Watching and learning in the land of the whio

Overnight rain had swollen and discoloured the river and the morning was filled with low cloud and drizzle. Atmospheric pressure sat at 914 hPa and wasn’t moving. We were packed and ready to go and had cleaned and tidied the hut but we both doubted the helicopter would arrive as scheduled to fly us out, so I’d prepared myself mentally for another night, perhaps even two, trapped at the hut. That wasn’t such a bad prospect; the difficulty was the uncertainty and it took some effort to prevent that from turning into a low-level anxiety. Still, I remained weirdly optimistic and didn’t know why.

     Robb was struggling. He went for short, slow walks in the drizzle to check the river and store more memories of the river flats and the bush and the mist; he sat on the bench on the porch, tapping his feet and staring at his hands. I was writing at the table inside the hut and heard him singing quietly to himself and I guessed he was trying to convince himself he was relaxed.

     But he wasn’t. 

     He came into the hut and sat on the bunk next to his pack and said, ‘ It’s kinda like being between two places — you’re all packed and ready to go but you can’t.’

     He paused and said, ‘You’re beholden to the weather, and …’

     He let the thought trail off.

     ‘I don’t like it, Pete. I don’t like it at all. I need to get rid of it.’

     He stood and said, ‘Being outside probably helps.’

     He went and sat on the porch again and tapped his feet and looked at his hands. The drizzle kept falling and the watch still said 914 hPa.

...

We’d arrived a week earlier. The sound of the helicopter faded and the river took over and we shifted our gear from the riverbed to the hut and set about unpacking and settling in. I checked the hut book and was surprised to find an entry from that morning. A lone tramper, possibly a hunter (‘Not much deer sign’, he’d written), had come from Top Maropea the previous day but not via the usual route down the river; instead, he’d come ‘via Wakelings’. I assume he meant he’d bush-bashed down the true left side of the spur from Top Maropea, crossed the river, bush-bashed up the other side and down the ridge to meet the Wakelings track which he then followed to Maropea Forks rather than detouring to Wakelings hut then back to rejoin the track. Six hours, he’d said, and that didn’t seem likely if he’d included the detour. He hadn’t noted the time he’d left Maropea Forks, nor whether he’d gone up the track to Point 1450 to meet the Main Range or whether he’d taken the shorter route up the north branch of the river, but I guessed he’d left early and was now somewhere on the Main Range between Sparrowhawk Biv and Sunrise hut. I felt both a twinge of envy and some relief that we could relax in a comfortable hut with none of the slight uneasiness of being alone with safety dependent entirely on fitness and skill and unpredictable weather.

     Robb was looking forward to the evening’s wee dram and some snacks on the verandah and I had no objection when I found him assembling the essentials when evening still seemed a little way off — it was still winter, after all, and one can’t be careful enough not to be caught out by the early disappearance of daylight. The decision was sound, at least because, as wonderful as it was to sit outside with the river and the beeches and the riverbed’s boulders and big tussocky toetoe[1] and Astelia, the temperature was dropping and the temptation of the hut’s warm interior where Robb had got the wood-burner going grew stronger. Later, Robb cooked steaks with mushroom sauce and multi-coloured gourmet potatoes. Neither of us was entirely comfortable with fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) Ruahine trips but Robb’s deteriorating artificial hip had left no safe alternative and the advantage — a huge one — was that we could bring food and gear we’d never consider if we had to walk in or out.

...

At first light on the first full day of the trip a pair of whio visited the river by the hut. I heard the whistle and took the camera and binoculars out and we watched them feeding upstream, getting closer, in the dim pre-dawn light. Robb and I had both hoped to see whio but had deliberately tempered our expectations even though the likelihood of a good encounter was high; now, having had plenty of time to watch this pair, I relaxed a little, knowing I couldn’t be disappointed unless I adjusted my expectations unreasonably. I’m pretty sure Robb felt the same, but we were prepared to be grateful for more time with whio if that eventuated.

     Which it did. We met what I’m confident was the same pair further upriver later in the morning when we explored the north branch. A friend (Tony Quayle) had recommended that as an enjoyable day trip, pointing out that it led to a saddle north of Sparrowhawk Biv. We got nowhere near that but enjoyed several hours ambling up the river, photographing and filming the whio on the way up and again on the way back, by which time they’d moved several hundred metres upstream. The weather kept changing, clouding over, clearing, clouding over again, threatening drizzle. The one consistent characteristic was the bitter cold, made worse by a blustery wind.

