Chlidonias versus Samoa

GOING TO SAMOA, PART ONE: CHRISTCHURCH (5-6 May)


But first I had to stay frosty....

It’s a bit of a pain getting anywhere from Hokitika. For Samoa I have to take a flight to Christchurch, then another flight to Auckland, and then another flight from there to Samoa. Same in reverse for the return. Seeing I had to go through Christchurch and Auckland anyway I figured I may as well spend a couple of days in each to get in some extra birding. There aren’t really any birds in Hokitika. Up until now, in May, I had seen only 35 species for the whole year! So any chance I can get!! (This thread sort of ties in with the http://www.zoochat.com/65/zoochat-2013-big-year-304885/ thread, so I’ll be mentioning a lot of birds....)

Funnily enough, bird number 36 was at the Hokitika airport. It is just a very tiny airport of course because there’s only one plane and it only goes one place (Christchurch), and the plane itself is only about the size of a Ford Escort. While I was sitting in the departure lounge I spotted a New Zealand pipit running about under the plane picking up insects from the tarmac.

Christchurch was all sunny, despite the weather forecast for rain. I was staying at Vagabond Backpackers where the guy checking me in didn’t stop talking for half an hour when I just wanted to dump my bag and go out birding! Eventually I got away and headed across town to my old stomping ground of Bexley Wetlands. Christchurch is a depressing place indeed now. In the city centre all the falling-down buildings are all still falling-down buildings!! Two years later the place still looks like a war zone. My side of town is even worse, just abandoned street after abandoned street, the roads still torn up, the verges and properties tangles of overgrown grass and trees, empty houses demolished by looters. It’s like you’ve stumbled into the set of “I Am Legend”.

The abandonment of the eastern part of the side is good for the birds though. The first thing I saw as I walked up to the Bexley Wetlands was a white heron, a rather rare bird for Christchurch. A group of royal spoonbills huddled on an island in the middle of the wetlands surrounded by flocks of waterfowl, while Caspian terns hawked overhead on the lookout for fish. I even managed to spot an Australasian brown bittern in the rushes, only the second one I’ve ever seen. If there’s one bird that has benefited from the earthquakes, it is the bitterns!

I briefly checked out the nearby sewage ponds but there wasn’t much there and the sun was behind most of the birds which meant picking out anything unusual would have been impossible, so I headed instead to Travis Wetland hoping to see the annual winter-visiting glossy ibis. The last couple of years he’s been a little hard to find (he’s been spending the winter here for 16 years!), and today was one of those hard-to-find days so he remains absent from my year list for now. I ended the day back in the central city at Hagley Park and the Botanic Gardens, where I could not find a little owl but I did find greenfinch and hedge sparrow. Would you believe there are apparently no hedge sparrows in Hokitika!? I’ve been there for a year and a half and I’ve never yet seen a hedge sparrow there!!

There was a change in the weather during the night to a howling gale which rather put a wrench in my plans for the day. It was the sort of weather where the trees themselves were being violently whipped around like....I want to say slaves? Something whippy anyway. If dolphins lived in the sky they would have had fun twirling in the horizontal rain but, not being a flying dolphin, I went to the library instead and read Dr Who magazines. Supposedly the rain was going to clear away in the afternoon so at 11am I jumped on a bus out to Kaiapoi. Last year a white-eyed duck turned up at the Kaiapoi Lakes from Australia (and I saw him then) and he must have liked it there because he stayed put, so I figured I’d go see him again. By the time the bus got to Kaiapoi the rain had indeed stopped which was good because it’s a couple of kilometres walk from the nearest bus stop to the lakes and I would have been severely storm-lashed otherwise. Once I got to the lakes the rain started up again but I just used bushes as breaks. The white-eyed duck, however, was a no-show. He likes to play hide and seek amongst the willows so you can’t count on seeing him on any given day. Especially a day as bad as this one. I hung around for a few hours checking all the lakes repeatedly (also looking for marsh crakes) but no luck so I packed it in and went back to the hostel to dry off.


Photos below are from central Christchurch....

 

GOING TO SAMOA, PART TWO: AUCKLAND (7-8 May)

I landed in Auckland in the late morning to a perfectly fine sunny day. Hot even. If I could get to the harbour in time I was going to try for another whale trip because the one last year (in September) yielded precisely zero cetaceans. There was a bus outside the airport waiting to go, and handily enough it stopped in town directly across the road from the place I was staying, Princeton Apartments. This is a place that I guess you could best describe as somewhere you’d stay if you’re a tight-arse but not if you want somewhere, well, nice. Anyway, with bag stowed, I shot off down Queen Street to the harbour where I was just in time for the boat. Last year’s one was a bit of a flop to put it mildly. No whales, no dolphins, not even any stops for seabirds. This time was much better. The first birds I got ID views of were gannets and Buller’s and fluttering shearwaters. Then a pod of common dolphins turned up so the boat stopped, enabling me to get some better bird views, with flesh-footed shearwater, grey-faced petrel and common diving petrel all added to the bag. Oh, and some common dolphins too. Mustn’t forget them I guess. I even bothered to take some photos of them! Quite a few pods of dolphins were about that day; no Bryde’s whales unfortunately, but maybe next time.

