Remembering rivers

At dawn I sit outside remembering how, earlier in the week, I’d walked over the Ngamoko Range to Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina river. I had two nights there to myself and sat by the river each evening thinking whatever came to mind. Now I sit in a city and remember how, sitting by that river, I’d remembered the week-long journey with Robb at the other end of the Ruahine in early December; how we’d walked up the Makaroro river one morning, following deer that had walked the same way only a few minutes earlier, and how eventually I’d seen something bright and moving in a pool at the end of the reach a hundred metres ahead — the bills of two whio, bright in the early morning shadow. We’d moved closer, carefully, and watched them until we grew cold then turned back to the hut rather than disturb them by trying to move past upstream. Robb was ecstatic. So was I.

At Kinvig I’d walked upriver to the old hut site early in the morning and, feeling cold and clumsy, had sat in the sun on the riverbank beneath a flowering Marbleleaf. Gradually, the world revealed itself: an iridescent black spider-hunting wasp that wouldn’t pause to allow a photograph; a big crane fly, Zelandotipula fulva, that, perhaps lethargic from the cold, did allow me some photographs; once, dancing overhead and out of sight, a butterfly I was ninety percent sure was a Forest Ringlet. Later in the day I’d see more and could confirm the ID but none of those beautiful butterflies would settle. Then, in the river, at the head of the rapids about 100 metres downstream from the old hut site, where the reach ends and the river curves towards the big slip … a whio. I saw him before he saw me — just. He whistled, climbed out onto a rock, whistled again. Back into the water, out onto a rock just a little downstream; more whistling and craning his neck. I managed a few poor record photos. He floated downstream and I followed a little way but didn’t see him again.

That evening I sat at the river’s edge with biltong and 12-year-old Glenlivet and the sunlight coming and going on the rapids until finally the sun slid behind cloud and crept below the ridge. I wondered why wild water is white. Presumably the bubbles, foaming, reflect the light? Something like that, but I’d never wondered about that before, but that’s what sitting by a mountain river does — you think about things you’d never think to think about elsewhere. But mostly you think of nothing; you sit there and eventually you realise time has passed. You become absorbed by the sound and the incessant, constantly changing movement of the water and your mind loses itself. Is that what meditation’s supposed to be like? I don’t know, but it’ll do me. Is it the same, watching the sea? Probably, but it’s been so long since I’ve sat alone watching the evening sea that I can’t remember. But a river is always going somewhere — downstream, to the sea — but the sea goes nowhere: the waves rush up the beach then slide back down, and even the tide changes its mind twice a day. How might that change the way your mind works when you spend time simply watching the sea?

The light had begun to dim and the malt had almost gone but I was reluctant to climb back to the hut and leave that beautiful river that will keep flowing long after I’m gone. Who else will sit here on evenings like this, letting their thoughts roam, waiting for whio?

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Evening riverbed the sun still in its boulders

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Photos (click to enlarge): 

1. The pair of whio on the upper Makaroro river, Ruahine Forest Park.
2. Tītitipounamu (Rifleman; Acanthisitta chloris ssp. granti); female, near Leon Kinvig hut
3. Rapids below Leon Kinvig hut

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

Forgetting

At the top of the No. 1 Line track I set up the rain kilt as a groundsheet with the little pad of closed cell foam as a seat and the camera holding it down so it wouldn’t blow away in the cool breeze. I took the stove out and set it up on the ground with the homemade windshield and got water heating for tea, and I sat down and reached into the bag for the notebook. 

That’s when I remembered I’d forgotten to pack the pen roll. 

You can get wild with yourself for being an idiot, but eventually you have to face it: you have no pens and can’t do the writing you were so looking forward to doing. It’s a good lesson in several ways, I suppose, but the best that could be said regarding my response was that I got over it fairly quickly. I still berated myself for being an idiot, for not paying appropriate attention to that uneasy feeling I’d forgotten something — almost always an accurate indicator that you have forgotten something and should check again — but, having forgotten other things on other occasions, I’ve learned to move on quickly and to look for a more positive way of looking at the stuff-up. Once, I forgot the tea; that time I tried brewing kawakawa leaves, with acceptable results. Another time I forgot to fill the water bottle and at the top of the No. 1 Line track there’s no recovery from that — the nearest water’s a long way off and without water how do you brew tea? Disaster! A good lesson in acceptance. 

