Odd, Foreign Creatures

For 22 days including Christmas and the beginning of the New Year, Mark and I traveled around New Zealand on a big blue bus with a group of people. The tour company was Flying Kiwi, which is a clever name as kiwis are the national bird and they are land-bound (they do not fly). If someone took a muskmelon, covered it with spiky, dull brown hair and stuck a beak, two eyes, and some chicken feet on it, people in-the-know might actually mistake it for a kiwi—because that’s what one looks like—a brown, hairy melon with a long beak, a set of eyes, and a pair of legs.
Before visiting the Auckland Zoo, which we did the day before joining the tour, I, myself, had never even seen a picture of a kiwi. Quite the odd little creature. They’re nocturnal so were housed in their own little dark room in a building like the insect or reptile house at a zoo in the States. Their nostrils are at the end of their long beaks so that they can sniff out their prey since they can’t see well at night to hunt.

I was planning to write about a term some Englishman on the tour used to describe one of the Russians; I found it really funny. But I’ll save that story for another time as this post has turned to odd looking creatures.

We saw lots of colorful birds, and even a kookaburra, whose dirty gray and white feathers were not too vibrant. The kookaburra looked like the evolutionary middleman between a kiwi and what you and I think of as a bird today; the kookaburra had a bird shape, about the size of a large crow, only bushy. Its covering looked less like hair than the kiwi’s yet not quite a quilled feather.

Towards the end of our tour in New Zealand Mark and I visited a small sanctuary for birds native to New Zealand. One was the takahe (tock-a-HEE), actually, two were takahe, a male and female. The takahe has an amazing story of rediscovery. They were thought to have gone extinct around about the turn of the twentieth century. YET, in 1950 a doctor hiking in Fjordlands National Park, which everyone who visits New Zealand MUST SEE for the exquisite, snow-blanketed peaks, the tallest of which, Mt. Cook, dominates the rare clear sky. OK. Wait. I got off track again. OK. So a doctor—I guess a Ph.D. in avian science or something—this doctor was hiking, and A TAKAHE WONDERED ACROSS THE PATH HE WAS TRODDING! UNBELIEVABLE, RIGHT?! Can you imagine finding an animal that was, for the last 50 years, believed to be extinct? So exciting. Now there are 150 – 200 takahes in the wild in New Zealand. Go, takahes! They’re kiwi-shaped, however, a bit larger. Their plumage looks like feathers rather than hair, and they have big chicken legs and a turkey face. Odd odd.

Finally, I have to throw this picture in because an essay about odd looking creatures would not be complete without this picture.

Posted on http://www.cuteoverload.com/ about halfway down June 2006 archive is this picture of a baby llama (alpaca?) Notice the toothy grin. Some say he looks like Napoleon Dynamite, some say Barney Fife or Mr. Furley, both portrayed by comedic genius Don Knotts. This picture brings me a smile every time.