 

     Eventually I came to a narrow section of the river blocked by a loose slip and small bluff on the true right and a log jam on the left. I thought I could sneak past the log jam but wasn’t sure whether Robb’s hip would let him through safely.

     He came up to where I was waiting and said, ‘My feet are cold.’

     It was an observation, not a complaint, but I guessed his feet were more uncomfortable than he admitted. I pointed to the log jam and suggested it was too risky.

     ‘I’m good, Pete,’ he said.

     He meant he was good with the decision to turn back. Neither of us saw any point in enduring discomfort for the sake of demonstrating how tough we were — toughness is a virtue only when there’s a point to it — and in any case we both realised we’d be unlikely to encounter any more whio further up the river. They’re strongly territorial and the upper reaches of the river probably wouldn’t be enough to support another pair. A lone male might be hanging out up there somewhere but we could look another day.

     With the prospect of a warm hut waiting, we could fully enjoy the walk back. The whio pair delayed us when we met them again, but watching them feed upstream along a small backwater, eventually passing just a few metres in front of where I was crouching behind the tripod, made the extra time in the bitter wind well worthwhile.

 
   That afternoon I made bread on top of the wood stove in a makeshift oven: a billy sitting on stones inside a larger pot, the whole arrangement covered with a large lid. Initially I’d been pessimistic but the loaf turned out to be excellent. It was eaten within a day and only lasted that long because we exercised some restraint, but that evening we ate the first slices with Robb’s planet-sized meatballs. Life could have been better but not by much.

...

We’d abandoned the idea of an overnight trip to Otukota hut after Tony had warned us about a badly overgrown section of the track where stepping into an unseen hole or tripping on something hidden beneath the crown fern might have had disastrous consequences for Robb’s hips (or mine, for that matter). Robb was still keen to walk a few hours up the track towards Puketaramea one day, and we did that on the second full day. I’d stepped outside at dawn to see a pale blue sky behind the drift and swirl of mist. The whio were elsewhere that morning but we’d had marvellous encounters the previous day so we were content. Robb set off up the track and I followed some time later, crossing the river in Red Bands and changing into trail runners on the far side. I stashed the gumboots upside down in case it rained and started up the track. Robb had been walking slowly but steadily and waved me past when I caught up, but I stopped at the lookout point and didn’t have to wait long for him. A clear sky would have revealed the spur leading to Top Maropea hut but cloud had closed in, limiting the view, and the weather had turned bitterly cold. Even Robb, usually impervious to extreme cold, later admitted feeling it. He was happy to turn back, and although his hip had been OK, he didn’t want to risk aggravating it. We’d been aware that the descent might prove more demanding for it than the climb, but it seemed OK. However, after he’d had a nap back at the hut he began to feel the effects of the walk. He took some ibuprofen and wandered slowly around the riverbed in the afternoon sun and the discomfort eased.

     He’d also seemed set on the idea of climbing the track to Point 1450 at least as far as the section where it levelled out not far from the upper bushline. His great friend, Jeff, had, years ago, waited there for Robb when one of Robb’s hips was almost at the stage of being disabling. Robb had struggled through the pain and arrived at that spot to hear the sound of Jeff’s harmonica, and the thought that Jeff had waited for him brought him to tears. Years later, I’d waited for Robb at the same place, not knowing its history, and had brewed coffee for him. The place had special significance for Robb, particularly since cancer had taken Jeff, and I understood his desire to visit it again. He suggested it on the morning of the last full day of the trip and therefore the last opportunity.

     I had misgivings, though. I pointed out that a section of the track soon after it leaves the riverbed is very steep — so gnarly that hands become useful and a slip would have dire consequences. Robb might get up it but would he be able to get down it with a painful hip?

     He shrugged and grimaced and said, ‘Well ...,’ and left his reply unfinished.

     I didn’t press him and we moved on to other topics but later he returned from a slow stroll to the river, ostensibly to check for whio.

     ‘I’ve been thinking about the track to 1450 and how there’s a steep section where you have to pull yourself up by your hands,’ he said, ‘and I’m not sure I could get down it safely with this hip the way it is.’

     I agreed and commended him on his careful thinking.

     ‘Would you be OK if we just had another walk along the river looking for the whio?’ he said.

     I replied that I’d be fine with another wander down the river or even just pottering around at the hut. He seemed more relaxed after having come up with another plan, and on the walk downriver from the Forks in the morning in light off-and-on drizzle he seemed completely engaged with the river and its beautiful, deep pools. We paused to gaze into one.

     ‘A great one to dive into!’ he said.

