12 September 2007

Huia Ridge Track

page 6

This one always gets the "Aw shucks!" response: the hen and chickens fern with the chickens clearly visible and ready to drop off the parent and make their own way. It's a Blechnum, but I forget which. . .

Damn. I'd forgotten this bit. It obviously got lost among my catalogue of earlier miseries.

And here's rather more friendly bush lawyer than the one which grabbed me earlier. This one, Rubus australis, I've mostly seen as a carpet or scrambling a foot or two off the ground at most.

I think this is Metrosideros perforata, a small-leaved rata. I'm not quite sure as this looser form is uncharacteristic, and the leaves are too small, I think, to be M diffusa.

There's a wonderful example here of the thick roots of kiekie fastened to a tree as they head for the light.

and down here a purple quintinia sits over a cushion of moss like green stars.

My very favourite vegetable stick insect... There's a handsome splash of green on the otherwise dull bronze of these leaves.

Mapau has been present all along but taken somewhat for granted.

There's also quite a lot of Pittosporum tenuifolium, quite uncharacteristically bronze, like a small-leaved mapau, but I look for a pic and can't find one.

Then, hello? What is this? I await identification until Tony Foster gets home at the end of the month, unless somebody else can help. It would seem almost certainly to be a Pseudopanax of some sort, but I have never before seen a trifoliate leaf shaped like this.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle... (Distant echoes of Ray Ellington and the Goon Show)

A punga sprouts a pasture of lance fern. The leaf shape, together with the characteristic pattern of spores on the back make this one relatively easy to identify.

Just ahead is the scrambly steep bit. I carefully put the camera away until I have reached the bottom. I unpack it once again at the bottom with a glad cry of, "Now I can relax," and promptly fall flat on my back as a gob of decaying leaf matter shoots out from under me.

With swearing loudly, cursing myself for relaxing too bloody soon, like ever, and getting to my feet without getting any mud near the camera lens, my next few moments are almost completely absorbed.

But just around the corner a few metres along is a cold beer. I knock the cap off and think for a bit, before deciding I do have enough spare time and energy to take in the Piha Rd bit. What an amazing bloody mixture of a track!

I am sitting at table later that night at home, and Miranda looks at me and says, "You look tired."

It's true. . .