Motuihe Tree Planting

It’s a great feeling to meet deadlines you set for yourself.  I wanted to have my thesis proposal ready to turn in before driving down to the South Island this coming Friday on mid-term leave.  Well, it is now Monday night and I have a draft of the proposal entitled Non-Specific GIS-Based Mass Evacuation Planning for the Auckland Volcanic Field ready to run into my adviser Mark Gahegan.  It took me a lot of work last week meeting with hazard managers at the regional council, going to a course on the Essentials of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, reading background documents, and finally writing my proposal, but I now have my proposal at a stage I am comfortable with and looking forward to some constructive feedback from Mark.

Mexican Monday week II was a success with chili con carne at Marcel’s apartment.  We also took a look at (and poked a bit of fun at) Soren’s new car, which he and I will drive down to the South Island on Friday—arriving on Saturday for Uni Snow Games.  I’m so stoked because they have a cross-country competition as well.  After over a month of waiting, I finally received my household goods shipment from Alaska as well, which contained my ski boots, so at least I know have the bare essentials required to compete in the snow games.  I’m very excited about going down to the South Island as you might have sensed.

This past weekend was absolutely beautiful weather.  I spent Saturday checking out the Auckland Art Gallery, which had been moved to a different venue due to remodeling.  Though the exhibits were nice, it has nothing on the Auckland War Memorial Museum (see picture above), which is multiple times larger and contrary to the name, has a wide variety of exhibits ranging from natural history to ethnography.  Saturday afternoon I convinced my friend Marcel to give me a haircut and enjoyed the rest of the evening reading and dreaming about great tramps to do in the future.

Sunday morning I rose bright and early and headed out to Motuihe Island on a ferry full of Rotarians and Boy Scouts to work on a tree planting community service project.  Montuihe Island is located in Waitemate Harbour just a short 30 minute boat ride from Auckland.  Here, the Department of Conservation (DOC) has been working on a massive project to return the island to native forest by removing the introduced trees and replacing them with native growth.  I thought this sounded like a fantastic project and was very keen to help out.  Doing my part, I spent the day digging shallow holes, placing a fertilizer tablet in below each sapling, and tightly re-compacting the soil so that the kakariki birds would not dig the saplings back up.  As a result of the project I have a newfound respect for gardeners which it turns out requires much more work than I had previously realized.  Our efforts well rewarded with sausages however, so I was quite happy.  I also learned that kiwi birds had just been reintroduced to the island, which I hope to one day be able to see.  Perhaps next time I come back to the island it will be a flourishing native growth forest with a thriving kiwi population.  That would make me very happy indeed.