(Paul and I on the way to one of our sites)
Yesterday we finally found frogs! It was quite a morale booster for the group. It was funny actually, because even in the morning Boyd sensed that the mood was somber but he tried to pump us up and motivate us. When Kirstin and I got to our site, she found a frog within the first 5 minutes and was so shocked she didn’t even know what to call out! We found 9 between the 2 of us on the first day and we named all of them. The walk in and out of the bush took quite a while and after we finished our transects I went on a walk and then fell asleep by the creek for a little while. The boys and Boyd still weren’t back so the four of us (all the girls) left a note and headed back to the van. We decided that if they weren’t back by 5 o’clock that we would start to worry (we had finished 4.5 hours earlier!). Finally they came out of the bush at 4:45! I guess they had really good sites with tons of habitat to search and lots of frogs found. Better than the alternative- we created this elaborate scenario in which they tried to bush wack out of the stream, then ended up taking the wrong trail back, ended up in town and drank their worries away in the pub while we sat in the van in worry.
Today was quite an intensive day. Although we were all done by 2 o’clock and back to the van before 3, the going was quite rough. We had to bush wack our way down to the first stream. Someone had flagged the way for us, but they must have been mad when they did it because it was so illogical. There was a clear spur that we could have followed but instead the flagging took us down a muddy cliff, then sideways along the hill, and then back down. Lots of supple jack everywhere to get tangled in and those cutty ferns that grown conveniently at eyelevel for me. Even the streams themselves were very rough going with lots of overhanging vegetation and slick bedrock and waterfalls; what would have normally only taken 20 minutes to travel took twice as long. Needless to say, when Anna and I finished our 2nd plot and radioed Paul and Kirstin to let them know we were coming to our meeting place for lunch, it was quite a relief. I enjoy the bush as much as anyone, but even the guys were kind of sketched out by the intensity of the ground we had to cover today.
(Sara and I on the beach)
We had to say bye to Boyd unfortunately, because he is doing the mountain bike leg of a triathlon tomorrow so he can’t work with us anymore. Wendy is mostly better so she will probably just stick to the closer reaches tomorrow. We invited Boyd to come see our DRP presentation in December, which is not so far away now, only a few weeks. It’s really sucky that Wendy got hurt, but I think about the circumstances and how if it wasn’t for that, we never would have met Boyd. I admire him a lot and will never forget him.
To end the day, we took a drive to Piha, a beach town that is a famous surf spot in New Zealand. The tide was low and we were able to walk through the mussle covered rocks and go exploring. The clay cliffs were subjected to thousands of years of erosion, and there were layers of stratified rocks throughout. Some of them looked so unsettled, as if they could fall at any minute but many of the larger rocks had birds nests on them. I met up with Beck and Paul and saw this man-made hide out in one of the hills, and walked to the far end where there were no longer people and walked out on the rocky cliffs and outcrops. There was one area where the water would rush in and get more and more narrow and eventually expel a great burst of water. It was so cool! Then on our way back we walked through this cathedral-like tunnel in “Pride Rock,” one of the larger islands located right off the beach. The walls were covered in gigantic starfish, some with more than 10 legs! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I felt so tiny inside that tunnel. I looked up and probably more than 100 feet over my head was the ceiling. There was a great slab of rock that looked like black slate turned completely perpendicular to the ground, which is amazing because you know that all the uplift that this rock experienced over millions of years to get it to where it is now.
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