This time I rummaged through the bag in the futile hope I might have stashed a pen somewhere but I knew I hadn’t and soon accepted that I’d have to do the writing elsewhere, later in the day. But I wasn’t about to let that take the edge off the walk. I had the place to myself — during the entire walk as well as the drive up and down the road I saw no one; it was as if humans had vanished from the world — and a pheasant rooster had strolled across the road and disappeared into long weeds ahead of the car, and two feisty little piwakawaka had given me a delightful what-for a few minutes along the track, and, shortly afterwards, a smallish bird flitted into a tangle of branches on the side of the track. I peered at it, thinking it might have been a riroriro but it was too big. 

It was a Pīpīwharauroa, a Shining cuckoo. I unclipped the camera, thinking surely the bird would do that frustrating thing of posing right up until the moment you’re about to get it in sharp focus. But it stayed while I managed a single photograph, then it flitted a few centimetres along the branch to where it was partly obscured by twigs. None of the three additional photographs were of an acceptable standard but I didn’t mind, and as I sat at the top of track drinking tea and not writing, I thought this had been a mighty fine walk after all.

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Note: The Pīpīwharauroa or Shining cuckoo (Chalcites lucidus ssp. lucidus) is a subspecies of Shining Bronze-cuckoo. This subspecies breeds only in Aotearoa New Zealand, where it lays eggs in the nests of Riroriro (Grey warbler), and spends the winter in the Bismarck Archipelago, near New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. 

Photo: The first and only usable photograph of the Pīpīwharauroa. Click it for a better view. 

Photos and original text © 2025 Pete McGregor

An evening by the river

The big beech that had been threatening the helipad had been felled by the crew who had cut the new track from the tops down to the hut and the tree’s canopy now lay partly over the river bank. A riroriro had set up a territory in the tangle of branches and was singing furiously and squabbling with another that also appeared keen on the prime location. I watched the tiny birds fighting and chasing each other and saw more riroriro on the far side of the river doing the same thing — on one occasion three birds were engaged in a dogfight so aerobatic that I couldn’t follow any particular bird for more than a second or two. We think we’re amazing because we can fly fast and high over vast distances but these little birds — just a few grams of feathers and aggression — make us look like lumbering oafs.

I turned away to watch the river, hoping a whio might appear but mostly just because watching a mountain river in the evening, with a comfortable hut waiting and no responsibilities, is one of the most meditative and peaceful experiences I know (although that seemed lost on the riroriro). You watch the flow for a while and then you realise time has passed and all you’ve done is sit there and that’s perfect. You lift your eyes and the far bank starts flowing backwards, upstream, as if your mind has to make up for all that time watching the world flowing downstream, and the slight giddiness feels like the first hit of getting high. 

Clouds raced eastwards high overhead in the dimming sky and a cold wind swirled around but couldn’t get through my down jacket. I imagined Robb here with his nibbles (jerky, sharp cheese, olives) and his wee dram and his ecstatic enthusiasm and how if a whio appeared he’d become enraptured and almost mystical with joy and I’d know how he felt. If John were here as well, the evening might be impossible to surpass — just three old mates enjoying the evening and yarning in one of the best places in the world.

I thought of my sister, too. She’d never known places like this but she loved hearing about them. During one of our last conversations she’d asked me to tell her about my travels in India and I told her how I used to love walking down the back alley behind Main Bazaar to eat at one of the magnificently efficient little open-fronted restaurants opposite New Delhi Railway Station. The guys would recognise me and beam widely and look after me and I’d eat dahl and rice and a naan straight from the tandoor and watch the teeming crazy life on the street and I’d wonder why on earth I loved it so much when I loved evenings on the banks of a Ruahine river just as much. I didn’t say that at the time, and we didn’t get all philosophical or zen or whatever during that conversation, but now I think to compare experiences is to miss the point, which is that nothing compares to the moment you’re experiencing right now. She lay back, listening and smiling, and I hoped what I was saying reminded her of wonderful times on her own travels. Less than a week later she was gone.

