Impossible Sky

April 7, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I couldn’t capture today’s sky, but it was something like this…

It was another of those drive-off-the-road-gorgeous skies this evening. The kind that is completely impossible to capture in a photograph, and is more likely to be seen in a cheap painting for sale alongside velvet paintings of Elvis.

I can get lost in one of those skies.

Ripples and waves of grey cloud surging across the sky. A break just big enough to illuminate the edges, just big enough for the sea foam-salmon pink-blue of evening to peek through. The ragged shreds of dark cloud caught in shadow. And far out across the plains, a shaft of brilliant sun lighting sheets of mist shrouding the mountains.

These things only happen in bad paintings.

Or so I thought.

But the New Zealand sky is like the Andes Mountains. As a child, I was obsessed with the Andes–so impossible, so improbable in the National Geographic photos, I couldn’t believe they were real. And then I went there and climbed them, and I knew they were not.

It is the same with the New Zealand sky. To see it is to know it cannot possibly be real. It is a storybook caricature of a sky. It is a fantasy sky. It is a sky so dense with colour, you think it must have drained the rest of the world, casting everything else in black and white.

And I am so profoundly humbled and honoured to be able to call it my sky. My home.

Step on a Hedgehog

April 6, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

My daughter came to me frustrated yesterday evening.

“What is fear?”

Knowing she had just been out in the dark, I asked her if she was frustrated because she was afraid of the dark.

“No, I’ve gotten over my fear of the dark. Now I’m afraid of hedgehogs.”

“Ah. You’re afraid of stepping on them in the dark.”

She nodded.

“Well, you learned that from your father, who worries about stepping on hedgehogs in the dark. But I’ve actually stepped on hedgehogs in the dark.” I shrugged. “It’s not so bad—for me or for the hedgie. You tend to feel it before you put all your weight on it, and you pull back before you hurt it.”

She looked relieved.

It got me thinking about the nature of fear, how easily it is taught, and how difficult it can be to overcome.

Teaching children about insects, I see fear all the time. The fear that another living thing might harm us (and sometimes the fear that we might harm another living thing). Much of my teaching is aimed at overcoming those fears.

And in saying ‘overcoming,’ I don’t mean eliminating those fears—that’s the work of decades, not of an hour.

I know that, because I experience those fears, myself—they are deeply rooted in our culture, and I was taught them just like everyone else was. But I have confidence in spite of the fear. Part of that comes from knowing that the worst that can happen is really not all that bad (for most things). I have been bitten, clawed, and stung by songbirds, parrots, raptors, rabbits, rodents, snakes and all manner of insects and spiders, and have survived it all. More importantly, I’ve learned that if I understand the animal and move with confidence and care, I am unlikely to be hurt (or to hurt the animal).

So I don’t try to make children unafraid of insects; instead, I teach them how to move with confidence and care, even if they don’t feel the confidence yet. I teach them how to hold an insect safely. If I think they’re ready for it, I give them an insect that is likely to bite them—a tiny nip they might actually feel, if they’re paying attention. They might cry out, “Oh! It bit me!” They might fling the insect off their hand. But chances are good, they’ll pick it up again, because the worst has happened, and it wasn’t so bad. The act of taking the risk once makes it easier to do it again. Confidence grows. The fear may still be there, but it is diminished by understanding and experience.

I hope my daughter does step on a hedgehog in the dark. She will stumble in her effort to not squash it. She’ll cry out in surprise, and then laugh as the offended hedgehog lumbers away. When she goes out in the dark next, she’ll walk with more confidence. And because the fear will probably still be there, she’ll feel incredibly brave in doing so.

Standard Time

April 5, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We came off Daylight Savings Time last Sunday. And though it doesn’t change the actual day length, it does seem to shorten the days.

I’m still milking in the dark—an hour doesn’t change that. But now, it is all but dark by the time we’re doing the dinner dishes. There is no time to potter in the garden in the evening. The dinner leftovers destined for the chickens have to be saved until morning, because the chickens are already roosting for the night by the time we’re done eating.

But the truth is, there isn’t much still to be done in the garden. Oh, there are pumpkins and popcorn to harvest, and at some point I need to bring in the remaining carrots, but all those tasks can be done on the weekend. Large swaths of the garden don’t need to be weeded anymore—the crops there are done, and the chickens will appreciate the weeds when I turn them out into the garden for the winter.

So instead, I have time to read a book after dinner, which is a luxury I don’t have during Daylight Savings Time. I’m actually quite excited by it this year, as we have a new book nook my husband built along with some beautiful cabinetry for the bedroom. The perfect place to curl up with a book.

Herb Garden Reboot

April 3, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The herb knot in the snow a few years ago.

You know you’ve lived somewhere for a while when it’s time to replace perennial gardens you planted.

One of the first gardens we established when we moved in eleven years ago was the herb garden. That garden is now looking sad—the plants are aging, and this summer’s dry hot, weather took a toll. The beautiful Celtic knot of lavender and rosemary is overgrown and the plants are dying in patches. The clay pots we nestled into the ground to contain the mint are cracked and crumbling. A few of the surrounding shrubs are dead.