The plan for the next day was going to be Tiritiri Matangi if the weather looked good, or the Mangere WastewaterTreatment Plant if not. Last year I stayed on Tiritiri for three nights and it was awesome; this trip I only had time for a day-trip. In the morning I looked out the window and saw blue in one direction and grey in the other. Fifty/fifty. I decided to bet on the rain holding off, and chose to go to Tiritiri. Bad decision. The rain held off right up to the point where we set foot on the island, and then it just bucketed down. I headed straight for the brown teal pond, the “always” reliable site for spotless crake. Last visit the water levels were too high and I never saw a crake – this time the water level was too low!! The pond had recently been dredged out to increase its size and all that remained was a shallow puddle at the bottom as it refilled. There were of course no brown teal on the pond either.

There was no point hanging around the pond so I headed for the Wattle Track to find kokako (which I did not succeed at). Despite the absence of crakes and kokako most of the other birds were out in droves, especially the brown quail which were practically underfoot at every turn of the path. It wasn’t long however before the force of the rain sent me up to the reception building at the top of the island where hot coffee and a roof awaited. I felt pretty stupid having just paid $66 for the ferry over here and then doing nothing but sit inside, but the rain really was that bad, the sort of rain where a raincoat doesn’t actually keep you dry. Or maybe I need a new raincoat. It wasn’t long before the room was filled with everybody else from the ferry as well, all looking like survivors of a shipwreck, and it started getting a bit crowded for me. I’m a birder, dammit, not some kind of social butterfly! So I manned up, put my coat back on, and strode forth into the tempest. The takahe which usually hang out around the lighthouse weren’t out today, sensibly enough, but their smaller and stupider cousins the pukeko were everywhere.

I made my way back to the Wattle Track where there were still no kokako. But I did find a morepork, out in the daytime, in the rain, like an idiot. A bit like me really. This may have even been the same morepork I photographed last year in the daytime because it was only about 30 metres away from that spot. I took literally no photos on this day incidentally because there was just too much rain. However I did reach that rare state of peace you get when birding when you are just so wet/muddy/covered in leeches/insert any other condition here that you just don’t care any more because you pretty much can’t get any more wet/muddy/covered in leeches/insert any other condition here than you are already, so you can just get on with the day instead of feeling miserable about it. Of course as soon as you reach that place the rain clears away and you’re just left sopping wet and mildly hypothermic but never mind.

Some extra birds seen before leaving were a couple of little blue penguins in a nest-box (with a lid you can lift to see if anyone is home!) and some eastern rosellas on the beach. Non-bird highlight: eagle rays feeding on the sea floor under the jetty!!

 

no not the most tropical start, but at least it enabled me to get in an early Aliens reference! The next entry will be more tropical, once I get round to typing it up.

 

it will take a long time! Have a look at the following site which lists the quakes in Christchurch since September 2010: it lists over 13,400 quakes! They are mostly 2s and 3s this year but with quite a few 4s and some 5s the previous year. (When I was still living there you don't even bother getting up from your chair for anything less than a 4; you get so used to them you hardly even notice the 2s and 3s whereas in any other situation you'd be like "oh my god did you feel that earthquake!!"). They are dying off but another big one could go any time really.
Canterbury Quake Live

 

ARRIVING IN SAMOA, DAY ONE (9 May)

And now the tropical bit begins. Thirty-one degrees of tropicality to be precise. Now I’ll be honest, but I hate the tropics. That probably sounds odd given that pretty much everywhere I go is in the tropics, but I can’t stand the heat and especially the humidity, I just put up with it because that’s where all the best wildlife is. All things considered I’d rather be in Iceland. But the tropics are what call me and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Samoa’s international airport is 35km from the capital Apia, and most people take a shuttle for 25 Tala or a taxi for 60 or so. The other option, the one I and exactly no-one else on the plane took, is to walk fifty metres out of the airport building onto the road outside and catch a local bus for 3 Tala. (There are roughly 1.9 Tala to one New Zealand dollar, according to XE.com). The bus takes about an hour to get to Apia – cheaper usually does mean slower – so I had plenty of time to scenery-watch. The only birds I could note down firmly were common and jungle mynahs, red-vented bulbuls and Polynesian triller. I did see a Samoan fantail and what was almost certainly a Samoan starling, but because they are both endemics I pretended I didn’t so that I could see them for the “first time” in better viewing conditions than from a bus window.