The riroriro were still fighting and singing and the gorgeously clear river still flowed down towards the bend and on to the gorge and the wind still tugged my hair and pushed at the bulk of my jacket. I wanted to tell her about all of it and see that quiet, delighted smile again but that was no longer possible. I found myself wondering: what’s the point of these marvellous moments if you can’t share them with the people you love?

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Notes: 

1. Riroriro are also known as Grey warblers, although they're not warblers (some ornithologists insist on calling them 'Grey gerygone'). The scientific name is Gerygone igata. Here's the New Zealand Birds Online entry.
2. The hut is Leon Kinvig hut in the headwaters of the Pohangina River, Ruahine Forest Park.

Photos: 

1 & 2. Both photos are of the Riroriro that had set up in the canopy of the felled beech.

Photos and original text © 2025 Pete McGregor

Tea and animals at dawn

At seven o'clock the blackbird flew in like a small dark missile and landed abruptly on the lawn, yelling quietly as he settled and clucking occasionally as he began his breakfast foraging. The pre-dawn light had just begun to illuminate the birch so its main branches gleamed like white gold; the sky was smudged with hazy clouds suffused with salmon and mauve and grey against the idea of blue. I'd wrapped myself in merino and fleece and thick down and I was drinking unsmoked lapsang souchong tea, savouring the biscuity flavour, and I was warmer than on any morning I could remember since discovering what had become a morning ritual. I can't say the ritual had been intentional: I'd simply begun to sit outside first thing in the morning and gradually the practice became more regular and I began to enjoy it even more, so, as the mornings grew darker and colder I continued to sit outside drinking tea. Eventually the days shortened sufficiently so I found myself watching the dawn arrive, darkness lightening, the sky taking on colour, the birch beginning to glow, the early bird catching the worm, ducks and pigeons and starlings speeding across the dawn, the drab and faded colours of the neighbouring roofs and walls and fences lit briefly with soft light like the elegance of a Joel Meyerowitz photograph. The whole time, a thrush sang in a leafless poplar. When the sun finally slid above the unseen horizon so direct rays lit the tops of the trees and the highest houses, the magic vanished; the colours lost their subtle spectacular elegance; the world once more became possessed by humans. I'd pick up the empty tea bowl and jug and the small blue sitting pad and the Traveler's Notebook and pen roll and go inside. The blackbird carried on hunting for worms.

Sometimes as I sat there next to the small wood-and-iron table by the back door I'd hear the click of paws on the vinyl floor so I'd get up and push the door open  and a small whiskery face would look up at me and Guston would trot out onto the concrete pad. If rain was falling, or had recently fallen, he'd stand right at the boundary of dry and wet. He'd stay there as if making up his mind which was worse: the discomfort of getting wet or the discomfort of needing a pee. Sometimes, getting wet was clearly worse. If the lawn was dry, though, he'd be out there doing his rounds, sniffing his garden for evidence of cat-trespassing. Usually he'd ignore me until he'd completed his mission; only then, and not always, would he stop to greet me on his way back inside. I don't mind being ignored by animals, though: I like the reminder that they're not ours, that the attention we receive is a gift, that the value of a dog's affection (or a cat's) is because they can choose to ignore us if they wish. I love the lack of respect some birds have for us and wish we gave them more reason to consider us not worth bothering about, but, sadly, I can't see that ever happening.

From the farmland beyond the edge of town I heard a barrage of gunshots as ducks were shot for sport.

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Note: Guston is a miniature Schnauzer. He's not mine but we get along famously.

Photos: 1. Next door. 2. The actual blackbird on the actual lawn. 3. The birch on a windy dawn.

