All my firsts

First let me tell you that I’m doing this now because Brian is a nag and says I can’t have wine until it’s done.  But there have been a lot of firsts this week, quite apart from that.

There’s been the albatross, the Tracey Island disappearing gun but the penguins and seals were really entertaining.

Then I saw/entered a fjord for the first time (but here they’re mostly called sounds and when they do use fiord they spell it wrongly.

At the Fox Glacier

Then there were the kiwi experiences – in captivity and the wild.  The next day it was a glacier – I’d no idea that they were such dirty looking things or that they ended abruptly with water coming out of the bottom.  All my life I thought they were pristine white/blue and tapering gently down to nothing – hey ho.

I'm posing!

J and B have been on about keas (those naughty alpine parrots) so yesterday they sought some out and they were such fun – though stand still long enough and they would do so much damage – but I think you’ve seen the pictures.  

 

'Let me have a closer look at that camera!'

Who's a pretty boy then!

Last night we walked into the woods out of our camp site on a DIY glow worm hunt and saw lots.  We’d have seen lots more if we’d crawled on the way entirely on our hands and knees but there is a limit.

This is a glow-worm taken at night with a flash. In the middle you can see the worm and, on its right end, its glow. The vertical strings with sticky droplets on are spun and placed there by the glow worm to catch insects, attracted by its light. When it senses the wriggling of the insect it hauls in the appropriate string to have its feast

A very curious Weka

Today’s first was weka, a bird between a hen and a kiwi that came to be fed at lunch time, but that was eclipsed by the weka that wanders round our campsite, which looked very sweet until a fellow guest said she’d seen it grab a sparrow and run.  Now Brian and I are very fond of the sparrows, which are exactly like ours at home, so it has lost some of its charm!

And the last first is being bitten by sandflies, which we quite thought didn’t like me.  But the little blighters (and that’s not what Brian calls them) do.  I’m told to expect extreme itching.  Help.

She’s forgotten the sheep shearing competition (none of us had any idea what was going on!) The Glow worm caves on her birthday, little blue penguins and yellow eyed penguins, and what about the three of us sitting in a row on her bed being called ‘cute’ by passersby, but perhaps she wants to forget that!