Choice words from a choice man...

From the New Zealand Listener, April 23-29, 2005. Said by renowned conservationist Don Merton, who died today.

“They are our national monuments. They are our Tower of London, our Arc de Triomphe, our pyramids. We don’t have this ancient architecture that we can be proud of and swoon over in wonder, but what we do have is something that is far, far older than that. No one else has kiwi, no one else has kakapo. They have been around for millions of years, if not thousands of millions of years. And once they are gone, they are gone forever. And it’s up to us to make sure they never die out.”

Never a truer word was spoken.

Goodbye to a legend...

Renowned conservationist, Don Merton died today. As we tend to say in New Zealand, a mighty totara has fallen. 

Don and his old mate "Richard Henry" the kakapo

Someone recently described Don Merton as New Zealand conservation's answer to Sir Edmund Hillary.  Not a bad little comparison.  What Don was able to achieve for some of our native species was nothing short of staggering. 

I got to meet Don while traveling through the Subantarctic Islands in 2004. We had a great old time pointing out wildlife and going into raptures over sea lions, albatross and penguins.  Then, while filming "Meet the Locals" with TVNZ, we met with him and asked him to tell the story of the black robin.

If you don't know the story, it goes like this. The black robin, one of NZ's most endangered  birds, dropped to just 5 individuals when Don and the Wildlife Service team got to Little Mangere Island in the Chathams. In that 5 birds, was just one viable female, an older robin Don named "Old Blue". Thanks to some nifty nest-swapping and unlimited perserverance, the team got Old Blue breeding again, and saved the entire species.

After the black robin work, Don went on to lead the kakapo recovery programme, and again contributed to saving the species from certain extinction, due to nifty nest-minding techniques and total tenacity.  He has since gone on to advise on conservation projects around the world. 

In a strangely synchronous event, Don's kakapo-contemporary, the elderly kakapo Richard Henry (named for New Zealand's other legendary conservationist) died on Christmas Eve last year, after an enviable life-span of up to 100 years.  Richard Henry was the last remaining Fiordland kakapo, rediscovered by Don and his team in the 1970s. Shortly after Richard Henry and the Fiordland kakapo were discovered (all males), a remnant population of kakapo were found on Stewart Island (including the crucial females), and the opportunity to save the species began. Richard Henry's genes (because he came from a separate population) were very important for kakapo conservation, and he was certainly the 'elder statesman' of the kakapo clan.

Don and Richard Henry crossed paths many times over the following years, most recently when Don and his wife went to visit Richard Henry late last year. Don told me that he was very glad to have had that opportunity.  In correspondence I've had from Don this year, he seemed quite matter-of-fact about his illness, his one regret that he did not quite have enough time to finish all the conservation projects he was involved with.

I remember watching Don and his workmates on wildlife documentaries, when I was a kid, their work inspiring me to take up the career I have now. If Don has one lasting legacy among people, it was his unswerving dedication to the conservation of our most precious wildlife. I wish to help carry that torch, and I know I'm not the only one.

A little bit country...

We spent last Saturday visiting the Oxford A & P show.  There's been a rash of them lately in our area - but this is the first one I've been to this year. 

I love A&P shows. Always have. I love the unchanging nature of them. While almost every aspect of our day-to-day life changes constantly as technology increases, lives get busier and we fill every moment of our time with 'important' tasks, the A&P show is predictably the same. And that's extremely comforting.

The same rides (actually, this is no joke, they are exactly the same pieces of machinery I remember tentatively hopping onto twenty years ago), the same food caravans, and I'm sure, sometimes, the same people operating them.

I'm pretty sure that this is the same ferris wheel that I used to ride on at A&P shows when I was a kid...

Taking your family to the A&P show means you can amble along past shearing displays, the calf-judging, prize-winning poultry, and hand the kids a few bucks to go on a ride, or get a hot-dog, knowing they'll find you again soon. We left the father-in-law at the shearing (it's his favourite), and meandered over to the wood chopping contest, which was by far the most popular event.

This photo was taken about thirty years ago, but you can't really tell the difference between then and now in woodchopping competitions.

Sitting on hay-bales in the sun, we watched some of the fittest kiwi athletes I think I've ever seen power their way through logs in seconds, scale huge poles to cut the top of logs that stood twenty feet high, swinging axes with arms that would have put Popeye to shame.

Apart from the people-watching, and sneaking a pat from some of the livestock on display, my favourite part of the A&P show is actually inside. The arts and crafts and vegetable part, usually in a hall on the site.  Oxford's A&P show didn't disappoint. As a kid, I remember entering the flower-saucer competitions (usually involving some wilted looking pansies jammed in a saucer full of sand), but the vegetable-art one was probably always my favourite.  Bert and Ernie (below) were streets ahead of the usual potato-bunnies.

Bert and Ernie were definitely my favourite, looks like the judges thought so too.

The bloke and I wandered around the tables, exclaiming at the odd stand-out prize-winning vegetable, and muttering quietly to ourselves that our beans were better, my plum sauce was definitely competitive, and our kamo kamo were worth a shot at the top prize.  Next year, we'll enter our own fruits (well vegetables mostly) of our labour, and A&P shows will take on a whole new meaning.