     ‘Feel free, Robb.’

     He laughed and shook his head. Neither of us had forgotten we were still deep in winter.

     Several of those big, blue-green pools held trout that drifted in the current then darted off into the shadows in the deepest part of the pool when we came too close. On our return in sporadic drizzle I stopped at the edge of the water before crossing the shallows at the tail of one of those pools, and I saw two trout side by side in the shallow water, wavering in the flow. One swam upstream into the body of the pool and the other followed and I saw the pale grey patch where the algae-filmed substrate had been cleared away. I’d been watching a hen and jack rainbow spawning.

     That was the one day we saw no whio. Most days we met them more than once, often in the river close to the hut. They’re strongly territorial so the pair we met most often were almost certainly the same pair, and that was supported by their behaviour — feeding methodically as they worked their way past us, sometimes only a few metres away. They seemed unperturbed but we took care to move slowly or not at all and I like to think those repeated encounters helped them learn that humans are not a threat. We did find one other pair, further down the river on the day before I watched the spawning trout. Those two were resting at the base of a small rock face that entered a slow backwater pool. They stood, each on one leg with their bill under a wing. The male stretched and whistled several times at first before returning his bill to his wing — but twice I heard him whistle softly, still with his bill beneath his wing. I’d never seen a whio do that before. You learn things when you spend time watching quietly.

     You learn things when you make time to watch, too, and sometimes I think you learn best when you’re simply watching without the expectation of seeing something new and surprising. It would have been easy to stay warm and dry in the hut at first light on the last day, when the sky was heavy with drizzling cloud, but I’d heard the whio and knew this would be our last opportunity to watch them. We found them easily: they were directly opposite the hut, on the far side of the now-swollen, discoloured river. This time the two birds were separated and although I could hear the male whistling, I could see only the female. She was walking quickly downstream over the rain-slicked stones a few metres back from the water’s edge, calling from time to time. I set up the camera on the little tripod and watched her through the binoculars while Robb stood nearby, storing his own memories. She paused to snatch something from the ground, carried on, picked up something else. Something big and long — a native earthworm, driven to the surface of the sodden ground. The male called from somewhere upstream; she answered and turned around and began hurrying back past us, towards his call. I filmed her[2] — not easy because she was walking fast — until, almost directly opposite us, she picked another earthworm from the top of a wet rock and gobbled it down. I wasn’t sure Robb had seen what she’d been eating.

     ‘She’s eating earthworms, Robb — the big native earthworms. I don’t know if that’s been recorded before, but I got it on video.’

     We talked a bit about it; how an earthworm that size must be the equivalent of an awful lot of tiny caddis larvae and how a few of those worms (I’d seen her eat three in the space of just a few minutes) would set her up well for laying a clutch of eggs. North Island whio can start nesting as early as August and if we’d been a few weeks later we might have seen only the male as the female spent most of her time incubating the eggs in a well-hidden nest. We’d been lucky in almost every respect throughout the week; now we needed just a final bit of luck to let the helicopter fly in to collect us in a few hours.

...

Everything was packed and ready and I wandered a little way from the hut to look at the beech forest and the mist-enshrouded tops, to listen to the river, to feel the prickle of light rain on my face, to remember everything. I walked back to where Robb was sitting on the verandah and I’d almost reached the steps when I heard a faint hum. I looked at Robb. He’d heard it too, and within seconds it was unmistakeable.

The sound of a helicopter drawing closer.

––//––

---

Notes:
1.Austroderia sp., probably A. fulvida
2. You can watch a short (25s) clip here. Quality would be acceptable as evidence that it did happen 🙂
3. Here's Robb wading the river.

Photos (Be sure to click them to see them properly):
1. Whio in the main branch of the Maropea river a few hundred metres upstream from the Forks.
2. The best weather all week: Maropea Forks hut.
3. Robb takes a break in the lower reaches of the Maropea's north branch.
4. Whio in rough water, Maropea river.
5. Robb scribbles notes on the porch at Maropea Forks hut.
6 & 7. Downriver from Maropea Forks.
8. The female whio, eater of earthworms at first light on the last day.

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

Top Maropea and the midwinter sun

On the track a few metres ahead, a small bird fossicked among the leaf litter. A female blackbird, I thought, but it was too small and its posture wrong. I stopped and looked more carefully and, stunned by the unexpected encounter, recognised it as a North Island robin (toutouwai). These gentle, confiding birds have suffered badly from the depredations of introduced mammalian predators like stoats, rats, and possums and I had no idea they still survived anywhere in the Ruahine. 

