Although riflemen are sexually dimorphic, both the male and the female have this pearly-white chest and belly, along with these grandad eyebrows. Young birds are more mottled on their chests, and the pearly chest and white brow seem to come in as the birds mature. Both male and female have the yellow sweat stains under [...]
Places
New Zealand’s smallest bird, the rifleman (Acanthisitta chloris), feeds exclusively on insects. They browse native forests, going up and down trees, systematically hunting down their tiny prey. This rifleman on the track to Mt Arthur Hut has taken an interest in what’s inhabiting the mosses and lichens on the underside of a branch (probably a [...]
To overseas visitors used to snowfall in deciduous forests, it might seem odd to see snow on and around trees that haven’t lost their leaves. New Zealand’s southern beech (Nothofagus) species are evergreen, so this is what our forests look like when it snows. This photo was taken on the track up to the Arthur [...]
When Europeans started looking at weka closely, they were confused over how many species there were. There was also thought to be an extinct species of little weka, known only from sub-fossils, but these days that species is thought to have been a variant of the ones we still have. The four subspecies vary in [...]
St Arnaud is a tiny village (pop 442) on the shores of Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes National Park. The road through St Arnaud was temporarily a major highway following the Kaikoura earthquake in November 2016. Massive and multiple landslips over the coast road north of Kaikoura required over a year’s work to get [...]
The walk through the Kawatiri rail tunnel ends above the Hope River, where you can see the supports for the old railbridge. The track goes up and over the tunnel, following the bend in the river, then loops back down to the southern end of the tunnel and you can follow the track back to [...]
At only 185 metres long, you don’t really need a torch to walk through the old Kawatiri rail tunnel, and being without a torch adds to the eerie, damp atmosphere. The tunnel cuts through granite, and digging out the tunnel was hard work. At first, workers had only hand tools for digging the holes dynamite [...]
Although the Nelson railway line had reached as far as Glenhope by 1912, work on the 6.5 kilometre Glenhope-Kawatiri section stopped and started during the war years, then ground to a complete halt in 1917. Work on the Kawatiri tunnel began in 1920 and a workers’ camp was set up across the river from the [...]
In the carpark that is home to the old Kawatiri Junction railway platform, there’s another bridge over the river, but access to it is restricted. If you’re just stopping in the carpark and reading the historic info panels, you might think there isn’t much else to do there. But at the northern end of the carpark, [...]
At the Glenhope end of the Glenhope-Kawatiri section of the old Nelson railway line is the old Glenhope railway station. The railway line reached Glenhope in 1912, and it served as the line’s terminus until the Kawatiri station opened in 1926. After Kawatiri Station was closed in 1931, Glenhope was the terminus once again, until [...]
