Page 13 - 2008 NZ SUB ANTARCTIC ISLANDS - SMARTPHONE

The walk was quite lovely as we wandered through the green-tinted air awed by the enormity of
huge trees and the beauty of the tree ferns. The softly falling rain added to the magic of this “lost
in the mists of time” setting and we were not even surprised at first by the absence of birdsong.
Very few birds live at Jacob’s bay right now and of course even the few that are usually there
were quiet on such a damp day.

The most interesting plant we saw, though not the most beautiful, is the incredible lancewood
tree. We were to see it in other settings we visited too but this was the most impressive since it
was our first experience of it. When it is a sapling, it is very slender and its leaves look like very
wide needles pointing downward off the stems. They can reach 3 ft. in length, are deeply serrated
on the edges, and speckled. As the young sapling searches for light it continues to grow taller but
it continues in its spindly appearance. When a place opens in the canopy where the tree can reach
upward, perhaps caused by another tree’s fall, the lancewood shoots up amazingly rapidly until it
can join the treetops of all the other taller ones that have surrounded it. The trunk thickens out
remarkably and the leaves transform themselves completely. They are now more oblong than
linear and are only about 9 inches long and are much wider than the juvenile form. The tree can
reach 40 ft. in height and the trunk is usually about 1 foot in diameter. This condition of having
two or more distinct kinds of leaves in juvenile and adult forms is called “heteroblasty” and it is
not at all uncommon in New Zealand plants. But the lancewood was our only encounter with the
phenomenon.

Motuara Island

Now that our raingear had been thoroughly tested, the sun came out and we were able to visit one
of DOC’s predator-free islands—Motuara Island in this same area. It was quite different from
Jacob’s Bay. There were no tree ferns on this speck of land but many birds—the air was
constantly vibrating to their calls. The forest was much more open than the one at Jacob’s Bay
which was thick with underbrush as well as a lofty and dense canopy. The island is very hilly and
the trail up was slippery with mud because of the rain that had fallen earlier. But the slipping and
sliding were well worth the effort because of the wonderful birds were saw so closely and clearly.

13