And who knows, maybe one day soon, we'll be able to enter our own prize-winning poultry, lambs or cattle. I'm looking forward to that!

Mine's bigger than yours...

One of the veges that has been the most successful in our garden this year is the kamokamo.  I'd never eaten it before now, and upon trying it this summer, I have to say I really like it. It's kind of like a cross between a pumpkin and a zuchinni (tastes more like a zuchinni).  Some of you may know it as kumi kumi or Maori pumpkin.

Like many of the pumpkin and squash family, it starts in a fairly slow way, sitting quietly and non-descript in amongst the other plants. Then one morning, ZOOOM, you come out to see the garden, and this triffid has taken over your whole backyard!

Kamokamo is the plant that you can see everywhere here, running over gardens, along fences, and around the clothesline.  (chooks placed in picture to give correct scale!).

Our kamokamo this year have been extremely prolific, constantly growing the large striped green globes, with no signs of tiring yet.

Even now in April, we still have new kamokamo bursting forth.

Mostly it's best to eat kamokamo when they are relatively small, they can get tougher and less tasty as they grow bigger. The giveaway is when they start to turn orange. 

However, this year our kamokamo have grown like 'topsy' (as my Nanas would say), and have constantly produced large, tasty orbs of goodness like this one. 

Our most recent kamokamo, which I dubbed "Wilson" weighed 4.5 kilograms.

I have been going a wee bit stir-crazy working from home, and had almost started calling the enormous kamokamo "Wilson" in reference to my Castaway work situation.  Having got to that point, it was probably a good thing that friends from up North arrived here for a cup of tea the other day, and in exchange for a crayfish and some perch, I passed "Wilson" onto them for their culinary enjoyment. Kind of serependitous really, since they hail from the same area that the seeds of our kamokamo came from. Wilson has gone full circle. (aside: Reuben's Mum put it on the plane as her cabin-baggage, much to the amusement of the aviation security guys when they x-rayed her bag). 

Do any of you grow kamokamo? What's your favourite way to eat it?

Not quite loving ALL nature...

I quite often describe myself as a 'nature nerd'. I have in the past claimed to love all nature and embraced all manner of not-so-cute-and-cuddly creatures including eels, giant weta and tuatara.  It's time to confess. I really don't love all creatures great and small. In fact, it's some of the small ones that drive me the craziest.

Flies. I am really annoyed by flies. All kinds of flies, the little, moronic ones that just zzzzz around in circles in the middle of the room, the flies that have some kind of mad penchant for anything electrical, so they repeatedly land on my laptop or the corner of the television.  No matter how many times I shoo them away, they just fly in a lazy figure eight, and return to their favourite spot.  Which they then throw up on. Those 'fly spots' that you see on your walls, roof and lightbulbs, are not poo, they are in fact where the fly has regurgitated some spit in order to liquefy more solid food items, which it then mops up with its tongue, like a sponge. Blegh.

The problem with flies is if you don't like them, how do you get rid of them? you can swat them, but that's energetically demanding (I'm nothing if not consistently lazy!). Swatting also leaves gross fly remains on your walls, coffee tables etc. Some genius inventor has come up with an electric fly swat, that looks like a cross between a tazer and a tennis racket.  You can spray them, but it's not nice to pack your house full of chemicals, because you're annoyed at a couple of flies dithering around the lounge.  My Nana always had some of that sticky paper hanging in the kitchen... which I found rather macabre, with it's trail of sticky black corpses, trapped forever in glue. 

I have another solution. A venus fly trap. I've got one on our kitchen windowsill, and lo and behold it has been doing it's job.

Two in one go!

 Venus fly traps, are carnivorous plants. That in itself is pretty cool. They work by the tiny hairs found on the inside of the 'trap' part. When an insect walks over these trigger-hairs, the leaves swing shut, trapping the insect inside. The insect struggles away, the leaves seal around it, creating a kind of 'stomach' where digestion occurs, and then after the juice has all been sucked out, they open again, with just the exoskeleton of the insect remaining. amazing! 

I hope my venus fly-trap doesn't get as big as Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors!

So, what nature do YOU not like? got any pet peeves, or animals that just gross you out? Why?

Looking on the bright side...

I have to admit, as a Canterbury resident... the last month hasn't been easy. And it's actually not that easy for me to admit that, since I live twenty kilometres from the CBD and we were not directly affected by the quake. Not really. Sure, we lost our office (see below) and close relatives have been affected, some far more affected than you should expect to be in your life, and people I love dearly have had damaged houses or lost their homes. But nobody we know, thankfully, was injured or killed. and that's the main thing. 

Kenton Chambers, once home of my first and only office in my career (2nd floor above the door). Sadly we won't be returning, not even to get our stuff. My favourite hut slippers my Dad bought me for my trip to Antarctica (it was cold in that office!) will have to remain there too. But in the end, it's just stuff. thank goodness.

Except, after a month or so, if you're one of those people who have lost your house, or lost stuff, or had to drastically alter how you go about your daily business, as a human, that can be quite hard to cope with. 