From the bus Samoa reminded me of the Lesser Sundas; same sort of villages and in-between bits. But as soon as we hit Apia it reminded me immediately of Aranui where I grew up in Christchurch. I swear you could take a street from Apia, plonk it down in eastern Christchurch (pre-quakes) and nobody would notice. I was staying at the Hotel Elisa, in the hidden-out-the-back budget rooms of course, which were 50 Tala per night. They were very budget but a penny saved etc. Samoa is actually a relatively expensive place, especially in comparison to southeast Asia. When I went looking for something to eat I found a major difference to Asia: no food stalls! It was so bizarre, the whole place looked like there should be little stalls on every corner but instead there were just tourist restaurants. Eventually I found a cheap Philippines place which became my regular eatery. In the evening that place was closed so I ended up at Samoa’s only McDonalds where I discovered that you apparently can’t order burgers by themselves, only as a part of meals. The girl at the counter got very confused, and then I got very confused when she started trying to explain the system and how she could replace drinks with extra burgers, and somehow I ended up walking out with two single cheeseburgers, two double cheeseburgers and two lots of fries, all of which cost me 30 Tala which I could have used to buy real food at one of the restaurants. So that was (supposed to be) my only foray into Samoa McDonalds.

Before that though I had tried my hand at sea-watching from the foreshore walkway. It might have helped to have had a scope because the few birds I did see out there were too far away for binoculars. I did see a wandering tattler very close up on the rocks though, and also lots of snake-eyed skinks.

 

DAY TWO: MT. VAEA (10 May)

Today was a most excellent day for birding. Also there was a partial solar eclipse which isn’t something you see every day! I looked at it through sheets of microfiche so I’ll probably go blind. Or blinder. In the morning I took a taxi to the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, about 3km out of town. On the way I passed the hotel Hix stayed at, Le Manumea. Looked a bit upmarket for me!! Especially given that the room at the place I was staying had a naked bed, a desk, a fan, and linoleum on the floor, and that was it. The Museum is set in a very nice tropical garden, but of more interest is the forest-covered Mt. Vaea Nature Reserve behind it, on the summit of which is Stevenson’s now graffiti-covered tomb. He was a writer; perhaps he wouldn’t mind the graffiti.

Most of Samoa’s surviving bird species can be found in the forest of Mt. Vaea. I’d always wanted to visit Samoa to see one of the most unusual pigeons in the world, the tooth-billed pigeon or manumea, dubbed the “dodlet” by early European naturalists because it was like a little Samoan version of the dodo. Unfortunately the dodlet is now almost extinct, probably down to just a few dozen birds scattered across Upolu and Savaii. There are no dodlets on Mt. Vaea any more, and I was also too late for the Samoan moorhen (almost certainly now extinct), and even for the Polynesian sheath-tailed bat (critically-endangered). But most of the other species are found here still, so it was a good first stop.

The habitat had been severely trashed by the big cyclones in December but the park staff had managed to clear all the trails up the mountain. I had a little wander around the Museum gardens first. Banded rails were everywhere: even from the taxi on the way here I had seen them walking through peoples’ yards like chickens. I still haven’t seen a banded rail in New Zealand. Polynesian starlings and the huge grimly-coloured Samoan starlings were abundant, both in the gardens and on the mountain itself, and I saw a few of the brilliant crimson-crowned fruit doves as well. Then it was on to the reserve.

There are two routes up to the top of the mountain, the half-hour steep one and the 45-60 minute meandering not-as-steep one. I took the meandering trail, which took me three hours. A rather odd sight all along the way was groups of white terns drifting around above the trees like gossamer angels, accompanied here and there by the larger white-tailed tropicbirds which were even better in real life than I had imagined. There were also a few noddies passing by but they remained unidentified (too high up to tell). Loads of African land snails all along the trail as well. Lizards were abundant, with all the ones I saw being Pacific black skinks and Samoan skinks (the latter being endemic tree-dwellers which I had been hoping to see). I even saw a Samoan fruit bat having a lazy glide between the trees.

The birding wasn’t too easy, and the photographic opportunities virtually non-existent because they just didn’t want to come close enough or stay still long enough. Wattled honeyeaters were common, the smaller and more brightly-coloured cardinal honeyeaters less so. The bright yellow Samoan whistler was fairly common, as was the very dull Samoan fantail (its scientific name is nebulosus), and I got poor photos of both. I saw Pacific robins only twice, and I completely failed to find Samoan broadbill flycatcher, Samoan triller, many-coloured fruit dove or Samoan parrot-finch. Most birders’ trip reports on the internet gush about how easy finding the birds on Samoa is, so I suspect the damaged habitat here has changed that, at least for now. I spent some time in the clearing around the tomb hoping for parrot-finches at least but no luck. I was also surprised by the lack of other visitors. I imagine weekends might be busier but even on a Friday I expected other tourists to be here, and yet I saw only one (doing the usual thing you see tourists do in the forest, just motoring along, head down, looking at nothing but the path in front of them as if the end of the world is coming and they need to get back to civilisation as fast as possible).

Back at the bottom I had an acceptable fly-by of the endemic flat-billed kingfisher and a completely unacceptable fly-by of blue-crowned lorikeet (I think!). I never did see another lorikeet while in Samoa, and that was my second most-wanted bird there after the manumea. I got a taxi back to Apia where I added feral pigeon to the Samoa trip-list! Woot.

