Blue Duck or Whio

If you want to learn some more about whio, here is a link to a video from the Meet the Locals series. They are at the Whakapapa River where I saw my whio!

Meet the Locals - Whio

Ohakune Visit - Orautoha School

One special treat for me in Ohakune was a visit to Orautoha School. It is a small rural school northwest of Raetihi - for the adults it's near the start of the track to the Bridge to Nowhere.
Orautoha teaches up to year 8 and has 13 pupils currently. And you thought Normandale was a small school!
If you went there you might be the only person in year 3.
Would you like to be at a small school like Orautoha?
What might be some of the advantages and disadvantages of going to a small school like that?
They certainly were wonderful children, with a wonderful teacher/principal Amohia Rolls. When we arrived all the children stood and introduced themselves and said a little bit about themselves. They were obviously proud to go to Orautoha School.
We had a tour of their vegetable gardens and a wetland area they are restoring. The school and their community have planted 600 plants in the wetland!

Ohakune Visit - Whio

Last week I went to visit my friend Kathy in Ohakune. She is also a Primary Science Teacher Fellow and is working with the Department of Conservation and the Ngati Rangi Trust. Her main project is creating an app that will allow people in her area to record sightings of birds and water creatures.

The birds she is interested in are the kereru, whio (blue duck) and karearea (NZ Falcon). The water creatures are koura, tuna (long-finned eel) and kākahi (freshwater mussel).

While there we went on a whio hunt - trying to get my first sighting of a blue duck in the wild. We first tried the Tongariro River but no luck, though we did see a shining cuckoo! Then we tried some smaller rivers on our way back to Ohakune. Finally we were successful on the Whakapapa River.

Here he is. Can you see him?

I've zoomed in a lot. Can you see him now?

Here he is. The blue-grey colour makes him hard to find among the grey rocks. Can you see his bright yellow eye and red brown chest?

Here are some pictures of Kathy and I where we spotted the whio.

Primates

Yesterday I went on section with the primates keepers Jaqui and Nathan. Sadly there are no pictures because the weather was so lousy that I didn't want to take my camera with me.
We fed and cleaned up after the pygmy marmosets, iguanas, cotton-topped tamarins, squirrel monkeys, agouti, capuchins, spider monkeys, gibbons, chimpanzees, lemurs, and golden lion tamarins.
Two of those animals are not primates - can you tell me which ones?

I had a fantastic day as I got to hand feed many of the smaller primates - giving them small pieces of fruit to eat. We had lots of fun giving rice balls to the spider monkeys. One of the females is so nimble with her prehensile tail that she can use it to pick a rice ball out of your hand.
Find out what prehensile means. Why would this be a good adaption for a monkey to have?

It was also neat to see Jaqui using hand signals and rewards to give the chimpanzees basic health checks - seeing their hands, feet, ears and mouth. It is amazing what you can do with a little smear of peanut butter. And amazing training of course.
Here are some photos of the squirrel monkeys, cotton-tops and chimps that I took on other days.

Flying Food

On Tuesday I was up at the holiday programme that the Wellington Zoo runs. They were having a 'flight day' - looking at lots of different types of wings.
One activity they did was to decorate two paper plates then glue them together with some raisins hidden in the middle. These were then thrown like a frisbee to the capuchin and spider monkeys on 'Monkey Island'.
Some plates split apart and many others ended up in the water but the monkeys loved the ones that made it across.

  

Checking Penguin Boxes

Joel at Kau Bay

Last week I went out to check the boxes in Kau Bay on the northern end of the Miramar Peninsula. As it is the school holidays I took my son Joel along with me. As usual (it seems) I was on a North facing beach so the wind was blowing hard from the North!
We had to find and check the penguin nest boxes in the area but this time we had no map! We turned it into a treasure hunt. Our job was to find the boxes, check them, use the GPS to mark them and photograph their position so the next time they're checked it will be much easier.
The first box we found was number 9 so we worked back around the headland and found the ones we had missed. It was good having Joel with me as he was an excellent finder and much better at climbing under trees.
In all we found 22 boxes, but some numbers were missing and we dug up a couple of boxes that were buried in stones.
Out of all those boxes only two were occupied by Little Blue Penguins. It was a great day though and we got some useful information.

An occupied nest box - see how the flax and grass help hide the box and give the penguins cover as they are coming and going from their nest.

The Little Blue Penguin in the nest box. Can you see the egg just in front of its foot?

Small-Clawed Otters

These guys are some of my favourite animals to watch - especially when they're in the water. They are so fast and slippery. They are Asian Small-Clawed Otters and there are two living at Wellington Zoo.
The only problem is whenever I go to see them in my uniform they run over to the keeper entrance and start 'barking'. They think they're going to be fed.
In the wild they eat crabs, molluscs, water insects and small fish, but they will also eat rodents (like mice) and snakes. Look how they hold their food while eating it.

They always grab their food and take it down to the water edge to eat - what are some reasons you can think of that they would do that?
They also always go for a swim after eating - what are some reasons they would do that?
If they are cleaning themselves, why could that be important?