Photos and original text © 2022 Pete McGregor

Steinbeck, Ricketts, Doyle and the ~algias

I sit on the sofa, gazing out the window at the late afternoon sunlight sifting through the soft foliage hanging over the driveway, thinking about The Log From the Sea of Cortez. I’d first read that book by Steinbeck and Ricketts so long ago it seems like a different life. I’ve read it several times since, and now I’m partway through yet another reading and I still think it’s marvellous even though I’m more conscious of some shortcomings. They’re unimportant shortcomings, though, and some even add to the book’s quality: they’re the imperfections that rescue a work of art from perfection. The Log was written by real human beings: real, flawed, compassionate, crotchety, curious people who took delight in the similarly complex people they encountered and could see them as part of the greater wide wonderful world, including the multifarious, diverse creatures of the intertidal zone that ostensibly justified the journey. Now, more recently, the person who seems to me to most characterise those qualities is the late wonderful one-and-only incomparable Brian Doyle, and I wonder what a meeting between Steinbeck and Ricketts and Brian Doyle would have been like. The energy from that encounter, I imagine, would have been enough to power the great cities of the world; even thinking about it now fills me with such imagined delight and joy that I can hardly stand it and might have to pour another glass of wine.

Not everyone sees The Log like that, though. I’ve seen criticisms of ‘tenth-rate philosophising’, of boring descriptions of the animals the expedition collected, of a repetitiveness that wears thin, and other carpings. Those criticisms, to me, say more about the carpers than the book. Perhaps I’m more receptive to lists of animals because I know, if not the specific creatures, their cousins, and because I have some education in zoology perhaps I appreciate the complexity of those lives and how they’re suited to their environment. But maybe I’ve just always loved animals, and not just the fluffy cute ones. Even hideous things can be beautiful: Steinbeck tells how Ricketts once advertised hagfish — in Steinbeck’s view, ‘a perfect animal horror’ — using the adjectives ‘delightful’ and ‘beautiful’. [1] I don’t find the account repetitive, either; what some critics see as repetition I see as structure, a framework that supports the substance of the book and helps it avoid becoming an aimless ramble.

What most gets my goat, though, is that criticism about the ‘shallowness of the philosophising’. I might be mistaken, but Steinbeck and Ricketts not only never claim to be ‘philosophising’ but explicitly say they’re letting their ideas go wherever they will. Whether that’s philosophising is arguable, but I suspect that if The Log’s authors said it was, the critics would pounce with glee and say it’s not at all what philosophy is. Yet, those critics are happy to say the exploring of ideas in The Log is philosophising and because it doesn’t conform to what they believe philosophy should be, it’s tenth-rate, superficial, facile. But what does that imply? That only people with brains as obviously super-developed as those of the critics should be allowed to publish their thoughts? That rambling explorations of ideas have no worth? That only geniuses — or those who conform to the strictures of formal, academic philosophy — have the right to be published? Attitudes like that smack of intellectual arrogance, and implicit in the criticism is the idea that the only value of those explorations of ideas is as formal arguments.

In addition, the implication that ‘shallow’ philosophising (or the exploring of ideas) has little or no value leads inevitably to the question, ‘ When does shallow philosophising become real, worthwhile philosophising?’ I suspect the critics’ answer (although they’re unlikely to admit it) would be, ‘When it’s difficult enough to challenge my own superior intellect.’ But, someone, somewhere, will always understand an idea better than everyone else, so everyone else’s thoughts will, by definition, be shallow. (We can discount those who, like a certain ‘stable genius’, believe they’re more intelligent than everyone else even when all the evidence suggests the opposite.)

Exploring ideas has value even if it goes wildly off track. A reader, recognising that something’s not right, thinks about the idea and, with effort and a little luck, might work out where the exploration went astray. That’s useful; the reader has learned something. Even if they don’t identify the missteps, they understand more about the idea. Besides, it’s not always necessary to decide whether something’s right or wrong; often, it’s more valuable to let the uncertainty remain, perhaps to incubate and maybe eventually to hatch a related idea more interesting or useful than the original. Often, accepting that the truth of an idea depends on the perspective from which it’s viewed is more important than deciding which of those perspectives should have priority (this is an assertion about the value of pluralism, not a defence of relativism). My guess is that one sign of a highly developed intellect rather than a self-claimed superior one is the ability to understand that making a judgement is less important than understanding the idea, and accepting that ideas always generate more ideas and exploring those is generally more fruitful than sitting back smugly and dismissing the original idea because it contains some kind of logical flaw.

