We saw a Kiwi! A bird not a NZ person!

This morning we left our lovely Airbnb behind us and said goodbye to our wonderful hosts to head off for the day, this goodbye was a 2 hour conversation in the kitchen! Our destination was the Willowbank wildlife park in Christchurch which has a large amount of native New Zealand wildlife. The sun was shining for us today so many of the animals were out to greet us. The centre sold many types of food and to start with we only bought farm animal food but when we saw the hungry eels waiting to be fed we went back and bought some super tasty mince meat for the eels to eat. They had metal spoons for you to use and as soon as you moved it and they heard it they all knew what was about to happen. It was quite gross listening to them take it off the spoon because their teeth or bone scrapped along the metal making a horrible sound that went right through you. We were able to use the other food we bought to feed the deer and all manner of farm yard animals. At one point we discovered a domestic looking rabbit hopping around by the gibbon enclosure so I ran back to the reception just to check he was allowed to be out and about and it turns out that Gerald the rabbit is free to roam the whole park. One of the best areas was the section where native New Zealand species are shown. Many of the native animals and birds are endangered or low in numbers because of predators Europeans introduced that have gotten out of hand. Dogs, wild cats and stouts are the biggest hunters of kiwis and possums which were introduced for the fur trade eat huge amounts of vegetation effecting the food source for many other native birds. It's sad that there was little to no understanding how introducing new species of animals would effect the ones already here. For example the early settlers introduced rabbits for their meat and fur and quickly the population became out of hand so they bought in stouts which would eat the young rabbits to try and rectify the problem but in doing so introduced the biggest predator for the kiwi birds. It's a shame that a country's animals couldn't just be left as they are. Kiwis are nocturnal so we had to enter a darkened room which had 5 enclosures. They have 5 birds but we only managed to see one up and about. They're a lot bigger than we imagined and you can see how they are related to the emu/ostrich birds. I managed to get a shockingly bad blurry photo of one right at the back. We also saw a Kea, the world's only mountain parrot although I'm so determined to see one in the wild. There's only 4 thousand but they seem to be quite common to see so fingers crossed we find one a long the way. After trying not to buy the whole gift shop we headed to our new accommodation and to say it wasn't what we expected is a huge understatement. We arrived and no one was there but there was a sign saying to go in and we were just wondering around someone's huge home. It was all very weird and we found a room with our name on it but soon realised this is more personal than we wanted. It belongs to a Chinese family we discovered and as lovely as they are it was all so very weird and we decided to shorten our stay to just one night. There was no privacy and one bathroom between about 10 people. Nick spent an hour playing hide and seek with the owner's son and as nice as that was we felt 4 nights there would just be too overwhelming. Tomorrow we head to a very small, very private Airbnb instead.Read more