This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Wow, so that was a pretty fucking great school trip. We went up the coast about four hours to Kaikoura, which is a tourist hub for marine wildlife viewing/eating/etc because of a hugeass sea trench that comes rather close to New Zealand's coast. Tours to go and see whales and dolphins are a pretty big drawcard, but seeing as I was on a behavioural ecology trip I was studying seal behaviour.

The place itself is a pretty beautiful part of the country; the Pacific stretches out on one side, while steep, sizeable bush-covered slopes would've met them at the beach before a road and railway line were presumably dynamited out. The road itself hugs the coastline, goes through a few tunnels, and has periodic signs warning you that seals can shelter on the road during rough weather.

I was parked about thirty more minutes up the coast from Kaikoura township, at a reasonably large fur seal colony for seven-ish hours on Saturday. The weather was close to perfect, and it was breeding season so the coast was covered in pups. Popular consensus as to their appearance ranged from "fat otters" to "moles with flippers on" to "gangsters in sleeping bags". Some of the bigger male seal-dudes looked rather like bears, mostly because of the colour, size, little ears, and the stunning resemblance to a rock. The pups were reasonably agile on land (unlike "true seals", fur seals can flip their tailfins around so they're easier to walk on, like a sea lion does).

One fat bastard who was sleeping right beneath the observation point sat up maybe three times the entire day to have a scratch. He did not otherwise budge from his spot.

The best bit was Ohau Stream, a small river which opens up to the sea a short way up the coast from the Ohau Point colony. I'd heard that seal pups swim up the river and play at the foot of a waterfall upstream, but the one time I'd had a look a few years back I didn't have any luck. It must've been bad timing, because this time there were a dozen or pups splashing about in a pool at the very start of the track, with more further upstream. They don't appear to be doing this for survival reasons, either - they don't have any natural predators on their coastal colonies, and they still haven't been weaned at this time of year. Once pups have grown a bit, mother seals will head back out to see for longer periods of time, letting the pups wander the coast unattended. With no obvious parental prompting, they'll wander up this forested valley just for the hell of it.

I was chilling at aforementioned embankment for a while, slapping sandflies while watching the seals play with a yellow leaf I'd dropped upriver. They might've been about the right size to stuff in a sleeping bag case, maybe a bit smaller than that. One of them slid up onto the bank, waddled up to me, and had a good sniff of my shoe. Not a single fuck was given by any of them to the humans who watched them, and this one probably only stopped its frolicking about due to curiosity. Either that, or my shoe smelt good. I dunno.

I even managed to get some work done, have a significantly less-begrudging attitude toward New Zealand mammals, and now have another report to write up in addition to the three other things I've got due soon. I also had a good late night romp on the finest school playground to ever escape OSH censure, so all in all a pretty great way to spend a weekend.