With a long list of projects to accomplish and many people to see before we left Whangarei, we arrived in the Town Basin Marina on the morning of Wednesday, May 2nd, and were very happy to be rafted next to Vandy and Eric’s boat, Scoots. As we were tying-up, we saw SV Cayenne come into the marina so we were excited to be able to see Hannes and Sabine again.

The following evening there was a birthday party on The Barge Inn for Rob on SV Zoonie. He and his wife generously provided plenty of delicious food for a good turn-out of cruisers which seemed to please them very much. We were also thrilled to have a chance to catch-up with Hannes and Sabine and to say good-bye to Robyn and Mark from SV Mintaka. We also visited SV Maya, which is up for sale, to say farewell to Asma, Herbert, Adam, and Samy. They are going to visit Asma’s family in Tunisia for a month and then are returning to Switzerland to be closer to Herbert’s family and to their work. The boys were thoroughly enjoying their first experience of school while in New Zealand so we hope that they will make a smooth transition to learning in German once they reach Switzerland.

On the domestic front, I completed three loads of laundry which included most the cloth bags in which we store tools and equipment. Most of them had become salty and so felt permanently damp. It was the sort of messy project that included dumping their contents in piles on the cabin floor and which I had been meaning to do for ages. I also made three provisioning forays to the local grocery stores. Two of them were to the Pak’nSave store across the street and from which I returned with large supermarket carts full of stuff. On the first trip, I forgot that it was low tide so the ramp down to the dock was very steep. Randall had to help me slowly lower the trolley down the ramp. I shopped at a higher tide on the other days. In total, I bought about NZ$1,000-worth (about US$700) of provisions (not including much booze, meat, or fresh fruit and vegetables). The latter we will stock-up with when we rent a car from Marsden Cove Marina to drive into Whanageri for Randall’s last dentist appointment for his implant on 23rd May.



Tregoning (red) rafted next to Scoots (green) in the Town Basin Marina, Whangarei

All went well at Ranall’s penultimate dental appointment and his back is generally doing much better thanks to his visit to the physiotherapist and appropriate exercises. While he walked the Hatea River loop trail, I completed my rather obsessive but motivating challenge to run on all of Whangarei’s public roads within a 30-minute radius.

Despite the many projects, our four-night stay at the Town Basin did include one day of fun and relaxation spent with Vandy and Eric. Saturday was the Global Big Day, or International Birding Day. A Big Year is when an individual tries to see as many different bird species as possible on one year, usually within a single country. The Global Big Day as organized by the University of Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology is a day, May 5th, when as many people as possible worldwide go bird-watching and send a record of their observations for each site on a checklist to the lab’s www.ebird.org website. The idea is to capture a snapshot of the world’s bird population that can be compared year after year.

Randall had learned about this event and was keen to recruit Vandy and Eric so that we could participate as a team of four. Vandy has written a good summary of the concept and our outings on the blog of SV Scoots which is illustrated with a picture of Randall and me: https://www.sailblogs.com/member/shraderscoots/443489

We did two bird surveys. One in the early morning, walking up the Hatea River from the marina to Mair Park, and one in the afternoon further inland. We saw 23 species on our first walk and 15 species in the afternoon, for a day’s total of 27 species. For a while we had the longest list in New Zealand but by the afternoon we had slipped to 16th place. By the end of the day, we had been pushed down to the 40th position which suggests that there were plenty of other more successful birders participating in New Zealand.

The Global Big Day has been in existence since 2015 and information about it is apparently still spreading. According to the ebird website, 28,000 birders in 170 countries saw 6,899 species (a new record) which is approximately two-thirds of all known, extant bird species. In total, there were 1.6 million bird sightings. Colombia was the country with the most diversity with 1,546 species seen by 1,600 birders making 5,000 checklists (an average of more than 3 checklists per person). This tropical species diversity was double that seen in the USA (716 species) despite plenty of people submitting checklists from that huge, temperate country.



The end of Naylene and Phil’s relocated house with part of their marvelous view

For our afternoon survey, we had gone inland from Whangarei to visit Naylene (who works in the marina office) and Phil. We had been to a couple of parties on their “hide-away” property including one time when we slept on mattresses in their pole-barn. But this time we had come to see their “new” house which had recently been transported there from near Auckland. Looking at the good-sized, one-story building it was very hard to believe that it was carried up the steep and twisty parts of Highway 1 (traveling at night) and even more surprising that it was possible to get it up their steep, narrow, gravel driveway. Apparently, the latter part of the journey took almost as long as the drive from Auckland. However, it had arrived safe and sound with even the glass in the windows remaining intact.



Obviously excited, Naylene and Phil outside their house with their dog Tiny

Naylene and Phil were clearly hugely excited about the whole thing and seemed thrilled that we had come to take a look. They have not moved-in yet because they were painting the whole interior, adding a new French door, and completing the installation of utilities such as electricity. They have their own water supply (with two huge water tanks on the adjacent hilltop to provide good water pressure) and a composting sewerage system. And, best of all, are the fantastic views over their own sheep-stocked pastures to the surrounding countryside from the front of the house, and into their large area of bush from the rear of the house.



Naylene and Randall hand-feed Curly in front of Naylene and Phil’s house

After a full tour of the house and a session of hand-feeding one of their tamer sheep, Curly, the six of us walked into the bush and through the pasture in front of the house looking for birds. The dense vegetation in the bush itself was fairly quiet in the middle of the afternoon but we desperately hoped to find the morepork owl that Phil had seen a few times. We were not so lucky but we did see a flock of brilliantly colored Eastern rosella parrots as we emerged back into the pasture.



Phil leads Randall along the trail through the bush surrounded by many tree ferns

While the morepork would have been a good addition to our checklist, on our way to Naylene and Phil’s, we thought that we might have seen the birding scoop-of-the-day. Driving along in Baxter, Vandy cried-out that she had seen something brown and rounded creeping along the side of the road. It seemed pretty unlikely to be a nocturnal kiwi out in the middle of the day but we could not ignore the possibility. Eric turned us around but we did not see anything as we went back.

After turning again, as we retraced our route, I spotted something very kiwi-like and we ground to a halt. It certainly had the overall colors, pattern, size, and shape of a kiwi...but there was no long bill, the white on the “feather”-tips was too bright, and finally the presence of four legs gave it away. It was a healthy-sized hedgehog! Not the iconic native bird we had hoped for but a mammalian species that was introduced to New Zealand from Europe. Sadly, numbers of these endearing spiny creatures are declining in their native range, such as in Britain, largely because of reductions in their main food source, insects such as beetles, road-kills, and in the removal of many hedgerows, their favored habitat. The size of the urban hedgehog populations are holding a bit steadier than those in the countryside, as long as they can continue their nocturnal rambles unimpeded by solid fences and insects and slugs not all eliminated. Oh well, hedgehogs were an unfamiliar sight to my American partners so Vandy and Randall got out of the car to have a good look at it. Not a very useful observation for the Global Big Day but a very satisfying bit of nature-watching.