So a good day all up, with many nice new birds. Hoping for tomorrow to be as good....

 

DAY THREE: ALSO CALLED FAIL DAY (11 May)

I’d had a strange feeling that today was going to go badly and I was right. The bird I was going to find was the ma’o-ma’o, a giant forest-dwelling honeyeater (just called a mao in “English”) which is dependent on mature rainforest. They used to be found at Mt. Vaea until maybe a decade or so ago but no longer. Instead I was going to the Vaisigano watershed outside of Apia. I had several trip reports from other birders’ visits to Samoa but they didn’t all tally very well in their directions and name-usage so I wasn’t entirely sure I’d even be able to get there. The one thing they all did agree on was that it was easy to get a taxi to the start of the walking point, a reservoir tank at the top end of the 6km Magiagi Road. I guess the road has degraded in the meantime because it is now more of a four-wheel drive track than anything else. The taxi driver was not happy!! He decided that he couldn’t come back later in the day to pick me up because the road was just too bad. This could have been tricky because there’s nothing up there except forest and plantations – that is, no villages – but fortunately we passed a group of workers planting taro who said that if I could get back down to them by noon then they would give me a lift back to Apia in their truck. It meant I’d only have a few hours to look for the bird but beggars can’t be choosers!

The taxi dropped me off at the reservoir tank and I headed further up the road/track until I found the old trail leading off towards the valley. I was pretty sure this was the right spot but since the December cyclones the trail has been left to its own devices and it was heavily overgrown with waist-high vegetation and with numerous fallen trees. The trip reports all seemed to agree that the trail was about half a kilometre to the valley floor and then another kilometre or so up the valley itself, but after almost an hour I was still nowhere near the valley floor or the forest. I was literally soaked to the skin from the waist down from the dew-laden plants I was pushing through, and I became certain this just couldn’t be right. None of the trip reports, for example, had mentioned part of the trail being a near-vertical series of mud foot-holes!! Eventually the trail just disappeared altogether into a flooded taro swamp. I turned around and climbed all the way back up to the road again. By the time I got up there I was so drenched in sweat I looked like I had reached the river and had then fallen into it! I tried walking further along the road , which soon became little more than a rough trail itself, but there was nothing up there but more plantations. It was a thoroughly disappointing morning, made even worse through having a time limit for my ride back so I couldn’t keep trying. I headed back to the tank, hoping I might see some parrot-finches there, but no, so I walked back down the road until I found the workers.

The mid-afternoon was better, because I went to sleep back at the hotel. The late afternoon was also good. I took a taxi back to Mt. Vaea to see if I could at least find a Samoan broadbill flycatcher. There was a stiff breeze and the sky had clouded over, so it was quite pleasant up there. I saw most of the same bird species I’d seen yesterday and another (or the same) Samoan fruit bat, and then finally – drum roll – a male Samoan broadbill!! Result. He really was a little pearler of a bird, with his salmon-reddy-orangey throat and satin back. I didn’t get any photos although he posed very nicely for several minutes within comfortable binocular range. Shortly after I saw a pair of broadbills attacking a Polynesian starling; perhaps they were nesting somewhere nearby.

Back in the grounds of the Museum below it was just coming on to dusk, and the lawns were speckled with banded rails. They really are absurdly visible in Samoa! I thought I’d do a quick count-up of how many I could actually see at one time, but was distracted by the realisation that one off near the bushes had a red bill. I had a better look and it turned out to be a purple gallinule. Hmmm, maybe I should do the count through binoculars I thought. Good plan. Amongst the banded rails (twenty of them, by the way) were two Pacific golden plovers and a rooster! Before leaving to find a taxi I finally got a perch-view of a flat-billed kingfisher instead of the fly-by views I’d had to accept before. It looks much like a sacred kingfisher so not too exciting, but still nice to see.

 

I've never bothered to actually do any research on why looking at an eclipse should make a person go blind. That's just always been the rule: never look at an eclipse or you'll go blind. Bah humbug I say! And really, if you give warnings not to look at an eclipse it's just going to make more people look at it I reckon. I wonder how long it takes to go blind anyway. If I go blind sixty years from now, was that the eclipse? Or is it instantaneous -- "oh look an eclipse, aargh my eyes! Why did I look?!"

See, this is why I have never questioned eclipses and blindness.

I'd like to be a big-time birder but, you know....incompetence

 

solar retinopathy: hopefully I'm safe
The Straight Dope: Will looking directly at a solar eclipse make you go blind?

 

DAY FOUR: SECOND-ROUND MAO (12 May)

Another up and down day. I had been going to go to Lalomanu at the eastern end of Upolu today but it was Sunday and there are no buses on Sunday, so I decided on a return assault on the Vaisigano watershed. The head worker that I’d got a lift from yesterday was named Phineas and he had told me that I was on the right trail down to the valley (annoyingly!) and he arranged for one of his workers, called Alibut, to take me back there today so I could actually get to where the birds were. That’s Alibut as in the Samoan version of Albert, not the Pirate version of a large flatfish (“Arrh matey, I’ve ‘ooked meself an ‘alibut! Pieces of eight, etc”).

