New Zealand: Shakespeare Cliff Scenic and Historic Reserve

Look at the native bush and the naturally sculpted rocks we saw on March 7th at the Shakespeare Cliff Scenic and Historic Reserve in Cooks Bay on the Coromandel Peninsula. If you’d like a better look at the closest and most prominent rock formation, click the excerpt below.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Truncated and therefore asymmetric abstraction of a prickly pear cactus bud and flower

Here’s an abstract portrait of a bud and flower of a Texas prickly pear, Opuntia engelmannii var. lindheimeri, along floral Park Dr. in my neighborhood on April 7th.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: basking in the sun

It wasn’t I who was basking in the sun on pastel-colored rocks at the Matakaea Reserve on February 27th but a bunch of New Zealand fur seals (Arctocephalus forsteri), including this one. To enlarge the seal, click its image below.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: views from the Interislander

The first time on the recent trip that we took the Interislander ferry, from the North Island to the South Island on February 18th, the weather was grey. We had better luck going back across the Cook Strait to the North Island on March 3rd, as you can verify in the picture above.

And here’s a look down at the churning water alongside the ferry:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: two plants to ward off scurvy

On the grounds surrounding the museum in Russell on February 10th I found various cultivated native plants, along with little signs that identified some of them. The one shown above is Apium prostratum subsp. prostratum var. filiforme (yikes!), known in Māori as tutae koau and in English as shore celery and New Zealand celery. The one shown below is Lepidium oleraceum, called nau in Māori and Cooks [sic] scurvy grass in English. British sailors ate both of them to ward off scurvy, as the last link and another explain in more detail; in fact those plants were the first two ever gathered for food by Europeans in New Zealand.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Glenorchy

A few days before we were going to be in Queenstown I looked online for a hotel but the town was so crowded in February that I couldn’t find a single place to stay. None. Zero. I did, however, find an opening at a hotel in Glenorchy, at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu about an hour north of Queenstown. That turned out to be a good thing because I don’t know if we’d otherwise have taken the scenic drive along the eastern side of the lake. The picture above shows the mountains outside Glenorchy late in the afternoon on February 21st. Notice once more that fields of ice had lasted into the warmest part of the year.

After settling in, we went out again during the last hour of daylight and drove a few miles further north, where we found this rainbow:

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

I thought I might have missed them

We got back from New Zealand on March 9th. In driving around my Austin neighborhood in the days after that, I didn’t see any cedar sage (Salvia roemeriana) flowering in the accustomed place along Morado Circle so I thought I might have missed this year’s flowers while I was away. Toward the end of the month I finally saw one, and on April 1st I photographed a few beneath some “cedar” (Ashe juniper) trees on Floral Park Dr., as you see above. I found even more in another place a week later, and still more in Great Hills Park on April 15th.

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Even after six weeks, the Dauntless Duo has barely recovered from all the running around we did in New Zealand. Nevertheless, as of today we’re traveling again, so there’ll be fewer posts for the “foreseeable” future. (I used quotation marks because in a recent talk about the American Revolution historian David McCullough reminded people that the future isn’t foreseeable.)

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: southern black-backed gull

Driving S.H. 25 north from Thames on March 6th, I stopped to photograph a gull standing atop a mound of rock at the edge of the Firth of Thames. I think the bird was a southern black-backed gull.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Oh, those rocks

Anyone who had grown up in the southwestern quadrant of New Zealand’s South Island and had never traveled elsewhere could be forgiven for assuming that every other region in the world has patterned rocks lying around in abundance. If only it were so, say we from most other places. Above is another view from February 21st of Lake Wakatipu, this time emphasizing the rocks strewn along its shore. Below is a downward-looking closeup of a few.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: fern with sporangia

Look at the prominent sporangia (spore-bearing bumps) that I saw on this fern frond in Queenstown on February 21st.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman