KAKAPO - NOT WORTH SAVING?

A bloodless scientist in Aussie has done are very interesting thing. He has developed an index that assesses the worth of saving threatened and endangered species purely on fact and logic.

As a result the big lazy parrot we call the Kakapo is deemed not worth saving. That may well be true. Comalco has chucked a million dollars at the recovery programme for about 20 years so thats $20 m for starters and then its safe to assume DOC has stumped up the same amount so thats about $40million so far and what have we to show for it? Another 70 birds. Thats about $750k each.

Now don't get me wrong - Kakapo are the embodiment of innocence as we have blogged before and anyone who gets up close and personal to one cannot help but be affected by them.

However we have to fess. The mere smell of them sent our saliva glands into overdrive. They awoke some ancient Maori predilection for Parrot hangi.

Thats the problem with Kakapo - they are our forests village idiots. They never adapted. They cant fly their way out of trouble and the desire to breed is predicated on a seed that only flourishes every now and then.

Even so, we get the argument and a tool designed to triage the species that will best benefit from intervention is very useful.

However it does not take into account our nations love of charismatic fauna. If its cute we are more inclined to save it. The yellow eyed penguin is probably worthy of more resource but its an ugly bloody thing.

But small birds like the Black Robin take our fancy.

So while logic should dictate - it wont. Cute will always win the bucks and our verdant parrot will get all the love and attention it probably doesn't deserve.

COBWEBS AND CACTUS'S COAT

Last night we saw a tweet from TV3's Rachel Smalley @RachSmalley who is fast becoming a twitter princess.

Anyway she was interested in doing a piece on voluntary celibacy. It made us think of a not very well known social club that operated back in the late 80's early 90's on Stewart Island. It was called the Cobweb club. Numbers fluctuated but there were about a dozen hard core members. Membership was only gained if you had gone a whole year without a shag. What was even funnier is that these women were all good looking sheilas. Funnier because at the time there were over 60 single men on the island.

They were a motley lot.

Anyway we missed out on entry by about 10 days. However, because we were fervent believers in the southern sheilas maxim, that no roots are better than bad roots, we became an associate member.

Anyway to Cactus's coat. Cactus will never be a member of the Cobweb club but she could be an associate member cos her mates have got her to understand now that no roots are better than dud roots.

So our high flying financial diva, Cactus is soon to be off jetting around the world again and she has dragged out one of the great man magnet clothing items - the fur coat. It doesnt have to be real - just fluffy - its a tactile thing. Men like stroking fluff.

And so what does a modern girl wear under a fur coat ? Easy - nothing.

JASON WRIGHT

Today Southland will be in mourning for a young man who was making his mark on the local aviation scene.

Jason Wright, 29 wanted to be a helicopter pilot pretty much from the day he could talk.

Now small towns can be pretty hard to get out of sometimes, the lifestyle can be quite seductive. Jason was the only son of Liz and John, both born and bred Southlanders of Ngai Tahu descent. They are great parents and did all they could to help Jason realise his dream of being a helicopter pilot and its a huge credit to them that he ended up doing the thing he was born to do - fly.

Our son is a helicopter pilot too, so we know just how expensive it is and how hard a career it is to crack.

He and my son shared botha passion for flying and of the south.

Jason was good looking young man who was unfailingly polite and he was single minded in the pursuit of his dream.

He started flying around the age of 18. He flew both here in New Zealand and in places like Cambodia where he was involved in animal recovery. He could have set up shop anywhere in the world, but he chose to go back to the place of his heart - Bluff. It was home and like most of us who hail from those parts - we have a bond with Stewart Island that can never be broken.

This year he took us to our Muttonbird Island. He looked after his passengers like they were his own whanau - muttonbirders are really one big whanau anyway. Jason understood them and they loved him for it.

In fact, I suspect that for many years the hard money that Liz and John earned from muttonbirding, would have gone to help Jason realise his dream.

He was on our facebook page. We shared stories on there from time to time and the photos he took showed his passion for Stewart Island was probably as strong as his passion for helicopters.

He soon established himself as a trusted and popular pilot and as a young Bluff businessman. Bluffies were so very very proud of him. He was the role model many parents suggested to their kids that they could do well to emulate. He was the epitome of the small town boy doing good.