So in the morning I arrive at Phineas’ house at 7am as arranged, and waited for Alibut who was supposed to take a taxi from his house to Phineas’ house and then we would use that taxi to get up to the reservoir tank. Phineas and his wife went off to fill up their truck with petrol and I sat on their verandah and waited. When they came back I was still waiting. Phineas rang Alibut’s wife who said that he was walking but he would be there soon. At 8am Phineas got a call from Alibut’s wife that in fact Alibut was back home again! Apparently he had got to the corner, seen there was no truck outside Phineas’ place, and rather than walk the extra hundred metres to see if I was there had just assumed nobody was home, turned around, and walked all the way back to where he lived!! Phineas was pretty angry and because it was Sunday all the passing taxis were occupied with people going to church, so eventually he drove me himself up the road till we found Alibut, and then I got out, Phineas headed back so his family could go to church, and Alibut and I started walking. I had been under the impression that a taxi had been arranged to meet up with us but apparently not, and we ended up walking the entire 6km length of Magiagi Road to the top. I was drenched with sweat – the whole road is through shadeless plantations of taro and bananas, and I was told later the temperature that day was 34 degrees – and I knew what the trail ahead was like, to say nothing of the return trip! I had been anticipating an early start, in the forest by say 8.30am, probably back in town by noon. No chance! It was already past 9am when we reached the tank.

The trail down to the valley (yes, I had been in the right place after all!) took only half as long as yesterday, partly because I knew where all the foot-falls and logs were under the vegetation, and partly because we took a (steep!) short-cut which took off maybe 15 minutes. When we got to the flooded point where I had quit Alibut didn’t look too sure on where the trail was supposed to be, but he had a better idea than I and we were soon on our way, forcing through the triffids that call this place home. I actually don’t think I’d have found it even if I’d tried a second time by myself. I was feeling quarter-dead by this stage after the energy-sapping walk from town and now the battle through the growth. Eventually we got out into a more open sort of path following the river course. To be honest I was already struggling to keep my feet moving. Suddenly Alibut pointed up into a high tree and silhouetted at the top was a mao! I wasn’t convinced at first, but when it moved I saw the shape of the beak so I knew it was. Unfortunately it was against the sky so I couldn’t make out any details. There was its mate up there as well in an even worse position, and then they both flew off across the river and vanished.

So I had seen a mao (when I really didn’t think that I would!) but not a great sighting so we pressed on. The sighting had energised me but only for a short while and then my body went downhill again, needing more frequent stops for rest. Surprisingly we saw mao twice more but always right at the tops of the trees making them difficult to see. My shaking hands didn’t make looking through the binoculars easy either! I also managed to see a couple of Pacific imperial pigeons which I was very pleased about. Eventually I deemed it prudent to head back because I was in a bad state. I’m glad I went and I’m even more glad I saw a mao because I’m sure as hell never going up that valley again! Every trip report makes it seem like an absolute doddle: drive up a nice road to the tank, a casual stroll down to the river and then up the valley. No, no and no – not now at any rate!! I was half-dead by the time we got back to where I’d quit coming in yesterday. There’s nothing worse than having to lift your legs high with each step to get through logs and undergrowth when you’re absolutely shattered. But it was the bank of mud steps where the exhaustion really hit home. I didn’t think I was ever going to make it up those. Once up that I had to stop about every fifty metres to rest all the way back to the road at the top. Every time I stopped it would be harder and harder to stand back up again. It took a looong time!!! I think it must have been simple heat exhaustion; I felt like I was going to die that day. You know you’re getting too old when Samoa defeats you!!

Once back on the road I drained what little water I had left. There was still the whole of Magiagi Road to go and no chance of any lift because it was Sunday so no workers in the plantations. The road, as it happened, wasn’t so much of a problem because I could just trudge along on auto-pilot, and the fact that it was sloping downwards certainly helped. Still, it was two hours to get down to a point where I could finally get a taxi back to the hotel. It was 2pm.

