Going south towards Christchurch on State Highway 6 about half an hour before you reach the town of Murchison, there’s a turnoff pointing to St Arnaud and Picton. You can see the sign in the background of this photo, and on the right-hand side, the road continuing south to Murchison. The railway platform at Kawatiri [...]
Places
This photo of the Milky Way was taken at Upper Moutere. Back in the early 1960s, the University of Pennsylvania surveyed several sites in the South Island to see if they were suitable for establishing an observatory. Away from the main towns, the Tasman District has very little in the way of light pollution, and [...]
This is a Pelton wheel, the type of water turbine used in the Cobb Power Station. The Pelton wheel is suited for hydro stations that have a high head, which Cobb does. They are very efficient and can generate power from a small volume of water. For instance, the flow of the Cobb River into [...]
The Cobb Valley track runs alongside the Cobb River, and this is the view in the lower part of the valley, walking out towards the Trilobite Hut carpark. The valley floor is covered in tussock, these knee-height grasses growing in clumps that you can see in the foreground. From a distance, tussock give the landscape [...]
Yesterday’s photo was of two weka (Gallirallus australis) chasing each other and is a blur of feathers where it’s a bit difficult to tell which end of the birds we’re looking at. Today’s is a proper photo of a weka close-up. The subspecies of weka that is found in the Tasman District is the western [...]
Okay, this isn’t a great photo, but it illustrates something I find really amusing about weka (Gallirallus australis). Weka don’t mind you getting near them, what they won’t tolerate is others of their kind getting close. If another starts closing in, one will start clucking, slowly at first, and becoming increasingly insistent as the intruder [...]
This is the view from the eastern slopes of Xenicus Peak looking down on Lake Cobb. This tiny lake is the source of the Cobb River, which flows into the Cobb Reservoir, providing water to the Cobb power station at the junction of the Cobb River and the Takaka River. Who was this Cobb who [...]
This imposing beast is Xenicus Peak in the Cobb Valley. Xenicus is a genus of very small birds, containing only two species. The first is the New Zealand rock wren (Xenicus gilviventris), which is now extremely rare. It occurs in a lot of different parts of the South Island, but there aren’t very many of [...]
The colours of the welcome swallow (Hirundo neoxena) are striking and distinctive; there are no other birds even remotely similar in appearance found in New Zealand. They’re fast, though, so you’re more likely to see them in flight, swooping under and over bridges or around the eaves of buildings. The swallow’s rust-coloured face and throat [...]
This photo was taken in 2014 and shows the view from the Cobb Power Station back along the Cobb Valley Road. You can see how narrow and windy the road is, not to mention the steepness of the hill rising above the road. Cyclone Gita damaged the area pretty badly earlier this year, so it [...]