We’ve also been talking about some changes to the flower garden that flows into the herb garden. When we turned it from driveway to garden about seven years ago, it was meant to be full of annual flowers, but no matter what I’ve done to it, it still feels like I’m digging in a driveway every spring when I plant out the annuals. Perennials would really make more sense there.

It’s time for some planning!

My daughter went out there this afternoon with clipboard and tape measure and measured off the area, including features we want to keep, but ignoring everything else. I took those numbers back to the office and made a scale drawing of the space on the computer.

Now comes the fun part.

I’ll print out blank copies of the space, and we’ll scribble garden ideas on them. The pages will float around the house. We’ll draw ideas over breakfast, after dinner, at odd times of day and night. We’ll list all the things we “need” to have in the garden. We’ll take our sketches out into the yard to try to visualise them. We’ll argue about how many rosemary plants we actually need, whether the lemon trees would prefer the warmth of the northeast side of the house or the better soil on the southeast side, and how many artistic installations is too many.

We’ve got roughly 285 square metres to play with, which I’m sure will seem like not enough as we plan, but will feel like way too much once we’re in there pulling out plants and reconfiguring the space.

What do you do with a giant zucchini?

April 2, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

To the tune What do you do with a drunken sailor?

What do you do with a giant zucchini?

What do you do with a giant zucchini,

Early in the morning?

Hey, they just get bigger.

You can’t eat them all.

Cook ’em in a sauce and make enchiladas,

Early in the morning!

Hey, they just get bigger.

You can’t eat them all.

Bake ’em in a cake and add chocolate chips,

Early in the morning!

Hey, they just get bigger.

You can’t eat them all.

Puddles of Crickets

April 1, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

A female small field cricket–the long ovipositor (egg laying tube) at the rear tells you she’s a girl.

It was like walking through puddles, my daughter said.

There had been no rain.

But the grass was so alive with crickets, they rippled away from every step like splashes of water.

By the time I got there, she had splashed all the crickets away, but I could still hear them. Their little bell-like songs have been a constant background noise all summer, and are particularly loud now, in autumn, when most are adults.

It’s only the males who sing, and they do it by rubbing their short, leathery wings together. The song is fiendishly difficult to locate—it sounds like it’s coming from a dozen places at once, and finding a calling male is all but impossible for a predator. The other crickets are able to do it, though. Males’ calls stake out their territories and attract females.

When I ran the Bugmobile, I used to take crickets to schools, and I always wanted to have a couple of males so the kids could hear them singing. Catching males was a challenge. Not only are they difficult to locate by sound, but if you do stumble across one, it will drop immediately to the ground and scurry underneath the leaf litter like a cockroach. Females, on the other hand, take great bounding leaps to get away, making them easy to catch in a sweep net. I could collect a dozen females in one sweep of the net, but it might take me half an hour to search out as many males.

It was the same story when I went to photograph them for today’s blog post. Males singing all around me, and not one available for the camera. The girls were more obliging. It wasn’t quite like walking in puddles, but there were an awful lot of them hopping around in the grass.

Death in the Paddock

March 31, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I buried a goat today—Ixcacao, my little toggenburg. Well, I considered her little until I had to dig a hole big enough for her, and drag all 65 kg of her deadweight over to it.

I’ve found that, for most of the goats, digging their graves gives me the time and exercise I need to face the loss stoically. Usually, anyway. But each death is a blow.

There was Hebe, 9 months old, dead two weeks after I bought her. No clear cause. Just dead one morning.

Quickly following her was Hebe 2, four months old, who tore the ligaments in one of her knees. “If she were a rugby player, we’d operate on her, but…” was the way the vet delivered the verdict. I had kidded her myself at the end of a long struggle with three tangled kids. She was weak and couldn’t stand properly for the first few weeks, and I’d hand fed her until she could hold her own against her two big brothers. I held her while the vet put her down.

Hebe is the Greek goddess of youth. I should have known no goat named Hebe would live to adulthood.

There was Demeter, eight years old, who poisoned herself on green acorns, destroying her liver and causing her to waste away. She had always been a sweetheart. I sat next to her in the goat shed, stroking her head while the vet injected her.

There was Delilah, three years old, who wasted away, probably from Johnes disease. She was never particularly friendly, but I sat with her, too, when the vet came to put her down.

Ixcacao, four, went too fast for me to call in the vet. She had been off her feed a bit yesterday, which I attributed to being in season. Now, I think she must have had a tumour—she’d been looking a bit lopsided lately. And I wonder if it had been there in the spring when she delivered a dead, malformed kid. I won’t ever know, I suppose. She gave me no signs of trouble until late yesterday.

As a breeder once said to me, “If you have goats, you have dead goats.” It just goes with the territory, I suppose.

And tomorrow we will get up and carry on with another ordinary day.