Back at the hotel I had another unpleasant surprise: nothing is open in Apia on a Sunday! Not shops, not restaurants, nothing. Well nothing except McDonalds, so that is where I ended up because I needed food and liquid. And then I got scammed. I’ve been scammed before of course but usually I know it’s happening – over-charging the foreigner for bus-rides or whatever. This time I got well and truly hoodwinked and I can only blame the fact that my brain had clocked out somewhere round midday and not bothered to come back to the desk. So I had just left McDonalds and was heading for Aggie Grey’s Hotel because my hotel’s receptionist had said there might be a little supermarket open there. A passing Samoan woman called out for me to stop, said she liked my hair (as they always do), asked me where I was from, where I was going, the usual stuff. She said the supermarket I was looking for was closed but Farmer Joe’s Supermarket was open because that’s where she was going. So far, so normal. At the supermarket I mentioned that I was going to Lalomanu tomorrow and she said she was also going there today, or maybe tomorrow – if it was tomorrow perhaps we could share a taxi to cut the costs (there being no buses on Monday either because it was a public holiday celebrating Mothers’ Day). I did think this was a little coincidental but it passed because she never stopped talking. Outside the supermarket she said she would call her taxi-driver friend to see what sort of price she could get us, and he duly arrived. They talk to each other in Samoan so I have no clue what is being said. Then she tells me we will go to Lalomanu at 9am tomorrow, she will pick me up from the hotel in the taxi, and the price will be 60 Tala total (the regular price being 90 Tala). 30 Tala each sounds good to me, so I agree, and then they kindly give me a lift back to the hotel. All well and good. But then, and this is where I was kicking myself afterwards, when I get out of the taxi she says the driver would need to fill up with petrol before the trip so I can just give my 30 now – no wait, better make it 40 and I’ll give you back the other 10 tomorrow. Without even thinking I handed over 40 Tala and as the taxi drove away the cogs in my brain finally clicked into place and I was like “wait, what? Damn it!”. At least it was only 40 Tala; and I hadn’t had to pay for taxis to and from the top of Magiagi Road so I guess it evens out. I still felt damn stupid though!

 

DAYS FIVE AND SIX: HELL IS A BEACH (13-14 May)

Although I was sure I had been scammed yesterday I believe that people in general are honest, so in the morning I waited in the hotel lobby just in case my ride did turn up at 9am. I had the number of another driver, Jerry, who’d said he would take me to Lalomanu for 80 Tala so I was going to hold off until 9.20 and then call him. At 9.20, just as I was about to call Jerry, the woman from yesterday walked in. I’ll call her Violet, because that’s what she said her name was. Immediately the reception lady said she’d have to give me my receipt and when I went to the desk she wrote on a bit of paper “this woman is no good, she is a thief and will steal all your money”. I had a hurried discussion with her and found out that Violet used to stay at this hotel a lot and scammed a lot of money from other tourists and had been in a lot of trouble with the police. We debated what to do and decided that because I’d already given her the money for the ride then I may as well still go, but don’t let her take any more money (doi!). But sure enough, no sooner had the taxi left the hotel than Violet asked if she could get 30 Tala for petrol and she’d pay me back when we got to “her shop” in Lalomanu which she apparently owned. So I just said to take me back to the hotel and once there I called Jerry to take me instead. Obviously I never got my 40 back off her but them’s the breaks.

The reason most tourists go to Lalomanu is for the beach. I was staying at the Taufua Beach Fales which was actually very nice, much nicer than my usual style of accommodation, but it was overflowing with hot girls in bikinis. I felt a little out of place in my cargo pants and boots. I never was much of a beach person. My reason for going to Lalomanu was to try and get across to Nu’utele Island which lies directly off the coast. There I would have a very very very slim chance of finding a manumea (tooth-billed pigeon) which apparently still occur there. No boats go to the island as a matter of course, due to it being inhabited by evil spirits and the graves of lepers, so I didn’t know if I was going to be spending the next couple of days struggling through jungle looking for birds or sitting by a beach looking at girls.

The ace up my sleeve was a trip report by Lorand Szucs from October 2012 (yes, before the December cyclones that I keep harping on about!) in which he had the phone number for a chap called Foki who lived in Lalomanu, had a boat, and had taken Lorand across to Nu’utele where he *thinks* he probably saw what was possibly a manumea maybe. I got the owner of the fales, Tai, to ring up Foki and we arranged a meeting for the next afternoon to discuss prices and so forth, and then we would go across to the island on Wednesday (fingers crossed for weather permitting!).

And then I did nothing for the rest of the day. It wasn’t fun. The next morning I got up at 6am as I do, and did nothing. That also was not fun. The price of the stay at Taufua (90 Tala per night) includes breakfast and dinner so it’s a very good deal, especially considering the quality and quantity of the food! At the dinners I was like Homer Simpson at the eating competition in The Slaughterhouse restaurant in Maximum Homerdrive: “What’s happening to me? There’s still food but I don’t wanna eat it! I’ve become everything I’ve ever hated!” Anyway, breakfast is at the ridiculously late hour of 9am. So I sit on the porch of my fale looking at the sea, watching the bulbuls bopping about on the sand, and I do this for a couple of hours until it must be near breakfast time. But when I look at my watch it’s only been twenty minutes! And there’s another twelve hours in the day to go!! If there’s a choice between slogging through the wilderness risking fatal heat stroke or relaxing by the beach, I’d take the slog any day. But balancing that is I did want to be rested for tomorrow’s visit to Nu’utele because it was bound to be tough, so I forced myself to stay where I was. Sigh. It’s a hard life.



