Page 67 - 2008 NZ Subantarctic Islands

with their amazingly patterned bark. Ulva reveled in pointed out

every smallest little flower and every enormous tree as if they
were her own, as indeed they were in a certain sense.

Among the bird species we saw

happily making their homes in
this haven were weka (rather
like a chicken but we don’t know

if it also tastes like one), kaka
(the gaudy parrot),

saddlebacks (at one time
reduced to only 30 birds in all

New Zealand and here in Ulva alone they have 30 pairs breeding),
fantails (another tiny bird almost lost to NZ—it has the most

amazing tail feathers which spread like a lady’s fan with stripes of
white and black), brown creepers (they are like our sapsuckers
and can up & down tree trunks backwards and forwards), tui ( a

lovely black bird with vivacious yellow feathers about its face—
itself almost extinct on the two mainland islands), and finally the

fabled rifleman (NZ’s tiniest bird, so small that its nest cavity is
just a narrow slit in a tree truck and whose chicks are no larger

than bumblebees). We didn’t see the babies of the pair of
rifleman we were lucky enough to observe, but we did see the

daredevil approach of the parent birds to the almost invisible slit
in the tree where they folded their wings without a pause and
disappeared inside! Quite a show!

During our hour and a half visit to this special place, we had

alternate rain and sunshine, but we delighted in it all. The
thoughtful conservators of Ulva Island have put down gravel paths

so there is no slippery mud to contend with and they have
bridged all the little streamlets with non-slip materials so there is

no fording necessary. If we could have had longer on the island,
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