By the time I'd retrieved the camera and fitted the big lens, the little bird had disappeared. I prowled unsuccessfully but as I was about to give up I saw a flicker of movement in the canopy. I looked up to see a toutouwai peering back. I managed a few not-great photos — just good enough for the record. It eventually disappeared and I was again about to stow the camera when the bird appeared on the ground where I’d first seen it. It hopped onto a mossy log and posed beautifully. Perhaps because of the season and the recent snow, I'd seen few birds on the trip and the encounter felt as if the Ruahine had, at the last minute, relented and offered a gift to make the journey more memorable.[1]

 

The previous day I’d walked up to Sunrise hut, where I’d stopped for a late lunch and a conversation with Geoff and Brett. After leaving them in the early afternoon sun, I walked through crisp snow and across stony ground, and over frost-heave, and then along short, deeply incised sections of track where pooled water had turned to ice of lapidary hardness, and soon I arrived at Armstrong Saddle. Light, misty cloud swirled up from the eastern gullies and slid over the tops but it was the sort of cloud that does nothing other than add interest to photographs and a sense of possibility to the walk. 

Animal footprints came down the track towards me. Some were deer but another set puzzled me. I guessed possum but could see no trace of claws and the only animal that might have left such tracks was a cat — a very large cat. I hoped I was wrong; a feral cat would be terrible for the wildlife in the area. I added my own tracks through the snow and stopped occasionally to photograph, knowing I had plenty of time, aware that it’s too easy to keep walking because you’re in a rhythm and making good time and enjoying the feeling of being at home between the land and the sky, and soon the track entered low beech forest, boughs heavy with snow. The forest grew taller as I picked my way down the steep trail; snowgrass began to dominate the understorey, and at last the track opened up and levelled out and, suddenly, as if it had just materialised, Top Maropea hut appeared.

 

The small terrace on which the hut sits was almost completely covered with snow and gleamed in the afternoon sunlight and the hut itself also basked in the sunlight although thick snow still covered one corner of the roof and filled the guttering. The interior smelt of cold ashes and smoke and age, tinged with a hint of damp firewood but, perhaps because the sun was shining through the window over the bench, wasn’t as bitterly cold as I’d expected. That changed when the sun slid below the western ridge and the temperature fell like water draining from a sink. By then I had a fire going but in the breathless dusk the open fireplace struggled to draw and I had to leave the door ajar so the hut wouldn’t fill with smoke. The warmth from the fire was mostly psychological. 

That night I wore thick socks, down pants over geothermal long johns, two base layers, an alpha hoodie, a thick down jacket, a balaclava, and gloves — inside my sleeping bag. With the alpha and puffer hoods pulled up over the balaclava, I stayed comfortable, but by dawn the mug of warm water I’d placed within arm’s reach had iced over. The tap on the water tank had frozen, too, and I had to trickle hot water over it to get it flowing. I brewed Pu-erh tea and made porridge and pottered around as the dawn light strengthened. Knowing the track would be icy, I was in no hurry to leave and waited until mid morning to let the snow on the tops soften. As I closed the door and slid home the bolt I wondered about my next visit in a few weeks, when Robb and I would stay here overnight after six days deeper in the Ruahine. Always, though, the weather decides what happens. One December, Robb and our mate John and I had been blocked from Top Maropea by flooded rivers and had to find a different way out over the tops; on another occasion Robb and I arrived at Top Maropea as a storm set in and had to wait an extra day in the hut before crossing to Sunrise hut in driving snow. I hoped the forthcoming trip would be without drama, eventful only for the right reasons like meeting whio on the Maropea river, or weather like I’d had the previous day, or a comfortable night in a hut that stayed above freezing. But those plans have changed and now we’ll leave the Ruahine a different way, and I have no idea when I’ll see Top Maropea again. I hope it’s soon.

 

From the track high above Top Maropea I looked west across the centre of the Ruahine. Ruapehu and Ngauruhoe were as clearly defined as I’ve ever seen them. They looked like eruptions on the earth’s crust, as if enormous pressure had burst up through the skin of the land — which is, I suppose, exactly how they’d formed. I stood in the sunlight and, through binoculars, scanned the slips and clearings on the far side of the steep valley, wondering whether any deer had lingered to enjoy the morning’s warmth but, save for the desultory calls of a few silvereyes passing through the scrub and, once, the astonishingly loud and clear and beautiful call of a korimako, the mountain seemed strangely abandoned. I carried on, over the summit through crunching snow and down to the saddle and on to Sunrise where I stopped briefly to return Geoff’s spikes[2] and chat with him and with Brett. 