Photos below: Taufua Beach Fales

 

DAY SEVEN: THE HAUNTED ISLAND OF LEPER BABY GHOSTS (15 May)

Access to Nu’utele Island is only possible from Lalomanu at high tide because the reef has no channel so the sea needs to be high enough for the boat to ride above the reef. Fortunately the high tide today was at 8am, perfect for going birding. An Austrian chap called Walter from the place I was staying was also interested in going to the island for no real reason, so in the morning Foki picked us up and we set off in his little tin boat. I’m a bit erratic when it comes to sea-sickness: sometimes I don’t get it at all, and sometimes I get it bad. It’s only about thirty minutes across to Nu’utele’s beach but I was already feeling pretty queasy by the time we got there.

I was going looking for the tooth-billed pigeon, a long shot if ever there was one because it is rarely seen and I would only have a couple of hours on the island due to needing to leave to get back across the reef before the tide fell too low. The best thing to do really would be to sleep on the island for a few nights to get the most of your time, but I didn’t have that option (next time though!). Although the island is uninhabited there is a little house there used by teams who go over every so often to lay poison baits in an attempt to wipe out the rats on the island, so it is possible to stay there even if you don’t have a tent. Foki said he takes tourists to the island a few times a year but otherwise the locals steer clear of it. Apparently fishermen off the coast at night hear babies crying and people talking in the darkness. To me that says petrels and shearwaters but most people were aghast that I would even contemplate staying on the island, especially by myself. It is a bad place.

The beach is fringed with a wall of coconut palms with scrubby vegetation behind, extensively dug over by feral pigs of which we saw a lot, and then real forest up the slopes. There used to be a rough track up to the rim of the caldera but it no longer seems to exist. Foki had come ashore with us to show us the way but unfortunately we basically ended up walking in at least one circle (we passed the same roosting fruit bat twice), and by the time he found where the trail should have been the tides were changing and we had to leave. There are loads of birds of all sorts on the island, they were calling all around us, but the bush was so thick that it was near-impossible to see anything. We never did manage to progress much up towards the top of the island and needless to say we did not see any tooth-billed pigeons. I didn’t even see any shy ground doves which are meant to be common on the island (apparently it is the only place in Samoa where they occur), but I guess they live up to their name just as much here as they do in Fiji where I have also failed to see them! A return trip with a proper length of stay on the island is definitely in order!!

After launching off the beach we motored round to the back of the island. The cliffs here were thronged with clouds of noddies, although I’ll be jiggered if I know how to ID them properly! Most appeared to be brown noddies. There were probably “smaller and darker” ones in there which would be black noddies but I couldn’t say. There were also white terns and brown boobies. No doubt others as well, almost certainly masked and red-footed boobies, but I was starting to feel really nauseous again so couldn’t use my binoculars without wanting to throw up. I made do with the seabirds that were close enough to see with the naked eye!

We headed to the smaller island that lay beyond Nu’utele where Foki hoped to show me storm petrels in some clefts in the cliffs, but they weren’t there. The first birders he had taken out some years before were looking for an all-dark form of Polynesian storm petrel and when they found some on those cliffs they were so happy, said Foki, that it was like they had won a lottery! He didn’t understand it at all; they were just little birds. The next birders to come by just wanted to see those storm petrels, so he took them straight there, they took some photos, and then back to shore. Birders are a weird lot. The sea out round the islands was very rough and I was getting really sick. I was glad when I got back to dry land again!


Photos below: Nu'utele Island as seen from the beach at Taufua Beach Fales. It is quite steep. And Foki's boat.

 

DAY EIGHT: LAST DAY WRAP-UP (16 May)

At 7am I caught a free ride back to Apia with a van of school-girls. I had been planning on going back to Mt. Vaea for a last try at some of the missing birds but the winding road from Lalomanu had reminded my stomach of yesterday’s seas, the temperature was extremely hot, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my bags if I went into the forest. So I just got some breakfast in Apia then went to the bus station. I found a bus, sat in it for an hour until enough passengers had gathered, and then went to the airport where I sat slowly basting in the heat like a New Orleans plantation owner until my flight which was supposed to be at 3.30pm but turned into 4.30pm because Samoa.

Yesterday I had turned NZ$60 into 90 Tala at the Taufua Beach Fales in case I needed some extra cash for taxis and also because of the 65 Tala departure tax. It turned out that the departure tax had been done away with in the last few months so no need to pay it now. When I got back into Auckland I still had 90 Tala in my wallet. I changed it at the Travelex counter for NZ$37! A $23 loss!!! Pirates.