Chameleons

March 30, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

When I picked it up on the beach, it was lichen-green. A fist-sized chunk of serpentine that looked all but translucent. It was almost alive.

I brought it back to the campground. As it dried, it lost some of its lustre. It lost its translucence, but remained green.

When we packed up to come home, I took the rock with me, nestled in a cup holder in the car. Leaving the humid, green West Coast, we drove up over the mountains, and back into dry, brown Canterbury.

When I picked the rock out of the car, it was frosty white, with a few sparkles of pyrite in the crevices. Dry and dead.

I think people are like that rock.

When we see them in their own “habitat”—in the place where they feel they belong—they are alive and vibrant. They show their depth and their colours. We see their full beauty.

But when we see a person in a place where they don’t feel like they belong—a place where they’re uncomfortable—they frost over. We see only their surface and little of their beauty. There may be hints—small sparkles in the crevices, if we look closely—but most of their beauty will be hidden.

I used to see this a lot, working at nature centres in the U.S. Teachers would regularly warn me about “problem” children. Kids who were nothing but troublemakers, according to the teachers.

I took special note of these children, because I learned quickly that they were likely to be my best students. Take them out of the classroom where they felt they didn’t belong, and put them in a place where they could shine, and they invariably did. They were often smart, funny, helpful, eager to engage with the subject, and bursting with questions—completely different from the sullen, disengaged, miscreants the teachers viewed them as.

I don’t think their transformation had anything to do with my teaching skills—it was simply that they were more comfortable outdoors, moving around, picking up sticks, throwing rocks. They were in their habitat, and could show their beauty. I wished the teachers could have seen their students’ transformations—most of the time, the teachers sat around drinking coffee while their students were out on the trails. I don’t think they believed me when I told them how marvellous their “problem” students were.

Take my word for it. This rock is beautiful.

Fungal Forest

March 29, 2016March 30, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Entoloma hoschstetteri–the only fungus that appears on a nation’s currency.

Over the weekend, we went on a lovely hike from Okarito, through the bush up the hill behind the town, over to the next lagoon, and back via the beach.

The beach part was, naturally, lovely, with huge waves, trickling waterfalls down the cliffs, and a lazy seal who watched us pass.

Hygrocybe spp.--known as waxcaps--the Crayola of the fungi

Hygrocybe sp.–known as waxcaps–the Crayola of the fungi

But the real beauty lay on the forest floor. The track was like a Disney storybook forest, with colourful mushrooms everywhere. It just needed a few gnomes or fairies to be complete.

This unknown mushroom had a lovely lace petticoat.

Lycoperdon spp--a puffball. The genus name means "wolf fart"

Lycoperdon sp.–a puffball. The genus name means “wolf fart”

Another member of the genus Hygrocybe

Small Town Celebration

March 28, 2016 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

We spent Friday and Saturday nights last week at the Okarito campground. As it happened, Saturday was Okarito’s 150^th anniversary celebration. Okarito used to be a town of about 4000 people, back in the late 1800s when the West Coast gold fields were booming. The town sported a 25 hotels, 3 theatres, two banks, several general stores, and a public swimming pool, Today it has a year-round population of about 30. Most of what was once bustling streets has been reclaimed by the rainforest. There are no hotels (though many of the baches are rented as holiday homes), no banks, no pool, and the only remaining general store serves as a tiny museum and event venue seating 40. You can buy a coffee and insect repellent at the local kayak rental company.

Okarito is 30 minutes drive from the township of Franz Josef Glacier, and 3 hours from Hokitika. In the middle of nowhere, I was curious to see how many people would actually show up to the town’s 150^th celebration.

It started off slow…

The festivities were scheduled to start at 9 am and run through to 10 pm on Saturday. At 9.00, there were a few people setting up in the marquis…

About 10.30, the bouncy castle was inflated, and half a dozen kids tumbled around on it. We bought a coffee from a food truck that had parked on the edge of the commons and some baked goods from some girls who had set up a table on the lawn. There was a woodworker, the local scout troupe, a few Department of Conservation staff, some locals selling second-hand goods, a knitter selling baby sweaters, a woman selling jam and goat cheese…And very few customers.

By the time the auction started, there might have been 50 visitors, most locals. A good proportion of the items up for auction were purchased by the auctioneer.

A couple of dozen people enjoyed the barbecue dinner.

When the band started playing at 7pm, there were maybe 30 people in attendance. But the music brought out a surprising number, and within half an hour, there was an audience of 125.

Most of that 125 knew one another. They were local farmers, residents, bach owners, regular visitors, and young people working the local tourism industry. Everyone knew each others’ dogs by name, and the dogs chased each other around the crowd like young cousins at the annual Labour Day get-together. It was a lovely atmosphere—more like a family reunion than a public event.

I don’t know whether the Community Association had hoped for a larger crowd, or if it exceeded their expectations. I don’t know if they made back the cost of the marquis rental. But I do know that those who were there smiled, laughed, and enjoyed the day.