Today they found his body and that of the chap he was flying with - Allan Munro, another man who was obviously a lover of aviation, in the cold waters of the Bluff Harbour.

It is so hard when good men die young. So hard to fathom the reason for it all.

But we will remember the Jason who sucked the juice out of the fruit of life every damn day. He didn't waste one second of his time. He was still in awe at the beauty of the places he got to visit every day and he understood the people of the south and he loved sharing both with those from other places. His was not just a life well lived -it was a life lived best.

FEATHERS FLY -

We have had about a dozen emails and texts today asking if  we were involved in the stabbing on  the muttonbird islands on Monday. A bloke ( yes we know who he is ) was stabbed by another bloke ( and we know him as well and we dont like him. ) 


Guns  and often alcohol are banned on most islands. But as knives are pretty integral to the processing of the birds  - its no surprise  that they would be used as weapons in an argument. The island where the altercation occurred is about an hours journey by boat from our island.

It was apparently an argument about muttonbirds.  We laughed out loud at this statement by an Invercargill copper.

He was flown directly to Southland Hospital where he underwent surgery and was expected to be released today, said Detective Dougall Henderson of Invercargill police.

Access to the isolated islands is restricted to Rakiura Maori, who harvest muttonbirds - also known as sooty shearwaters - there, but police were granted clearance to fly to the island and a boning knife was recovered, he said.

A 49-year-old man was arrested and now faces serious assault charges.

The men had been muttonbirding together, but had a falling out over birds.

"Muttonbirds, not the other type," Mr Henderson said.

Hell, over the years  birders have fought over boundaries, catches, and just for the hell of it -   but women??? Nah. Never.


It will be interesting if the prize  wanker who was arrested will be allowed back on the island.

IN DEEP

In about three weeks we are going to be here.

Its Ernest Island which is a  short swim to Stewart Island, one of the southern most and isolated muttonbird  islands and on a good day with the sun shining on the ebb tide and the fish biting, its kinda paradise. When the southerly comes up and your words are thiefed by a gale to disappear forever - its  hells next door neigbour .
And yes, those waters are so clear you hang over the end of the dinghy and watch the blue cod commit suicide on a rusty hook baited up with the arse of a muttonbird.


We have been commissioned to write a story on this years trip , which we will be taking with our 73 year old father, 69 year old mother and 28 year old son.

The story will be in a magazine called New Zealand Today - and the editor is an old work colleague, Allan Dick.
We will be without  a cellphone and there is no internet coverage. We can talk on  a VHF and in the past we have taken down a Satellite Phone, but it costs a bit  - last time it was $600 for 2 weeks.( if anyone wants to sponsor us  - please let us know!)

It will be hard work,  and fun and always brings us closer together as a family. We work and live together in very confined quarters - Our power is a generator, we have a coal range that needs all the love an attention of an expensive mistress to keep us a warm and fed.

We have a long drop  but we have a good shower. Well we did two years ago. The first few days are always spent gerry rigging the things that have broken or deteriorated without constant maintenence. Its one of the joys and challenges of the place. Getting by with what you have got at hand.

We will take our computer  and blog when we can  and then we will put them all up on Roarprawn when we get back about the 14th of May. We will be taking a video as well.

And yep we sell the birds we catch to defray expenses.  It will cost  the four of us over $2500 to get down  by boat and chopper from Bluff  and thats is not taking into account the $1000 dollars for me and the son to fly Air New Zealand. But its worth every godamn hard earned dollar it costs to get there.
The boat we are travelling on is skippered by Jack Topi, he is  the grandson of Peter Topi, my Uncle who along with  a bunch of our cousins was tragically drowned on the Kotuku back in 2006. "Big Teep"  as my Uncle was affectionately known, would be bloody proud of his grandson, in fact his whole family have done him proud. 