So, a summary of Samoa. It was too hot. Far too hot. The birds were nice but contrary to everything else I have read it was not easy finding them and there were several “easy” endemics which I didn’t see at all. My experience was a complete contrast to every other Samoa trip report I've ever read where the participants only have to sit back in a deck chair next to a tree, gin & tonic in one hand and a pair of opera glasses in the other, and the birds line up to be viewed. I’m not sure if this was due to just being unlucky or (more likely) the recent bad cyclones have affected the difficulty for the moment through destroying a lot of habitat. The dogs surprisingly were all friendly! Dogs are always my biggest worry when travelling, and dogs in the Pacific are some of the worst. But without exception every dog I came across was perfectly civilised. Well, I did see two dogs attacking a car – literally attacking it, one hanging off the front bumper and the other trying to rip at the back wheel; and the car was moving!! – but that didn’t affect me so they don’t count. I think I do have to go back. The obvious reason is for the tooth-billed pigeon with a proper attempt at Nu’utele Island, and I’d also like time to go to Savaii to look for the Samoan white-eye which is only found there. Also everyone on Samoa kept telling me that Savaii is the nicer island.

And thus here endeth the Samoan part of the story, but stay tuned because there’s still more for the thread from New Zealand before I get back to birdless Hokitika!

 

BACK IN NEW ZEALAND: LITTLE EGRETS AND LITTLE TERNS (17-18 May)

I’m not having much luck with the weather on the New Zealand parts of this trip! Almost every day seems to be raining, with today not an exception. I caught the bus out to the Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant where lots of shorebirds gather. Birders like to gather at sewage plants too. Funny that. I didn’t know the tide times so I just went out first thing in the morning and hoped for the best. It was low tide which isn’t ideal but there were still lots of wrybills feeding on the exposed mudflats along with all the regular sorts (pied stilts etc), as well as more sacred kingfishers than I’ve ever seen in one place before (they get rarer the further south in the country you go, so down my way they are more random). I walked along to the shell-banks and found a pair of NZ dotterels. The shell-banks and islands are just by the path and are where the waders roost at high tide. A couple of weeks before there were two little egrets here, vagrants from Australia, but I didn’t know if they were still around or not. In any case, because it was low tide all the birds were out feeding and not here roosting so I’d have some waiting to do. I walked back the way I’d come and made my way to the causeway that leads to Puketutu Island. This is the spot for NZ dabchicks and black-fronted dotterels. The canal along the causeway was abuzz with literally hundreds of welcome swallows hawking for insects above the water’s surface. I have never in my life seen so many swallows together; they looked like swarms of newly-hatched mayflies. There was also a very large flock of starlings swooping back and forth along the far bank in the amazing unified fashion that starling flocks have. I walked all the way to the end of the causeway where it joins the island, and there on the saltwater pond were dozens of NZ dabchicks. I thought I wasn’t going to find any black-fronted dotterels today but walking back along the causeway, just before the rain really started hammering down, a dotterel flew up from the canal edge and settled on a sand wedge by the shore. They are one of my favourite waders!! So little you could fit a dozen on the head of a pin and so cute you can’t help but go “tee hee hee” in a high-pitched girly voice when you see one.

I waited out the heaviest of the rain under a handy tree and then headed back towards the shell-banks. The tide had started coming in and what had been a little rivulet through the mud-flats was now a much broader channel. There were royal spoonbills strutting through the water sweeping their spatulate bills side to side, bar-tailed godwits scuttering about the edges, and then something white flew up that was too small for a spoonbill. A little egret! The first one I’d seen in New Zealand. I was busy being all happy about that when I got distracted by two teeny-weeny terns hovering overhead of the egret. Little terns! Another vagrant and also the first I’d seen in New Zealand! (Actually the first I’d seen anywhere, which was even better!). Two new NZ birds within one binocular view equals a very good day!

The next day was a Saturday and I had the whole day free before my flight to Christchurch at 6.30pm. It was pencilled in as a zoo day but when I got up at 6am the rain was still thundering down. That would make it a museum day then! However by 9am the rain had disappeared and the sun had sort of come out so it was a zoo day after all. Auckland Zoo is a brilliant zoo, my favourite in the country. I’d just been there last September so I skipped some of the bits that didn’t interest me as much (chimps, tigers, kangaroos....). My first stop was the New Zealand section, Te Wao Nui. In the “Night” area I was hoping to see the short-tailed bats which I had missed last year. Sure enough I did, not only in flight but also grounded at the feeding station right at the window so I got to watch them sitting there chomping away on mealworms. I also saw an Archey’s frog but the giant weta was “currently off display” (I’ve seen them before, but not at the zoo). Another new thing at the zoo is that the crested porcupines now have their very own nocturnal house (the old kiwi house just by the zoo entrance), where instead of being sleeping bundles of spikes like at most zoos they are wide awake and plodding around like arthritic explosions. Very cool indeed.

After the zoo I caught the bus back to the city centre and walked over to the War Memorial Museum. Last time I was there the “Weird and Wonderful” section was closed for renovations. This is a really neat place. It’s supposed to be for kids (erm, I was the only adult there without a child attached....) but there’s so much cool stuff in there it can’t be missed. There’s a fair number of live exhibits including Avondale spiders, cockroaches, moray eels, lizards, etc.

Zoo and museum taken care of, day completed, I flew down to Christchurch for the next part of the voyage home.