A short walk in the ngahere

At the picnic table near the junction of the Tawa and Te Apiti tracks it was partly cloudy and almost calm. Cicadas were stridulating all along the Tawa track, which I’d chosen so I could walk the loop anticlockwise for a change and, besides, an annoying pain deep inside my left knee had persuaded me to choose the easier direction, ‘easier’ meaning very slightly longer but significantly less steep. The irritating pain eventually subsided, as I’d expected.

My first sight of the car park as I drove up depressed me: too many vehicles. I imagined the track swarming with people, with families, with yelling kids excited at being able to bash things with sticks and complain about whether they were there yet and wanting to know how much further and going quiet and sullen when they saw me approaching. I expected to have no more than a few minutes of solitude before meeting yet another person, or a sweating couple, or some old people inching along with walking poles and cheerfulness and I’d have to be cheerful and smiling too and say hello.

My misanthropy — or, rather, my expectation of being misanthropic — was unwarranted. I’d forgotten that if you happen to be walking in the same direction as most of the crowd, and at a roughly similar pace, you might not see anyone for long(ish) periods. In fact, it turned out even better. I met an elderly man (why is it so much more respectful to call someone elderly rather than old?) who was coming towards me on his way back to the carpark; he was  so lost in his slow, poles-assisted plod up the final ascent that he almost walked into me — ‘Sorry!’ he said and I said, ‘No worries!’ cheerfully, both of us smiling, and I resisted the urge to say something like it was good to see him out enjoying the track because I was worried it would sound patronising (it would have). No one else until Tom’s Lookout: a young couple with daypacks and heavy lumpish Nalgene water bottles like high-tech caveman clubs were sitting on the seat and we exchanged hellos as I passed by. The only others I met during the half-hour walk to the table were three older (not yet elderly but getting there) people who’d just finished a selfie when I came up the track around a bend and into view. One looked disconcertingly like Shane Jones but he stepped aside and waved me through with a smile and I mentally forgave him for looking like Shane Jones (which of course was no fault of his — that is, no fault of the man who looked like Shane Jones — and I felt mean for having instantly been wary of him. I was glad he’d given me the opportunity to revise my opinion).

Then there was no one the whole time I was brewing and drinking Lapsang Souchong at the picnic table and scribbling in the notebook, at least not until a tanned, shirtless, glistening man with spiky greying hair walked past going up the main track. We nodded acknowledgment of each other through the shrubbery.

A few more people passed by, some plodding, a couple jogging. A middle-aged couple came up the Tawa track.

‘Lovely spot,’ the man said, pausing and looking at the table and my stuff spread out on it. He had a distinct Irish accent. I agreed it was a lovely spot. They carried on towards the towering metal figure of Whātonga, and I wondered whether they’d wanted to sit at the lovely spot but had been deterred because they wanted to respect my solitude and scribbling and tea-sipping.

‘There’s another table just the other side of Whātonga,’ I called out.

He turned and said something which I took to be either thanks or maybe explaining why they wouldn’t be stopping but he spoke so fast in his gentle Irish accent that I couldn’t catch what exactly he was saying, but his intonation and gestures were reassuring and happy and I felt better about not being thought of as the monopoliser of the lovely spot.

My misanthropy had by then mostly dissipated, although it almost returned when a short, bulbous man shuffled up and began talking to me in a voice possibly audible at the carpark.

‘Having a drink of tea?’ he yelled, and I nodded.

‘That looks like a good camera!’ he said.

I told him it did its job if I did mine, but he didn’t seem to understand.

‘Doing your journalling?’ he yelled, and I nodded again. ‘What do you write about?’

But before I could say ‘whatever comes to mind’ he was making suggestions: ‘The birds! The people you meet on the track!’

“Whatever comes to mind,’ I managed to reply, hoping I didn’t sound unfriendly. I smiled, just in case.

