Top Maropea again

 

White clouds drift in a brilliant blue sky; west from the hut, bush-clad ridges in successively paler shades of light fade into the blue of distance as a sou’west front begins to thicken the cloud. Maropea Forks sits down there somewhere in hazy sunlight and I wonder how many visitors have stayed, or just called in while passing through, since Robb and I flew out exactly a month ago after a week when the complexities of the outside world seemed distant and less important than speculating about the weather, or deciding which branch of the river to explore that day, or whether to resist the urge to take a nap. I’d love to visit again and explore the rivers once more for whio. They’ll be nesting now, perhaps even not far from hatching a brood of delightful and unsinkable chicks.

Another time. Soon, I hope.

Last time I was here at Top Maropea the bitter cold drove me indoors but now, as I sit on one of the scarily unstable bench seats at the back of the little terrace in front of the hut, scribbling in the sun with a second cup of Lapsang Souchong cooling in the afternoon breeze, I’m almost warm. Then a big cloud drifts its shadow over me, the temperature drops, and I wonder whether that’s the day calling time. But, after a few minutes, the cloud moves away and the warmth of the sun returns. Off to my right, a riroriro sings and is answered by another, further away and to my left. Pōpokotea have been trilling, too and waxeyes call as they work the stunted mountain beech. Far off, the sound of the stream in the gully swells and fades.

I look up as a blackbird flies off from the dwarf beeches beyond the lip of the terrace, uttering a little cluck of alarm. Perhaps it wanted to fossick for worms and other morsels on the terrace but I looked too fearsome? They seem to be everywhere in the Ruahine — thrushes too, but, as far as I know, no one knows what much about the impact of these introduced birds on native ecosystems. Thrushes presumably eat native snails but that doesn’t mean native snail populations are adversely affected (although that doesn’t mean they’re not adversely affected). The impacts of introduced trout, which are now ubiquitous in Ruahine rivers, on whio have been questioned but the only study I know of concluded trout don’t compete significantly with whio for food[1]. I’m not entirely convinced but I’ll concede that, even if the two do compete, fewer trout would mean not necessarily mean more whio. Population ecology isn’t that simple.

The afternoon sun begins to soften and I think about photographs, but right now I’m happy to sit and enjoy the warmth and relish the fact that from here all you can see is the Ruahine — no roads, no fences, no farm tracks, no huts other than the one behind me if I turn to my right. Yes, that faint haze of hills in the extreme distance lies beyond the Forest Park boundary but it’s too far and too indistinct to be recognisable as farmland, as anything other than a two-dimensional, featureless shape. Other than the occasional, barely discernible drone of a plane from time to time, no sound of human activity intrudes on bird song, wind sigh, and the faint, constant, always changing sound of the stream.

Back in the hut, I boil water and add it to the dehy and set a timer for longer than the recommended 10–15 minutes. The sun’s almost gone from the terrace so to enjoy what little remains I take the binoculars and stand there looking for an unlikely deer. I turn the glasses towards Puketaramea and the clearing where, in 2022, Robb and I had watched a stag, his antlers in velvet, feeding in the deep snowgrass. Already that has become history, a story to be told, a photograph and a video stored for the time when an encounter like that will no longer be possible. The thought strengthens my resolve to spend as much time as I can exploring the Ruahine — even if that means revisiting places I’ve been many times before.

I know people who think repeated visits to favourite places suggest a lack of imagination or an aversion to adventure. I disagree, and in any case the two attitudes are not mutually exclusive: it’s perfectly possible to keep going back to places you love while also exploring new places. Crucially, though, I don’t think you can build a deep relationship with a place by visiting it just once, briefly. You get to know a place in much the same way as you get to know a person: by spending time with them. Falling in love with a place instantly is not just possible but, in the case of the Ruahine, a common experience, but it carries similar risks to love at first sight when you meet a person. Infatuation can lead to deeper, stronger love but it can also lead to disillusionment, boredom, and the realisation that what you thought you saw is what you wanted them (the person or place) to be, not what they are. Still, I wonder if that’s as common for places as people? In my experience, including that of good friends, becoming disillusioned with a place you loved the moment you met it is rare and happens only when the place changes radically — for example, the so-called development that destroyed the marvellous, wild qualities of the place where I lived during my childhood and teenage years. The place no longer exists; you can only mourn it and enjoy the memory of what it was.

I hope that will never be true of anywhere in the Ruahine.

---

Notes:
1. Towers, D. J. (1996). Diet overlap between coexisting populations of native blue ducks (Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos) and introduced trout (family: Salmonidae): Assessing the potential for competition [Doctoral dissertation, Massey University]. Massey Research Online. http://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/2827

Photos (Click them to see them properly):
1. The head of the Waipawa river — very different from a few months ago
2. The last of the sun-rotted snow at the start of the descent to Top Maropea hut
3. The heart of the Ruahine. Top Maropea's on the darkest spur; Maropea Forks sits hidden in the far distance.
4. December 2022 — the stag finally decides something's not right.
5. The top of the track that climbs from Top Maropea; last snow clinging on. From here it's along the ridge and down to Armstrong Saddle and eventually to Sunrise hut. On that last section between the saddle and Sunrise, the wind lived up to its notorious reputation, battering me so violently I sometimes could nothing but stop, brace myself, and wait for a slight lull.

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.

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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.

---

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

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

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

The Gardener

My recollection of her is faint, which is to be expected because it was a long time ago and I haven’t thought about her in years. Possibly decades. I don’t know why I’ve started thinking about her recently. Perhaps it was the dream, a strange one, like all dreams, that I had a while ago, alone in a mountain hut (Why there? I have to ask) and which left me unsettled and also thinking perhaps I could write a short story about this. But the difficulty is how much to stay true to what I remember (which might be unreliable anyway) and how much I should feel free to make up, or at least extrapolate. The other difficulty is that I don’t know what the story means. A story has to have a point, after all, doesn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t, or maybe the point, the meaning, is something that arrives after the story has been written, and maybe the reader sees the meaning better than the writer? But, having pointed to the story’s existence, I suppose I now have to relate it.