Then, all that remained was the trudge down the track to my unexpected meeting with the toutouwai and, at last, to the car and the long drive home.

 

---

Notes:
1. Later, going through the photos at home, I realised I’d been watching two different individuals, both toutouwai.
2. Geoff had insisted I take his shoe spikes; he and Brett were convinced the track would be dangerously icy. It wasn’t, but I deeply appreciated their concern.

Photos (remember to open them for a better view): 
1. One of the toutouwai. The very dark grey colouration suggests this is an adult male but I've been unable to get authoritative confirmation yet.
2. The track along the tops above Armstrong Saddle, headwaters of the Waipawa river below, on the first day.
3. Route along the tops back to Armstrong Saddle. Those are my footprints from the previous day.
4. Ruapehu (L) and Ngauruhoe (R) from high on the track from Top Maropea to the tops.
5. Looking back towards Armstrong Saddle, Main Ruahine range in the background, on the first day.

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

The valley in midwinter

(Be sure to click the photos for a better view)

On the first day of July, deep in winter, I left the car at the end of Limestone Road and climbed almost 800 metres — much more if you take into account the track's significant up-and-downs — to the top of the Ngamoko Range, and then walked south and east for half an hour in the glare of the low mid-winter sun, which crackled in a cloudless blue sky, and then I descended the track through leatherwood[1], at first low, then over my head until it became mixed with Pāhautea[2] and eventually turned into tall, moss-hung, red beech forest, and finally I came to Leon Kinvig Hut, over 600 metres below the highest point of my walk. Everything around the hut — the ferns, the big slabs of unsplit firewood from the trees that had been felled to clear space for the hut to be relocated, the remaining logs and stumps and piles of slash, the helipad, the shrubs, the blue plastic barrel that served as a dog kennel — was locked in a crust of frost. I crunched my way to the steps — also filmed with frost — and onto the veranda, unbolted the door, and stepped into Antarctica. The window on the far wall was opaque with ice, except for a small patch at the top, and even that was hatched with thin threads of frost.

I lit a fire and while the interior of the hut slowly climbed towards the temperature of the frost outside, I walked down to the river to collect a bucket of water. Recent rain had raised the level and now the big log where I'd sat on previous visits over the summer offered only a small area for my feet — not that I'd have wanted to sit there this time because the log, like everything else, was rimed with frost. As I bent to collect water, a sound made me look up. Over the roar of the river, the sound barely registered, but I'd heard it so often that I almost instinctively looked for the source.

And there they were: two whio, speeding past, going downstream. Just before they disappeared, they flared their wings, slowing and descending towards the water.

Then they were gone.

…

I stayed two nights at the hut and spent my time collecting, sawing, and splitting firewood, drying kindling, rummaging through the woodshed to try to find the driest wood for the next visitors, and checking the river for whio. On the second day, I walked part way up the track with the camera and binoculars. I saw a stag with a good length of antler, but he was draped over a log in the big side creek and had been dead probably a month. How had he died? Had he been shot, or had he been killed in some accident — a fall from the near vertical snowgrass-covered gully a little upstream on the far side of the creek not far from where his body now lay twisted and rotting? From high on the track I couldn’t tell, even through good binoculars, and I wasn’t going to struggle over frosted boulders and logs and wade through swift ice-water to find out. He resembled a stag I'd watched earlier in the year feeding at dusk on that clearing, and the thought that this might be the same deer filled me with sadness. An unwanted vision of a lonely, lingering death haunted me. I didn't know how he'd died, but I hoped he was gone before he knew what was happening.

…

That evening, I returned to the river. The olive-green water of the previous day had cleared a little and looked to have lost some of its power. A crossing might have been feasible but the time for exploring upstream to the old hut site and beyond had passed and the prospect of numb feet wasn’t appealing. I milled around near the whisky-and-olives log but that, too, was uninviting and would have to wait until summer. But my hands, deep inside a pair of ancient fibre-pile gauntlets from the ‘70s, were warm and the hut was waiting.

