December 31, 2012
The bird watching has been great here. We’re so happy to see familiar seagulls after missing them in the tropics. There are also a bunch of birds we don’t know.
This morning, we walked along the disused railroad tracks near our marina and ran into these two:
The Eastern Rosella Parrot comes from Australia and is found in the northern part of New Zealand’s North Island. They seem kind of shy and this is the closest we’ve been able to get to one – maybe 15 meters away (yes, we’re on the metric system now – that’s about 50 feet to you yanks!).
This white-faced heron was enjoying some peaceful fishing from a disused train bridge until we came along. They are found all through most of Australasia (thank you Wikipedia!).
By the way, speaking of Wikipedia, did you know you can download the entire thing and take it with you when you go cruising? It is about a 7GB download and decompresses to about twice that size and this doesn’t include any pictures. It was really handy to have along on the trip. If you want to know how to do it, Google “downloading wikipedia.” You should find something involving wikitaxi. That’s how we did it. -Rich
