Living on the island of lost birds

One of the things that's fascinating about living in New Zealand to me is that for most of the millions of years of its existence, it was a land of birds, and birds alone. Until the first Polynesians arrived about 800 years ago, isolated NZ was a feathered place with no native mammals. Unfortunately, between the Maori and later European colonisation, many of this land's most unique and dazzling birds were soon extinct.

Most people know about the moa, the largest bird ever to live. If you've ever seen a skeleton of one of these, it's pretty amazing to imagine a bird as tall as a giraffe. They were wiped out not long after the Maori arrived and were gone by the time Europeans came. At their biggest, they stood 12 feet tall.

But there were tons of other amazing long-gone feathered things -- the Haast's eagle -- the world's largest eagle; the beautiful black and yellow huia (right); the moa-lite adzebill; the whekau or laughing owl... I've a long list of things I'd do if I ever got my mitts on a time machine, but I think one of the things I'd love to do is see what New Zealand looked like, pre-colonization -- before the original bush was mostly wiped out, when the only thing you'd hear was a million different bird calls and imagined herds of moa roaming the land. It's just a tremendous shame to know that thanks to man's greed or man-introduced predators like rats and cats, we'll never know what a wonder a country of birds would've been.

Not all the unique birds of New Zealand are extinct, of course. Everyone knows about kiwi - which are fascinating creatures, but I tell you, there hasn't been a bird less prepared for foreign invaders since the dodo. Flightless, nocturnal, timid and nearly defenseless, the poor kiwi doesn't make it easy on itself. Another gorgeous yet terribly hapless critter is the flightless kakapo, the rarest, fattest parrot in the world -- dozens of people work long hours in the bush trying to force this exceedingly stubborn animal to mate. Living on the ground and not flying makes it hard to be a bird in the modern age.

Another native bird I discovered just a month or two ago is the beautiful kokako (right), which is a sleek grey with dazzling blue wattles and the cutest dark little cry you ever heard -- it sounds exactly like a person saying "ko-ka-ko," hence the bird's name. There's not a lot of them left, either, but we saw one at a bird sanctuary near Wellington and they're just awesome.

But hey, not all birds here are evolutionary dead-ends. My favorite New Zealand bird is the pukeko, (right) which is like a punk-rock chicken. They're gorgeous, gawky things, a sleek and sparkling blue with an orange helmet, about the size of a chicken but with huge oversized feet. They're awkward and amusing little fellows and they're as common as pigeons in many New Zealand parks. I like to think they're a reminder of what it was like in a country of birds.

Earth Hour and plastic bags

Excuse me while I put on my cynic's hat. I like to think of myself as fairly environmentally minded. But I found this whole Earth Hour thing this past weekend to be a cheesy bit of feel-good symbolic environmentalism, a big empty gesture that doesn't exact much in the way of change. Shut off or reduce your power for an hour, they said. But why turn off your lights for an hour and tell yourself you're clean and green if you don't do much in the way of changing your habits the other 364 days of the year? New Zealand's energy consumption went down 3% for Earth Hour; but how much would it go down if people didn't just pat themselves on the back with one hour and instead did things like buy energy-efficient bulbs, turn them off when you're not in a room and the like?

The intention behind Earth Hour is wonderful, I know, and it's geared toward getting people to think about a new global climate deal, but I guess I tend to find it very vapid cheerleading that doesn't really lead to much in the way of action, allowing people to think they've made a difference and then go on as before. I guess as I get older and more cynical I find less appeal in these gestures, but then again, maybe I'm just a cranky git and it will make some people change their habits. But I have to wonder, are people really going to turn off the Eiffel Tower and Las Vegas lights every Saturday now?

On the other hand, one movement that is gaining steam in New Zealand does have a lot going for it -- charging people for plastic bags at stores. Chains like Borders and the Warehouse (our big Kmart sort of chain) are now charging customers an extra 10¢ if they want a bag for their purchase. I like it - it makes you think twice. If you're just buying a single book, you don't really need a bag, for instance. Borders reports bags have cut down by 80 percent after they introduced the levy. Yeah, sometimes you need a bag, but most times you don't. We recycle our plastic bags we do have for trash and so forth, but probably could do without a great many of them. If you hit people in their wallet, they have to reconsider habits a bit. Considering how many zillions of bags clog the planet right now, movements to reduce or even ban useless bags are change I can get behind. (Has this gotten anywhere in the US at all? Apparently in California it's actually illegal to charge for bags!)

I'm not wanting to be smug as I'm nowhere near a "perfect" environmentalist; sure, we compost, grow some of our own vegetables, recycle most of our trash, never buy Starbucks or fast food really, only have one car between us, don't eat much red meat (my wife's a vegetarian). But we use electricity, our cranky old Subaru smells funny, I do have a nasty habit of driving to work when I could walk (it's the 6.30am bloody start time darn it) and do love the smell of Pledge furniture polish. It's good to see people thinking more and more about the future now, but that ever-rising cynic in me still keeps worrying it's about 20 years too late.