What I’m doing, of course is exploring an idea without even the supposedly small degree of intellectual rigour Steinbeck and Ricketts applied to their explorations. What they did, however, was to incorporate their musings into a narrative replete with gorgeous, evocative writing: often generously and compassionately humorous; occasionally sardonic; frequently with that ineffable quality that might be characterised as wabi-sabi; almost always suffused with the kind of nostalgia that some see as debilitating [2] but others (including me) see as not simply a longing for what we’ve lost or never had but a connection with the history that makes us who we are, or who we’d like to be, or who we’re glad we’re not. Perhaps it’s not even nostalgia but more closely related to ‘solastalgia’: that feeling you have ‘when your endemic sense of place is being violated’, to use the words of Glenn Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term. In that sense, the Sea of Cortez has already been lost; the place Steinbeck and Ricketts and their companions visited on the expedition and which gave rise to the book no longer exists, and even when the Western Flyer sailed that sea, the signs were evident that supposed civilisation had begun to encroach. If one were to visit now, one would at best experience intimations of what the Western Flyer’s crew experienced. The people they encountered have gone, too. No doubt new, interesting, complex characters live there, but the sense of remoteness, of strangeness, of other-worldliness that weaves through the narrative must inevitably be greatly diminished by technologies like GPS and Google Earth that make the Gulf of California so much safer to navigate, so much more accessible, so much less mysterious.

References

Routledge, C., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Juhl, J. (2013). Nostalgia as a resource for psychological health and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 808–818. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12070

Sedikides, C., & Wildschut, T. (2018). Finding meaning in nostalgia. Review of General Psychology, 22(1), 48–61. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000109

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Notes: 

1. On p. 18 of my Pan Books (1960) edition

2. Nostalgia used to be considered as mental illness but a more recent, evidence-based perspective considers it an important way to foster psychological well-being including a heightened sense that one’s life has meaning (Routledge et al., 2013; Sedikides & Wildschut, 2018).

Photos: 

1. Purple shore crab (Leptograpsus variegatus) at Flounder Bay a long time ago

2. Rock pool at Flounder Bay. Steinbeck and Ricketts never made it here, but in theory one could sail across the Pacific from Flounder Bay on the coast of Aotearoa New Zealand to the Sea of Cortez without touching land.

3. The coast at Flounder Bay

Photos and original text © 2022 Pete McGregor

The weather and Brian Doyle

The weather arrived at a quarter to three as I was reclining on the couch reading Brian Doyle’s excellent collection of Brian Doyle essays, Reading In Bed, with the new electric heated throw wrapped over my body from the waist down and my upper body encased in my best largest puffiest down jacket (the Mont Bell) so if anything had been watching I must have looked like a giant grub or chrysalis, but nothing sentient enough to make that comparison was around to watch so I was safe from those kinds of uncomplimentary judgements. But boy, that weather wasn’t holding back. The rain pounded down so hard it sounded like hail, and darkness moved over the face of the land so if I hadn’t been reading on my Kindle I’d have muttered, ‘God, let there be light’ respectfully like a prayer not blasphemously, and would have had to metamorphose into adult form, crawling out of my electric heated throw cocoon to get to a light switch. Fortunately, I had plenty of charge left in the Kindle and I’d adjusted the brightness and font size so I could ignore the rain and keep reading, which is all anyone reading Brian Doyle essays or books or anything else by Brian Doyle ever wants to do. By the time I finished the book the rain had given up trying to discombobulate me or stimulate a premature metamorphosis and had settled into a quieter sulking steady rhythm that I took to be respect for Brian Doyle’s writing, and when I finally closed the cover on the Kindle I noticed the rain had stopped. So it should.

It came back later for another attempt but I was impervious and laughed at it and enjoyed the sound of its tantrum on the roof, and again it exhausted itself and gave up. In the battle of the weather versus Brian Doyle and me, we won by a loooong way. At least for the moment, though, because the weather has now called up a vicious bitterly cold violent hissy fit from the deep Southern Ocean and if the forecasters are to be believed, that evil blast should get here tomorrow night. I’m prepared, though: I have plenty of charge still left in the Kindle and Haruki Murakami’s latest collection of short stories, First Person Singular, to read. I just have to resist the temptation to read it all tonight, which might be a problem because his books are soooo good, which makes me wonder: how can two writers so different in style as Brian Doyle and Haruki Murakami be so wonderful and weather-resistant?