Not yet, though. I heard a whistle upstream and, stepping forward for a better view, saw the bright bill of a whio. He stood on a rock in the middle of the pool and after I’d photographed him for the record, I made my way back out of sight then up onto the terrace overlooking the pool. From the gloom beneath the beeches I photographed him, carefully, trying not to alarm him (and succeeding). He stood on one leg, the other drawn up into his feathers, his bill now tucked well out of sight into a wingpit. The cold seemed drawn from the outer planets and I had difficulty fathoming how he could stand there on that rock in mid pool without freezing solid. Through the 10x40s I studied him and thought back, long ago, to my undergraduate physiology lectures when I’d learned about the counter-current exchange[3] system that minimises heat loss from the legs of birds. Later, I’d discover that birds lose heat more easily from their bills than their legs[4], which is presumably why this whio had his bill buried in his wingpit. The bill’s epithelium is highly vascularised — when startled or during aggressive interactions, the blood supply to a whio’s bill increases,[5] producing a characteristic pink tinge — and presumably this vascularisation makes the bill susceptible to heat loss. Little wonder, then, that the bird I was watching had his bill tucked into the warmth of his plumage. 

The light was going fast and I wasn’t going to get better photographs. I watched him again through the binoculars for a few minutes, during which time he remained utterly motionless, and at last I crouched slowly until out of sight and crept back from the edge of the terrace and made my way back to the relative warmth of the hut. Just before night drove away the last of the light I heard whistling in the river. Then I heard more whistling — but from obviously further down the river. Then from the original position. I picked up the binoculars and hurried outside. Something was going on: I could hear whistling from two different positions, and a lot of it. I saw movement as something floated downstream, moving fast; more whistling, then I could just make out a bird flying upstream. I heard the momentary call of a female whio. I guessed this was a territorial dispute, a pair fighting with an interloping male — possibly even one of their own sons.

I left them to their arguing and just before I stepped back into the hut I looked up at the sky. The Milky Way had begun to emerge and the sky right across the valley glittered with stars — and yet another satellite slid southwards. Then another. A momentary flash of light prickled in the sky as something small burned up entering the atmosphere but it wasn’t enough to make a wish upon, even if I could think of something to wish for. Maybe that the whio would resolve their conflict without anyone getting hurt, or that the stag died peacefully in its sleep? The possibilities were endless but I’d settle for a good night’s sleep and a comfortable walk out in the morning. As it turned out, both could have been better but they were enough — I stayed warm during the night and enjoyed the sound of a ruru calling just before first light; and although the tops were clagged in and a strong, cold wind was driving across from the north-east, I was well-equipped and had crossed the Ngamoko in far worse weather. Besides, there’s something satisfying and enjoyable about managing those conditions and being self-reliant and aware and capable. 

Before leaving the shelter of the leatherwood, I ran the binoculars over the slips and clearings, wondering whether any deer might still be feeding but I saw none. Even the birds had been scarce lower down, although I’d seen a pair of tītitipounamu (rifleman). I tried to photograph them but after a night in the hut the camera was colder than the sunlit track and condensation fogged the lens instantly when I removed the cap. I set the camera down in a patch of sunlight and watched the tiny birds foraging and thought how it’s the animals — mostly birds and deer in the Pohangina headwaters — that so often bring a place to life: that animate it. Hardly surprising, I suppose, given that ‘animal’ and ‘animate’ both come from the Latin word ‘anima’, meaning breath or spirit.[6] The river last night had a life of its own, as anyone who sits quietly by a mountain river understands, but it was the whio that brought it to life in a way I could more clearly connect with, that animated it, that breathed life into it. That’s what whio do.

---

Notes: 
1. Macrolearia colensoi | Tūpare; Leatherwood. Formerly known as Olearia colensoi. https://www.inaturalist.nz/taxa/1398657-Macrolearia-colensoi 
2. Libocedrus bidwillii | Pāhautea. https://www.inaturalist.nz/taxa/135820-Libocedrus-bidwillii#articles-tab 
3. Cornell Lab. (2017, January 9). How do gulls deal with cold feet? All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/how-do-gulls-deal-with-cold-feet/
4. McQueen, A., Barnaby, R., Symonds, M. R. E., & Tattersall, G. J. (2023). Birds are better at regulating heat loss through their legs than their bills: Implications for body shape evolution in response to climate. Biology Letters, 19(11), 20230373. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2023.0373
5. Williams, M. D. (2025). Whio | Blue duck. In C. M. Miskelly (Ed.), New Zealand Birds Online. https://www.nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/blue-duck 
6. Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Animate. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved July 8, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/animate

Photos (remember to open them for a better view):
1. The hut looked like this the whole time I was there.
2. Usually you get a beautiful view down the river from this window.
3. The true right bank of the river just downstream from the hut. The frost never thawed.
4. Just outside the hut; the track leads from here down to the river.
5. This is him.

Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor

The mystery of black-and-white

Earlier this year, for reasons I don’t remember, I began thinking about how photographs of birds are now almost always in colour. The alternative to colour, of course, is monochrome, often referred to as black-and-white and I’d been wondering whether black-and-white photographs of birds could still have any impact. Perhaps I’d been irritated by the way a carefully prepared colour photograph can end up looking dreadful, the colours garish and bearing little resemblance to the original photograph even when that’s been processed on a computer with a hardware-calibrated monitor. Facebook is particularly bad for distorting (i.e. ruining) colours, although posting photos in .png format instead of .jpg format seems to avoid the problem (but is there anything that works properly on facebook, the platform so enshittified that it’s now like a parody of itself?). Besides, even the most meticulously prepared colour photograph can’t influence the monitor on which it’s displayed and only a tiny percentage of monitors are regularly calibrated, so what you see on another monitor is mostly a matter of luck. 

Last century, controlling colour was much less of a problem because for many decades the only practical option for most photographers was the black-and-white print, and even bird photography was mostly a black-and-white medium. That came with its own problems: notably, how to give the impression of different colours in a monochrome image. But compared to the problems of working with actual colours, that problem was easy to deal with, admittedly because the options for dealing with it were so limited, typically involving the use of different coloured filters.[1]

Now, however, viewers expect a photograph of a bird to be in colour. Is it still possible to produce a black-and-white photograph of a bird that has real impact, I wondered? How might that be possible? Why would you even bother?

 …

Not long afterwards, my tramping mate Robb got in touch. He’d persuaded Tara to let him put a series of black-and-white prints of the Ruahine on the wall and wanted to know if I had anything suitable. He liked the mystery of black-and-white, he said. Coincidence or synchronicity? Whichever it was, his query goaded me into action. He’d suggested one photograph he thought would work, so I retrieved it from an old hard drive and worked it up into black-and-white. Not bad, I thought, so I tried a few others. Not all worked well and some weren’t what Robb had in mind. But, among those I processed as black-and-white photographs were several of whio, and I was surprised and pleased that they did seem better than I’d expected. Perhaps the reason was partly because, despite the English common name ‘blue duck’, whio are not blue — at least, not a distinct blue — and getting their colours ‘right’ can be extraordinarily difficult. Removing colour from the list of things to deal with made the processing more straightforward and I was able to concentrate on other aspects, like contrast and tonal range, composition, and subtle selective sharpening or blurring.

 However, while they were better than I’d expected they still seemed to me like straightforward records of the birds, and I was hoping I’d be able to find some way of saying something other than ‘here’s a whio’. What seemed missing was an element of that aspect Robb had suggested — a sense of mystery, that something else was present or was going on, that the story suggested was more than just ‘here’s a bird’. How might that be achieved, especially when I don’t even know what it is?

 …

 Around the time I was thinking about these things I was also reading a book about killing elephants. The author, Walter D. M. Bell, called ‘Karamojo Bell’ because of his extensive hunting in the Karamoja region of Uganda in the early twentieth century, is widely regarded as among the greatest of Africa’s white colonial hunters. The book, Karamojo Safari, is hard to read, mainly because of his attitudes not just towards elephants but towards the local people (whom he referred to as ‘the natives’: ‘mostly savage and primitive peoples’[2]). Even allowing for the context (the book, published in 1949, recounted Bell’s elephant hunting safaris at and following the end of the nineteenth century), Bell’s writing is, let’s say, uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much else about the book. Yet, constantly, I found myself mourning a time long gone. He’d write about how he looked out from a kopje or a mountainside at vast numbers of animals on seemingly endless savannahs, and even Bell himself realised, when he wrote the book almost half a century later, that those days had vanished.[3] He was undoubtedly stricken by nostalgia; I, however, having never experienced that time nor place, experienced a keen sense of anemoia. If you don’t already know, anemoia is ‘nostalgia for a time you never experienced’[4] and a key way it can be triggered is by looking at a black-and-white photograph.

 That resonated, and I realised a black-and-white photograph didn’t always need a sense of mystery to trigger strong emotions. During one of my last visits to my sister, she and my younger brother and I sorted through a great many old prints from the unofficial family archive. More than a few were of us when we were small children and although they held little mystery — we knew who the subjects were (us!) and often remembered the circumstances when our dad had photographed us (it helped that he was a professional photographer as well as an excellent one) — their rendering as mostly black-and-white prints conferred a sense of returning to that long gone past: not quite nostalgia because the emotions they evoked were merely tinged with yearning rather than saturated with it. I doubt colour prints would have affected me as strongly, and now I think that might have been because dad’s primary photographic medium was the black-and-white print.

