Golden Bay’s mild climate, native bush and numerous golden sand beaches make the Abel Tasman coast track popular throughout the year. The Abel Tasman National Park is New Zealand’s smallest national park and is named after Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman, who was the first European explorer known to sight New Zealand. The park was established in 1942 to mark the 300th anniversary of his arrival. Project Janszoon is working to restore the park’s ecology. Their timeframe is thirty years; the end of their work in the year 2042 will mark 100 years since the park was established and 400 years since Abel Tasman visited New Zealand. This photo of walkers in Goat Bay was taken in early April, when the track tends to be quieter than during the peak summer season.
The South Island’s beech forests (Nothofagus species) play host to a species of aphid-like scale insects. These scale insects attach themselves to trees and suck up sugar from the tree’s vascular tissues. The fluid ingested is so rich in sugar that the scale insects secrete it, providing a high-energy food source to other forest life, including tui, bellbirds and kaka. The excess sugar is also food for the sooty mould fungus that can be seen in this photo. Look closely at the right-hand side of the photo and you’ll also see a fine filament hanging off the mould. This is a scale insect’s anal tube and there’s a drop of honeydew at the end of it. Yes, the South Island’s beech forests are full of insects dripping sweet nectar from their butts.
White-faced herons (Egretta novaehollandiae) are common in the Tasman region. They’ve arrived in New Zealand in the last hundred years and like it here so much that they’ve spread throughout the country. Coastlines are their thing, especially mudflats, where they systematically scour the shore for signs of dinner. They eat invertebrates (crabs, worms, insects, spiders), but will also eat small vertebrates (fish, lizards, frogs). White-faced herons are also found in paddocks and parks after rain, where they look for worms.
Abel Tasman Drive connects Takaka and Totaranui Beach in the Abel Tasman National Park. Along the way, it passes through popular coastal settlements, including Pohara, Tarakohe and Tata Beach. This is the marina at Port Tarakohe.
Just up the coast from Kaiteriteri is Split Apple Rock, a huge granite boulder that has split in two. The rock is thought to have split when water seeped into a crack, then froze and expanded.
New Zealand fur seals/kekeno (Arctocephalus forsteri) were nearly extinct before the Marine Mammals Protection Act was passed in 1978. Before humans arrived, it’s estimated there were as many as two million seals on New Zealand’s coastlines. Hunting for food and furs was the issue. Although hunting stopped in the late 1940s, the population didn’t really start to increase until after 1978, when they were given legal protection. Since then, the population has steadily increased and fur seals are now breeding in the North Island once again. This mother and pup were sunning themselves on rocks in Tasman Bay. Well, one was sunny herself, the other was waiting for a feed.
This South Island robin (Petroica australis) was checking us out along a track at Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes National Park. Although quiet, these guys aren’t shy. They will come very close to you to check out what deliciousness your footsteps are stirring up.
The tangled hump of vines is old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), and anyone who was watching New Zealand television in the late-1980s will remember David Bellamy’s “Old man’s beard must go!” ad. Old man’s beard grows vigorously, strangles its host plant, shades out other plants and stops the seeds of other species from germinating: Bad news all around. Many regional and district councils have active programmes working at controlling old man’s beard. Efforts include using biological control agents, cutting back vines, pulling up seedlings and using herbicides on the foliage. Eradication requires multiple methods and repeated effort.
This is Amanita muscaria, fly agaric. There’s some discussion about whether Amanita muscaria is just one species or many, as specimens can look very different. See Fungi of Nelson Lakes: Episode III: Fly Agaric for a cluster of fly agaric that looks not much like this one at all.
After Tuesday’s cold snap blew through, we woke Wednesday morning to the Wharepapa/Arthur Range looking like this. The pyramid-looking mountain in the foreground that doesn’t have snow on it is Sugar Loaf. Sugar Loaf is 1081 metres high and lies between the Pearse and Graham Rivers, which feed the Motueka River. Mountains called “sugar loaf” are named after sugarloaves, the hard, conical forms in which sugar was sold until people started getting the stuff in paper and plastic bags. So common is the use of “sugarloaf” to name a steeply conical mountain that Wikipedia has a List of mountains named Sugarloaf. The list has three geographical features named after sugarloaves in New Zealand alone, not including the one in the photo.
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