Every day after school I’d get off the bus opposite the Moa Bone cave and walk home around the edge of the Bay — roughly half a mile, a few houses on my left, on my right the road and just to the right of that the stink of mud and rotting sea lettuce if the tide was out or, if it was in, glittering water where the glass shrimps crept and nibbled among the rusting rubbish. Then the abandoned quarry on my left and the road and gravel dumps and waste land on my right, and eventually our road and the ominous row of old trees behind which drinking and other immoral acts sometimes occurred after dark on Fridays and Saturdays and occasionally at other times too. Sometimes when I walked past, a car would be parked there, well back from the road, and I walked past quickly, not looking.

Hers was the last house I passed, not long before the quarry. I often thought the garden was wonderful, crowded with trees and shrubs so it resembled a small forest, and I liked the house, too, mostly because the main part was raised above a garage and what I guessed must have been the laundry and maybe some storage areas. From the upper part of the house she must have been able to look out over the bay and see the water and the birds and probably no other houses except so far away they didn’t matter. She’d see the Causeway with all its traffic, of course, but that was inevitable: nothing to be done about that.

Once I mentioned to my mother that I really liked the woman’s garden. She looked at me, and eventually she said, ‘She’s got too much planted. It’s too crowded.’

She looked away, and then she said, ‘She’s there all on her own.’

One day I was walking home and as I approached the entrance to her property — a gap in the bulk of foliage — I saw her working, snipping with secateurs at a shrub. I think it was a Pittosporum, but that doesn’t matter, except I like Pittosporums because they’re endemic and their foliage is nice and P. tenuifolium (kohuhu; black matipo) has the most beautiful and powerful scent of any plant I know, and the flowers are small and dark so you’d never notice them if the scent didn’t say ‘Check me out’.

She smiled at me and said hello and I said hello.

She asked how my day had been and remarked on my bag, which she supposed must have been very heavy, presumably because it was full of books.

‘Yes. Lots of homework.’

I never found out what kind of work she did, and I don’t know if my mother knew.

She asked if I liked reading, and I said yes, and she asked what kind of books I liked reading.

‘Lots of things, but I particularly like reading about mountains.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and something changed, like the conversation wasn’t just casual anymore.

‘Some books arrived today’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking for them for a while and found them in a bookseller’s catalogue. I’m delighted with them. One’s John Pascoe’s Mr Explorer Douglas. Have you heard of him?’

I had. I knew of Pascoe and even had one of his books, Exploration New Zealand, which I’d won as a prize at school. I’d heard of Charlie Douglas, too.

‘Would you like to see it?’ she said.

We’d been warned about talking to strangers, never getting into cars with someone we didn’t know, that sort of thing. But she wasn’t really a stranger, and maybe it wouldn’t be polite to refuse, and I wanted to see Pascoe’s famous book.


She led me inside, and I took my shoes off at the door because we’d been taught it was the proper thing to do, and her house was so clean and tidy I’d have been uncomfortable walking through it with shoes on. I have only a vague recollection of the large lounge — dim despite the large windows, but perhaps the trees outside kept the light out. As I’d guessed, the main window looked out to the entranceway and across the road to a strip of bay and the causeway with its incessant traffic. I suppose when the light was right she could look right across to the foothills of the Southern Alps. I most clearly remember two books sitting on a dark wooden table. She stood next to them, her arms by her side as if she’d been trained how to stand for formal occasions like public speaking. She smiled again and looked down at the books and picked up the one on top and ran her hand gently over the cover, the way you’d stroke something fragile or desired, even longed for, and she opened it carefully and turned a few pages. She turned them carefully, from the corners, the way I’d been taught to respect books.

‘Would you like to look at it?’ she said, and she held it out for me.

I took the book from her, gently, and turned some pages in the same careful way, hoping she’d notice my respect. I couldn’t say much, though, because it was all text and I didn’t want to flick through it looking for photos.

‘It’s in very good condition,’ I said.

‘Yes. I was very lucky. It’s out of print. Hard to find, and good copies are rare.’

We were both unsure what else to say.


I don’t remember much more — a vague recollection that she might have offered me a biscuit or even a cup of tea, but memories are constructed rather than recalled and are therefore unreliable. If she did offer me anything, I declined politely. I had to get home in case my mother worried. She nodded and let me go.


Later — possibly weeks or months — my mother told me someone had remarked on how well I spoke and how I always looked so neat and well dressed in my school uniform. This surprised me because I didn’t think I spoke particularly well, often loosened my tie and let my socks slip down, and wasn’t sure I wanted to be known for proper speech and tidy presentation anyway. I was at the stage when fitting in was more important. She wouldn’t tell me who the person was, though, and when I asked, she said, ‘It doesn’t matter. I just wanted you to know.’

I could tell she was pleased that my good speech and neatness had been noticed, but I often wondered whether the remark had come from the woman with the garden and the books, and I wondered what my mother knew about her. The time for finding out has gone, though. I have so many questions, but none of them are clear; they’re vague wonderings that I can’t bring myself to pin down. Maybe that’s for the best.

 

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Photos:

1. Kotare (New Zealand kingfisher; Todiramphus sanctus), common around the Bay. I photographed this in the Pohangina Valley just a few days ago.

2 & 3. White-faced heron (matuku moana; Egretta novaehollandiae), another common inhabitant of the Bay. I photographed these roughly a decade ago at Flounder Bay on the east coast of the North Island.

Photos and original text © 2020 Pete McGregor