We are alos looking for some guest bloggers to keep the Roarprawn feeding the masses while we are out of range.
And if you want to buy some birds then contact us on bustedblonde@gmail.com

GLORIOUS FOOD

The Australian has a great yarn on the worlds best food experiences from readers.

this is our particular favourite

"While tootling around the far-north Japanese island of Hokkaido, one morning my husband I found ourselves on a windswept wharf, the fishing boats and trawlers tantalisingly empty. My husband, who possesses the food instincts of a gourmet bloodhound, pointed at a nondescript door, through which a few people came and went: "Let’s go in there". We entered a shopfront where glistening fish was piled high on ice – tiny, brilliant red prawns encrusted with bright blue roe, dinner-dish sized scallops, the prized starlight squid. After much pointing and gesturing, the fishmonger unfolded a card table, plonked it in the middle of the bare room, tipped some soy and a smudge of wasabi onto paper plates with a great pile of the prawns, and offered us tea made from the local, dried seaweed. The moral of the story? For one door to open, you sometimes have to knock on it."

For us, the following food memory is enduring.

On the coldest and windiest of nights over 45 years ago we would be sitting in the tiny "pluckhole" on the muttonbird (titi) island - a small square room in the workhouse, that fitted about 6 people all pulling the first layer of feathers from the fat titi. Occasionally the men would stop for a quick swig from a big bottle of beer, the women pausing for a sip of sweet tea from enamel mugs. All the time the men and women wove tales of the past to clothe us for the future.

With the last of their down still on the birds, they were passed out of the pluck hole and another group of men and women dipped the birds into hot water .With an ancient rhythmic swipe, the last fluffy undercoat disappeared from the titi leaving them clean naked . They were then hung from the rafters to dry.

In another corner of the workshed on an old range, a Kerosene tin rocked as it boiled away - full of muttonbirds simmering in nothing but a seawater broth. Its rangetop companions were an old black boiler of mussels steaming away, in their own juices. In a third pot, cod heads peeked out - looking like they were fleeing their only companion - an onion.

After a hundred or so birds had been plucked clean and hung to dry, old Maxy Skipper would pull down the pail of oily titi, the mussels and codheads putting them on the floor, the heady scents driving us crazy and we generations all, would sit around on beer crates and apple boxes, wipe our hands of the last of the feathers off on our overalls and dip in and grab a piece of bird or mussels or a cod head.
Faces and hands grease smeared, we grinned at each other in shared delight of the sublime and subtle flavours. Us kids loved to watch Maxy. He played the boiled birds like a harmonica - in one side of his chubby moosh went the oily legs of a bird and out the otherside came the cleaned white drumstick - all in the blink of an eye and the lick of his chops.

Poetry it was - poetry.

CALAMITY - AND PESTILENCE.

We have been blogging on this for a while.

It is arguably the worst muttonbird season in 45 years.

It affects many of our larger whanau.

It is a significant environmental event. Not unprecedented but significant.

MUTTONBIRD SEASON A BAD ONE

<-------This pic is of the Helicopter on the beach of the muttonbird island we go to every year.

We blogged on early signs that this years Muttonbird harvest was going to be a bad one. Weather patterns appear to play a huge part in the parent birds ability to feed the chicks in the burrows on the islands.

As we feared it is a bad season. Birds are dying in the burrows and parent birds aren't visiting the island to feed the chicks. It happens. We can expect and see about one really bad season every decade. So all the climate change believers wont be able to blame this years bad breeding season on global bloody warming.Last year the chicks were huge and plentiful. This year they are not. Shit happens - it has happened before and we expect it to happen again.

Word is that some muttonbirders are already coming off the islands.

It is a sad place to be when the birds are dead and dying . The islands are spooky without the underground and overhead hustle and bustles of chicks and parents.

We may visit to check the place out. It will be a sad trip.

MUTTONBIRD SEASON NOT GOING TO BE GOOD

One of the most unique harvests in New Zealand is about to get underway on Wednesday but the news is not all that good.

Hundreds of Rakiura Maori, those with a blood right to exclusively harvest muttonbirds, are on or on their way to over 25 islands around Stewart Island. However the early signs are that this is not going to be a good season.

It is nature - and it happens at least once a decade. And the fluctuations are well recorded.

The crook seasons are cyclical as we have blogged before. Our family has a policy of not harvesting muttonbirds if the season is not looking good. I suppose some would call that conservation - we just call it common sense.

Some birders will go to the island's to check on their properties and make any repairs others will stay away . They only good thing is that a bad season with low numbers of chicks or chicks in poor conditions is always a precursor to a bloody good season. So if the early information is correct then next year will produce a bumper crop.

And while we may not go to our island this year our favourite Hooker Sealions will have the island all to themselves.