Onetahua - Farewell Spit

Farewell Spit.  Photo courtesy of Robin Capper, Flickr.

Farewell Spit, which the Maori called Onetahua, meaning "heaped up sand" or "sand formation."  The spit was considered the birthplace of whales - and a place they returned to in their death, which explained why there has always been a high incidence of whales beaching themselves on the landward edge of this sickle of sand that protects Mohua, Golden Bay.  It isn't well understood why these beachings occur, perhaps the structure of the spit and the currents within it messes with whale sonar?  Case in point, on my tour out into the dunes we passed the carcass of a whale.  It was the body of a male sperm whale that had washed ashore at the end of October.  Our guide thought it would probably take 6 months before it became fully skeletonized.  Fewer creatures live on the ocean side of the spit which faces the rough Tasman Sea than the more protected bayside, so if it had washed up on the other side of the dunes he figured it would only be 3 months.  As we passed, our vehicle disturbed the lurking host of rough looking juvenile seagulls that loitered there.  

The spit does have its share of wildlife, almost entirely birds as local conservationists have worked to get rid of the wild pigs and are working to make sure rats and stoats are also eliminated from the delicate coastal ecosystem.

The first predator free fence across the cliffs was not enough, a second "mouseproof" fence had to be added all the way around the cliffs because mice were climbing down and around and get to the nesting site.  I just picture Beatrix Potter style mice free soloing to an endangered bird egg dinner. 

A lot of birds work very hard to get to the spit -- the terminology gets funky because they are mostly northern hemisphere birds so are they "overwintering" or just skipping winter entirely by coming so far south that they are in the full force of summer?

Varieties of snowbirds that come to the spit include: 

Whimbrels:

Photo courtesy of K Schneider, via Flickr.

Sanderlings:

Photo courtesy of Doug Greenberg, via Flickr.

Cerlews:

Bill Abbot, via Flickr.

And the only one that sounds like a bird and not the name of an English cottage surrounded by foxgloves and hollyhocks: Turnstones.  Wait, that also sounds like an adorable and cozy hobbit hole.

Courtesy of Richard Towell via Flickr.

The birds above take the slow (and less starving) overland route through Asia, hop to Australia and finally end up on the Spit.  The Godwits have to be a bit more hardcore about it.  Alaskan Godwits fly 8-12 days straight to get to their Southern Hemisphere nesting grounds.  In the process they lose half the bodyweight and cover 12,000 miles, mostly over ocean. No big deal.  

Barred-Tail Godwit: (lookit their funny little beaks!)

Courtesy of JJ Harrison 

Farewell Spit does have year-round residents, Caspian Terns, Pied shags, Banded dottrells and Variable oystercatchers.  While they are more likely to live there year round, it is their nesting season, too.  I saw multiple newly hatched chicks.  Most baby birds seem weak and soft, pitifully undercooked, but there is something especially vulnerable about baby shorebirds.  I saw day old Pied-Stilt chicks, puffball cotton swabs on their incredibly long legs running along the sand, barely outracing the enormous ocean.

There is a pair of chicks in this part of the photo, I sweat.  Their markings have the same glowing + shadow quality as the plants along this estuary.  

Guide jokes from the tour were gold:

"Black swans have smelly feet, just look how they fly, heads as far away as possible." Lest I deseminate bad information let me assure you that black swans do not have particularly good senses of smell.  Leave that to the kiwis who have adorable wee nostrils at the ends of their beaks.

After pointing out a rock shaped like a face that kind of resembled a screaming skull.  "There's a story that the hill was going to grow an entire body.  But it quit while he was a head."

The Caspian terns mate for life, because "one good tern deserves another."

"the rays of light from the lighthouse were like milk - passed your eyes."  (Pasteurized).  

It ain't a good guide joke unless it leaves the people actually listening groaning, right?

The guide was great, he clearly knew a lot about the flora and fauna of the spit.  We spotted some "Bluebottles" at one point when we got out of the water.  Portuguese man o'war = siphonophores, the guide described them as three organisms working in concert, one that acts as stomach and digestion for the whole crew, one that is the venomous tentacles, and one that is the propulsion system and the little air bubble that carries the beastie around on all its maritime adventures.  They sting if you're swimming in the waters this time of year, and can still sting you if you encounter them on the sand.  They look like little bits of plastic that have washed ashore.

Some kind of starfish, maybe a Common NZ Cushion Star?

In the late 1800s a wooden lighthouse was built on the end of the spit, it only lasted about 20 years in the salt air and had to be rebuilt out of metal.  Three lighthouse keepers and their families settled on the windy end of the spit, and it remained a manned lighthouse until 1984.  Now the light is an LED that runs on solar power.

Our guide had this to say about the early lighthouse keepers:  "Their beds, their bellybuttons and their jam sandwiches got sand in them." Slowly the keepers brought small trees and buckets of soil from their trips to town to surround their homes with a small windbreak.  That part of the spit smelled like ocean and evergreen resin and sunshine on hot grass.  We stopped into the one of the old houses and drank hot coffee and admired a collection of little trinkets collected from the time people lived on this part of the spit.  A few years ago a group of people who grew up on the spit as children of the keepers returned and picnicked under the lighthouse.  What a strange and haunted place to grow up.

They hiked up a dune, shrouded in seafog, never to be seen again.