Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

Can you post more pics of animals. I like the bird you posted

Uhhhhh so my phone of the time did not have an especially good camera, but here's footage of a bird called a Weka:

psyche. I'm actually chucking the link here because I'm p sure discord links rot, so go check it out in hawk-hq.

Weka are flightless dickheads occasionally referred to as "bush chickens" (derogatory). They're a member of the rail family, which includes crakes, coots, moorhens, swamphens, and also that big chunky boy I posted earlier in the thread (the takahe). There are four subspecies of weka; the western weka is the most widespread, has the largest population and is my local guy.

Like the takahe, weka are endemic to New Zealand and on the mainland it is illegal to catch, kill, or disturb them unless you've got your official nature-touching license. Unlike the takahe, weka did not get completely fucked up by the arrival of humans to New Zealand, mainly because it's smaller, more of a generalist feeder and habitat-er, can pop out babies much faster if conditions are good, and it was already a prey species to falcons and harriers so it's got slightly better instincts when an animal with pointy bits is up in its business.

Where I lived, weka were populous enough and doing a good enough job living alongside humans in semi-urban areas that it was easy enough to forget they're a protected species. Like you can see in the video, they wander round carparks in tourist spots giving nary a shit. While I never heard a student talking about catching or bothering one (and a good number of kids at the school were from outdoorsy families or into hunting etc), jokes about how they'd probably eat one if the opportunity came up were common.

---

My property was a rental, and the property managers were up in Wellington and basically doing the bare minimum to keep it habitable, so the fence at the back of the property was lichen-encrusted and the planks rotting from the bottom up. After rain (which was common because of geography n shit), when the sun would beam out because one thing I loved about the place was the weather really didn't half-ass things, the palings would steam as all the water they'd soaked up would evaporate away. There were a couple holes along the bottom of the fence which at least one family of weka used to great effect, mostly because they were trying to get into my neighbor's place (where chickens were kept and a vegetable garden ripe for the ripping to tasty pieces was).

During lockdown, I got to see a lot of these guys coming and going because one of them had had a family. Two chicks, and like most rail species the chicks are basically grimy balls of fluff on stilts. (pic from new zealand birds online)



In one corner of the verdant, slightly boggy meadow which was my back yard 90% of the time (couldn't be fucked getting someone to mow it, and I liked listening to all the insect life in the evening) were two sheets of rusted corrugated iron, stabbed into the ground about a metre and a half apart and once held upright by long-disintegrated posts. Between the two sheets was a compost heap, though really it was more of a compost sprawl because the weka would stop by most days and upturn its upper layers, scattering semi-decomposed grass clippings (and brassicas I'd let moulder in my fridge until I yeeted them in the pile's direction) across the rest of the lawn. It got to the point where the grass in a two meter radius around the compost hillock was, two weeks after a mowing, twice as tall as the rest of the lawn due to Nutrients.

One of them also wandered into my kitchen one time, because despite what I said earlier about them being a prey species with nominal survival instincts they're also nosey as shit.