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Photo: Evening rain moving up the valley earlier this year

Photos and original text © 2021 Pete McGregor

That thing about birds

What is it that you love about birds? What’s at the root of the thrill you get when something as apparently ordinary as a sparrow sits on your verandah railing, puffed up against the cold, with a spatter of drizzly raindrops sparkling and gleaming diamond-like on the feathers of its back, and it doesn’t bother to fly off when you walk past the window? Or, when you watch a magpie swoop in fast and streamlined, a white-and-black bullet, low over the paddock then suddenly tilt and arc around and flare its wings and stop in mid-air to lower itself onto the ground, the sheer class and cheek of it a delight you can almost feel physically, as if for a moment you inhabited the bird’s body and felt the rush of air and the forces twisting your wings as you bent the low sky to your will? For a moment, you left your own body and lived in the air with a command and sheer gall you yourself, you slow and awkward lump of mammal fixed to the ground with your fear of falling, never had and never will. No flying bird ever feared falling. How could it? A fish might as well fear water.

Naturally, your pedant’s mind reminds you not all birds fly. But big deal — you love them nevertheless. That pheasant rooster you saw this morning just below the Raumai Hill could have flown if it felt the need, but it didn’t — didn’t fly, didn’t feel the need — and you didn’t love it any the less because it stayed earth-bound, strutting and peering, a little anxious perhaps, but not prepared to waste energy flying. Perhaps it knew you were no threat. Perhaps it sensed you just wanted to admire, on the verge of gasping, anything that could be so spectacular; perhaps it sensed your twinge of envy, your awareness of your own drab and heavy form.

Perhaps you love the insouciance of so many birds, too — the way they just go about their lives not caring about you and your kind even when you might be a danger or a benefit. Those crows among the filth in India, for example — just going about their business, fossicking for the delicious among the unspeakable; they know you’re there, but they ignore you until you’re one step too close, and then they’re gone. A few flaps of those strong, shining wings and they’re above you — you’re beneath them and they’re looking down on you — and when you’re a few steps further on they’re back down to earth, getting on with their day.

You’re a minor nuisance but they’re not bothered. They do what they’re doing. When they’re feeding they’re feeding; when they’re fighting they’re fighting; when they’re mobbing a threat — a cat, an owl, you — they give it all they’ve got. Then they go somewhere else and do something else.

They know how to concentrate, those birds. Watch a heron stalking, or a kingfisher posted on a power line, watching the paddock, or a godwit probing the estuary, and you know you know nothing about focus. You’re a mess of distractions — even when you think you’re writing well, you’re … ooh, hey, look at that rain, how will I get back to the car without getting soaked? … that guy in the brown coat and trendy hair looks familiar, … and so on. Could you focus for an hour on picking worms out of estuarine mud? I bet not.

But here’s your pedant’s mind again, telling you birds aren’t really like that — they can’t be like that, surely? Even when they’re stalking bullies in the shallows, or crabs on the coast, or lizards on the rocks, they’re alert for threats — that cat again, or the owl, or you, or the shadow overhead — and maybe they can use different parts of their bird brains more independently than us. Some, like godwits, can sleep on the wing, switching half the brain off while the other half carries on allowing their wings to carry them on that immense journey from Alaska to New Zealand, eleven thousand kilometres, non-stop.

Try sending half your brain to sleep on your drive home and see how far you get.

You don’t envy birds, though. You love them — among so many other reasons, only a few of which you can identify — because they’re so much more competent than you, yet most of the time they don’t bother rubbing it in the way we would if we were more competent than them. There’s no malice in their superiority — it’s just a fact to them, and they’d probably try to cheer you up if they thought you envied them. You, in turn, only envy them in a good, respectful way, the way you wish you were as wonderful as someone you love.

And maybe that’s exactly why you love birds, but you really don’t know.

Photos: 

1. Ring-necked pheasant, Pohangina Valley

2. Miromiro (North Island tomtit), No. 1 Line track, Pohangina Valley

Photos and original text © 2021 Pete McGregor