He was OK, though, and seemed genuinely interested in the people he met (he’d just come from explaining to the Irish couple how Whātonga had been vandalised then eventually fixed, and about aspects of the earthquake-proofing of the new bridge), and I was another person to be genuinely interested in. Also, I think he enjoyed the sight of someone enjoying what had, until he’d turned up, been some quiet time, and I found it hard not to appreciate his enthusiasm although I was getting desperate for him to move on. Which he did: he wished me a good day and shuffled on down the Tawa track, poking his walking pole at the ground in front of him like a one-feelered bug probing for morsels. The white noise of cicadas returned, punctuated occasionally by the notes of a tūī and the soft, high-pitched chattering of a pīwakawaka.

I had a chook in the fridge at home, waiting to be roasted, and I needed to get it into the oven. Responsibilities can be a pain sometimes but I still had plenty of time and roasting a chook hardly tests one’s organisational abilities or cooking skills. I finished the tea, packed away the pens, notebook, and stove and set off back to the car. When I turned the ignition on and the dashboard lit up, I saw the temperature was registering twenty-nine degrees[1]. I felt a twinge of empathy for the chook I was about to roast.

---

Notes: 

1. Ngahere: forest, the bush. Here's the pronunciation.
2. That's 29° Celsius (84° Fahrenheit)

Photos (click to enlarge them): 

1. Tūī in the ngahere on the Te Apiti track
2. The lovely spot back in August 2024
3. Pīwakawaka. This was on the No. 1 Line track, a little further north of the Te Apiti track.

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

What is it like to be a riroriro?

One of the riroriro flew close and perched on a horopito twig to examine me. It had the gangly look of a teenager not yet bulked up into adulthood, although to describe even fully-grown adults of these tiny birds as ‘bulked up’ seems ridiculous so let’s just say it looked less rounded, more slender, and slightly scruffy, the way I assume I was when I was a teenager — and still am. I wondered about its apparent curiosity. Was I the first human it had met (unlikely) or was it deciding whether I might be delicious (definitely not) or perhaps it was trying to decide whether I was a potential threat or something that might provide food (plausible — I suspect it, like most teenagers, was perpetually hungry)? Probably it was just curious and trying to figure out what I was.

When I’d last visited Leon Kinvig hut just a few weeks ago, the riroriro that had been seemingly everywhere in November, disputing territories, singing threateningly at each other, scrapping among the tangle of branches of the recently felled red beech, were much less evident. I wondered whether they’d accepted their territorial boundaries and were now preoccupied with raising young, like the family I was now watching on the No. 1 Line track. Perhaps that felled beech, which had seemed so desirable, so worth fighting over, not longer offered such an attractive addition to a territory — the leaves, still healthy in November, had by January turned brown and crisp and shrivelled and probably offered little hope of fat caterpillars or other morsels.

But who knows what a riroriro’s thinking? Who knows what prompts its behaviour? It’s often hard enough to guess accurately what another human’s thinking, even when we think we know them well, so to guess what a bird like a riroriro — so vastly different from us, particularly in its ability to fully inhabit three dimensions — might be thinking must surely be impossible. We can imagine what it’s like to be a bird (or a bat, to acknowledge Thomas Nagel’s famous paper), but imagining requires filling in the gaps in what we think we know, and when the thing we’re trying to understand is mostly gap and barely any fact, it’s hard to be confident about what we imagine. I’d like to imagine that the teenage riroriro found me both interesting and nonthreatening but I’ll never know — nor, I think, could I ever know.

---

Notes:
1. Riroriro are also known as grey warbler; their Latin binomial (scientific name) is Gerygone igata. You can find more photos of them in my post about my November trip.
2. Red beech: tawhai raunui; Nothofagus fusca.

Photos (click to enlarge):
1. This is the one!
2. Gratuitous photo of the Pohangina river at Leon Kinvig hut, January 2026. 

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

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?

.

Evening riverbed the sun still in its boulders

.

---

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