 …

 As is the way in this era of surveillance capitalism, I soon found my Instagram feed being populated by an increasing number of posts about photographers and photography with a strong predilection for black-and-white as a medium. For once, I didn’t mind. I discovered a lot that impressed me (among much that didn’t), and it didn’t take long before I realised what should have been obvious: that the appeal of black-and-white can take many forms and isn’t just limited to nostalgia, anemoia, or even a sense of mystery. Sometimes, for example, what’s appealing can be patterns, textures, forms, or the tones themselves (I’m struggling to find a way to avoid referring to ‘shades of grey’).

 I’d already known about the marvellous work of Ragnar Axelsson and the book Ravens by Masahisa Fukase, but the work of Pentti Sammallahti was new to me, as was that of Gilles Nicolet and Chieko Shiraishi. Other black-and-white photography, particularly much of what Instagram presented from contemporary photographers, I found overprocessed and melodramatic, as if the photographer (perhaps more accurately, the photo editor) had been desperately afraid that the viewer might fail to feel the drama of the moment. The most powerful photographs, I realised, were often characterised by subtlety: a character harder to achieve than it might appear. The line between a mediocre photograph and a powerful one was itself subtle, not easily pinned down.

 …

I converted a couple of new photographs to black-and-white and showed them to a friend. She liked them but she’d already seen the original colour versions and wanted to know what extra the black-and-white conversions offered. I shouldn’t have been surprised (and wasn’t — offering both colour and black-and-white versions and asking ‘which do you prefer?’ is a well-used way to get social media engagement) but the comment, although well-intentioned, gnawed at me. All that effort to arrive at the black-and-white image was pointless, it suggested.

 But it’s not. The point of the conversion is not to compare colour with black-and-white; the conversion is an end in its own right and the crucial question is not ‘which do you prefer?’ but  ‘how well does this work as a black-and-white photograph?’ or ‘what impact does it have?’ or ‘what does it evoke?’ The comparison could also be flipped so that instead of asking what extra a black-and-white version offers over a colour version, one might ask what colour would add that would improve the photograph.

 More specifically, how would the addition of colour influence the viewer’s perception of the important elements in the photograph? Colour, I’ll suggest, does not always improve a photograph: it can distract and detract, drawing attention away from particular elements and changing the way the image acts on the viewer. To complicate matters even more, colour preferences change with age and gender-related social conditioning, so what you experience when you view a colour photograph will depend at least in part on your age and gender.

 …

 I was sitting outside at the back door before dawn on the coldest day of the year so far, drinking tea, watching flocks of pigeons flying out from the city, and thinking about these and related questions. A thought came to me: perhaps, when we look at a black-and-white photograph in the twenty-first century, in this age when colour is an hegemony, we subconsciously wonder why the photograph is not in colour and we assume its main intention is something other than simply documenting a moment. In other words, when you remove colour from a photograph, you remove much of the temptation to view the image as a mere representation of its subject. Instantly, you begin to wonder, and perhaps it’s in that wondering that the sense of mystery resides.

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Notes: 
1. Even when colour photography did become common the choice was between colour prints or colour transparencies (‘slides’). Few photographers processed those themselves, so what you got depended on the competence of the lab that did the processing and once you’d pressed the shutter release the process was out of your hands. Now, serious photographers do their own processing: on a computer. Photographing a bird or other subject in colour no longer ends when you hand a roll of film to a lab, and because manipulating colour is now up to the photographer, the process is more complex and the results more variable than working in black-and-white.
2. P. 3 in Bell, W. M. D. (1949). Karamojo safari. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
3. ‘This is a true story of a journey into Karamojo some fifty years ago when it was an unknown [sic] part of Africa. Indeed, even today with the aid of modern transportation, it is but little known. [...]  At the time dealt with in this book, the author was the first white man seen by the natives. Needless to say, the conditions prevailing can never occur again.’ (Bell, 1949, p. 15).
4. From The dictionary of obscure sorrows, by John Koenig.

Photos (All are from the Ruahine Forest Park. Be sure to click them to see a better image): 
1.Whio pair, Maropea river, December 2023
2. Robb Kloss on the final descent to Sunrise hut from Armstrong Saddle, July 2022
3. Whio pair preening before dawn, Maropea Forks, December 2023
4. Miromiro (North Island tomtit) on the track from Upper Makaroro to Parks Peak hut, February 2024
5. Robb Kloss climbs the track from Maropea Forks to Puketaramea, July 2022

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.

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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

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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