A very merry kauri Christmas

Well, that was a whirlwind Christmas trip -- less than 48 hours out of Auckland -- but we had to negotiate work schedules and so forth and were pleased with what we got. We drove on up to Opononi, a flyspeck hamlet perched on the shore of the Hokianga Harbour about three hours north of Auckland. It's a place I last passed through in 2003 on our trip to Cape Reinga, and we'd been wanting to see more of.

The big attraction in this part of NZ is the kauri forest, the remnants of trees that once spanned most of the country (little-known fact: the lovely green rolling hills most people think of when they think New Zealand are actually the legacy of clear-cutting by man). Kauri are basically the redwood trees of New Zealand, and among the biggest trees on earth. As I've said before, I love redwoods and I quite like kauri too. They don't quite reach the heights of redwoods -- 160 feet or so max as opposed to nearly 400 feet for reddies, but they do have an astounding girth -- the biggest is 50 feet around. Running across some of the few remaining giant kauri is a bit like coming across a solid wood wall in the middle of the forest. The pictures don't quite do them justice in terms of scale.

This time we stopped at the most excellent Kauri Museum in Matakohe along the way. Despite being in the middle of nowhere, it's one of the better museums I've seen in NZ, with a look at kauri logging and its role in the pioneer settlements, in Maori legend, and its ecology. It's a huge sprawling place with a replica of a working sawmill and tons of big machines which Peter loved.

Also featured is a display of all kinds of kauri gum, which is a gorgeous glowing golden amber and was a prized resource. The museum had nifty displays of gum, included some carved into strange shapes (the kauri gum carved into the shapes of Christian Bibles is a nice statement of the 19th-century mindset).

Of course, despite it being summer in New Zealand, we had a mostly rainy getaway to Opononi, but it was still nice. The damp lends an evocative atmosphere to the kauri bush anyway, which is full of kiwis and such. (Not that we saw one -- actually, has anyone reading outside of biologists actually seen a kiwi in the wild? They're very stealthy.) We wandered on the great beaches of Hokianga Harbour, ate too much fish, chips and chocolate for our own good, opened Christmas prezzies and then came back to Auckland and opened still more! My kind of holiday, mate!

Deep into the redwood canopy: Wild Trees

One of my favorite places in the world has always been California's most remote regions, far away from the crowds and traffic, the foggy Northwesternmost coast of Eureka and Arcata and Crescent City. Redwood country. It's a long ways from anywhere – 5,6 hours at least from San Francisco along some really windy roads. The chilly damp, grey-skied and very green forests aren't for everyone, but every time I've visited friends and vacationed there, I feel like I'm visiting somewhere I belong.

Part of that big appeal is the redwoods, utterly epic giants of trees that are so big they become your environment rather than just part of it. You can walk through a redwood forest and not even see the tops of most of the trees. It's a cool place, full of much mystery, and so Richard Preston's great book "The Wild Trees" is like a travelogue of another planet – the world that exists on top of the redwoods. A few years back Preston wrote a fascinating New Yorker article following those who explored the redwood canopy – 200, 300 feet above the ground, where unknown to science until only a few years ago, entire ecosystems had formed in the crowns of redwoods. There are epiphytes (plants growing on the redwoods), soil formed over decades, species of animals unknown to science, and much more. Preston later expanded that article into this deeply evocative book.

"The Wild Trees" is a must for anyone interested in how much we still don't know about the natural world. He digs into the stories of those spellbound by the redwoods, a handful of dreamers, botanists and adventurers who've been scaling the redwoods, searching for their secrets. Gradually folks like Humboldt University professor Stephen Sillett realize just how little anyone knows about the inaccesible peaks of tall trees, and that hidden in the foggy remote canyons of Northwestern Cailfornia are trees that are the tallest in the world.

Preston - who wrote "The Hot Zone" a few years back – balances history, ecological musings and his own growing fascination with redwood country. He puts you right there as his cast scale redwoods with impossible skill – relying on a single rope or two to hold their life dangling 300 feet in the air. I seriously doubt I'll ever climb one of the world's tallest trees, but Preston's tense, spare prose put me right there in the canopy. (And harrowingly brings home what it'd be like to fall in one terrifying scene.) A New York Times review puts it well – "Preston combines the thrill of exploration with the quirkiness of those who choose it as their lives’ work."

He's clearly awed by the redwoods, but avoids too much new-agey tree-hugging sentiment in favor of letting the facts speak for themselves: "Botanists think that the oldest redwoods may be somewhere between two thousand and three thousand years old. They seem to be roughly the age of the Parthenon." And estimates are that since people began buzzing around, about 95 percent of the coast redwoods are gone. "The Wild Trees" is an invitation to a world most of us will never see, a reminder that there's a heck of a lot more going on in this big blue marble than we can imagine.