Page 24 - 2008 NZ Subantarctic Islands

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

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