-thrush (the bird is a tui). In the woods almost-warblers almost warbled. The trees were mostly unrecognizable - some with tufted tops, others like tall rhododendrons, yet others like starburst palm trees.

And then, in the open fields, you might as well have been for a ramble in the English countryside. Complete with a few sheep carefully fenced and stiled off from the rest of the island at the south end.

So we had beer and pies at the ferry wharf canteen.