Someone asked me what it was like in the middle of all the quake madness last month. I said that I swung between feeling extremely lucky that we weren't directly affected, to feeling extremely guilty that we weren't directly affected, to feeling terrified that we would be next.  The terror is slipping away now. Just like last time (September 4th 2011), after a while, you just have to get on with living, and the fear of the next 'big one', gets put in amongst all those other things you have to remember, like hanging out the towels, getting a new rego for the car, and freezing the last of the apples we picked. 

While we are (like most Cantabrians) affected by this quake in a variety of ways, which are not worth going into, my greatest trial is that I get to work from home... which, given my chosen lifestyle, isn't that stressful at all.  But my heart is still breaking for people who've had their lives disrupted, altered, or turned upside down.  And then, that in itself can be quite stressful. Worrying about others you know and love, worrying about people you vaguely are aware of, and worrying about people you've never even met. Then of course (because I'm completely neurotic), I worry that I personally have nothing to worry about, and shouldn't be worrying at all. All in all, it's exhausting. 

So today, I took the time to get away from the kitchen table (current 'office'), and make the most of the fine autumnal (because I'm not sure if it's technically Autumn yet!) day, and went for a great little sojourn. 

The green racer

This beauty of a bike once rusted quietly next to our back doorstep, but thanks to the loving and dedicated bloke, got a makeover just in time for my birthday last year. Now let me start by saying (I know he won't mind), I hate cycling. I hate roadbikes, I hate mountain bikes, I hate stressing out everytime I try to pass a bike on the road... (but I do like swearing like a sailor when I have to pass a palleton of about twenty of the buggers!).  In fact, my hatred of all things cycling traversed into my total inability to ride a bike properly, which reached crisis point when my then-producer of Meet the Locals simply banned me from doing any more bike-riding on camera, because she said I 'looked like a gumby'.  I'll leave you with this episode to judge for yourselves.  


Anyway, I digress. Despite my hatred of bikes, and the fact that I turned into someone from the "Ministry of Silly Rides" whenever I got on one, I do love my birthday bike.  It has no gears, but it rides really smoothly, and I can sit on it with good posture while I'm pedalling along. And, since we live in a semi-rural area, I can ride past the few houses at the end of our road, and then cycle past paddocks, hedges, horses, sheep, and eventually to the big shelter-belt where we gather our pine cones. It was a relatively warm day, and even though my dog is a total idiot when it comes to road-sense, I took the chance that it was quiet, and he gambolled along next to me, for the first time in his life, sticking to common-sense rules, like staying off the road.  We pedalled and padded along the road taking in all the sights and smells... the warm, musty smell of long grass and the end of summer made me think about my childhood. All in all it was a lovely trip down a country and memory lane. It also only took about half an hour. On the home run, I was smug, because Nemo had finally run out of puff, and was trotting lightly behind me with his great pink tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. I had the wind behind me, and coasted home. Life is beautiful. 

Journey to the Good Life...

(Just for nostalgia's sake, I thought I'd open with this great little clip - who remembers these titles?)

Kia ora and welcome to The ka pai life.  I've been meaning to delve back into the world of online writing over the past year - but just never found the time, and got way too distracted with the online madness of Facebook and Twitter to properly contemplate writing more than 140 characters.  Sadly, this has transferred into my 'real' life, and I now find it difficult to hold a conversation with more than two 'status updates'. I consider myself a writer, and it's important for me to keep a discipline of writing if I'm going to continue seriously with a career in this vein, hence the blog.  The discipline will be keeping it going as I've already written and discarded one blog in my online writing lifetime.

To introduce myself, I guess you would say that in the past year I've had a bit of a sea-change. Chucked in a high-profile, pretty well-paying public service role, to follow my heart and soul back to the South Island, and to a job that I can say with pride I believe in, and am passionate about. Also, after a decade of chasing my career, to the detriment of all other things, I've followed a life that is about lifestyle, love, family and dare I say, balance.

I've been back in my beloved Te Wai Pounamu for a year now, and during that time have learned more about the 'real stuff' than ever before. Cooking, preserving, foraging for, and growing food are skills that I am slowly gaining - but rapidly in my terms since last year I could just about manage a spaghetti bolognese (the bloke had to teach me how to scramble eggs)!  I can now cook and bottle plum sauce, snorkel for paua, collect sacks of pine cones for winter, feed my chooks and collect their eggs (more on those ladies later), and live in a way that feels right.  It's not always easy... and we are by no means self-sufficient, but living simply has done a lot for my body and mind, not just my ecological conscience.

Friends and parents often give me a hard time, since I once would have eaten takeaways five nights a week, I now skite about eating meals that consist almost entirely of veges from the garden. They call me "Barbara Good" and the bloke and I get a good-natured ribbing about how we've taken on "The Good Life".  I'm quite happy about that. It was one of my favourite shows as a kid, and I'm happier now than I ever have been.  The Ka Pai Life gives a kiwi slant on what we are trying to do, and I hope to be able to share with you some of the experiences, good, bad and otherwise that we encounter - if you're interested.

Looking forward to hearing from you and sharing ideas, trials and tribulations. Let me know what you'd like to hear more about - happy to oblige.