Penguins and Wallabies and Kiwis, oh my!

Did you know that there are resident penguins in Timaru? Little Blue Penguins (Kororā in Māori) are the world’s smallest, measuring just over 25cm in height and about 1kg in weight. Between October and March each year, they come ashore in the evening along the rock wall of the port, waddle along the sand and nest in the reeds and grasses. You can also see them in Oamaru, south of Timaru, but there you must sit silently in a blind many meters from the birds. Here, you can see we were just on the other side of the wall from them!

We also noticed that sometimes you can hear them better than you can see them:

This weekend, after buying some plants, veggies and meat at the Timaru Farmer’s Market, we ventured up to Christchurch to return our rental car. We spent a couple of hours at Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, where the exhibits were broken into exotic, farmyard and native animals. The boys loved feeding the eels, which are called tuna in Māori and carry significant cultural and nutritional significance.

After feeding fallow deer and admiring swans, emus and peafowl, we entered a large paddock with several wallabies. These invasive marsupials were brought over from Australia and obviously resemble the larger kangaroo species. People hunt them here in New Zealand to control their numbers. We saw little joey heads and feet peeking out from various pouches (but didn’t get a great photo of it, unfortunately.)

In the farmyard section, we pretended as though we were shopping for animals to add to our future New Zealand “lifestyle property.” Little Brother befriended some baby sheep, Mom fell in love with the Arapawa Goats who loved being scratched on the neck, and Big Brother got a kick out of the big tongues of the Nadudana Zebu (one of the oldest and smallest breeds of cattle, originating in Sri Lanka.)

In the native birds section, we saw the famous kea (an endangered New Zealand parrot), the bright green kākāriki, a small native owl called a morepork (ruru in Māori), the navy blue takahē, a tuatara (the last survivor of an order of reptiles that thrived in the era of dinosaurs), and of course, the brown kiwi. Kiwi are nocturnal, so while we did see one scurrying about in the darkened habitat, we were unable to photograph them. Here’s a cheeky kea instead:

We rounded out the weekend with an amazing Italian dinner, lunch in the hilly port town of Lyttelton (where our shipping container will arrive, eventually), and a failed attempt at flying a kite on a not-so-windy day. This week Mom starts work, the Rav4 gets delivered, Big Brother will partake in his first crossing guard shift, and we’ll have dinner with a SECOND set of new friends. How fortunate we are!