Tag Archives: Sustainability

Kiwi bono?

4 Replies

Tuesday 17 February 2026 – Apart from the Haka and Brendan McCullum, what New Zealand is best known for is the Kiwi, in all the various connotations of that word – an adjective to describe its inhabitants or its Rugby League team, a brand name for shoe polish (actually developed by an Aussie, but his wife was a New Zealander), a fruit… or the species of the country’s, possibly the world’s, oddest bird. Today we went to the National Kiwi Hatchery to learn more.

I had actually seen Kiwis before, on my last trip to New Zealand, in 1988. I was culturally backward in 1988, but even in those days I knew that Kiwis came from New Zealand, and somehow or other (there was no Google in those days) I found a place then where one could view the birds, in captivity of course, as they’re very difficult to see in the wild, being (a) shy and (b) nocturnal. The place operated 12 hours out of sync with actual time, so that daytime visitors entered a darkened environment in order to see the birds active. I have a clear memory of seeing at least one Kiwi, and possibly even photographing it, but that was nearly forty years ago, my memory has a habit of inventing things and I have no way of finding out if this is true until I get home and can look at the photos from that time. If I can remember where I put them.

So…today, then.

Jane had cleverly averted a major sulk on my part by ensuring I knew in advance that any sort of photography of the birds was not permitted. Kiwis are easily upset by unexpected light and noise, and I (grumpily) accepted that the centre had to be careful because most people (a) use phones, which emit a lot of light and (b) almost certainly have no idea about whether its flash will fire or not, therefore can’t be trusted. Armed with that foreknowledge, off we went.

The first challenge was finding the place. We had an address, but that turned out to be some kind of Māori-themed tourist trap. In the end, Google Maps gave us the place to find, the intriguingly-named Agrodome, which is not a Mad Max style cage fight but is actually a place themed around a family day out on the farm.

The Aardman theme continues once one gets there.

It’s actually quite the operation, running farm tours around what is quite a large area.

They have a variety of livestock, including sheep, goats and cattle. Sheep are their main focus; the gift shop and cafe is housed in the Woollen Mill, where they have an old carding machine

alongside the sales of Pure New Zealand wool in the shop.

They have a pig,

a Kunekune pig (“Kunekune” means “fat and round” in Māori). They also have an ostrich

which has many similarities to a Kiwi – flightless, grumpy and with very strong legs.

This similarity was pointed out on the guided tour that the National Hatchery operates. One is picked up at the Agrodome and taken by minibus to the hatchery centre.

The lass who drove our van was also our guide for our trip

and she did a very good job of explaining about the bird, its environment, its challenges and the role of the hatchery. She also emphasised that photography of the birds would not be permitted before leading us through to where they keep a few (currently three) kiwis in the same inverted time that I saw thirty eight years ago, switching day and night.  As it turns out, it was so dark in there that any sensible photography was simply not feasible anyway, so I didn’t miss out on a photo opportunity.

So: the Kiwi, then. It’s a weird, weird creature.

  • Its feathers are more like hair
  • It has whiskers like a cat
  • In many ways it’s more like a mammal. It has two ovaries; a low body temperature of about 38°C; and marrow in its bones (flighted birds’ bones are honeycombed and hollow to save weight)
  • It is very heavy, which is not a problem because it is flightless. Our guide passed around a couple of fluffy model Kiwis made to weigh the same as a chick and an adult and it was a real surprise: the adult female weighs around 3kg

It is thought to be the world’s most ancient bird, having evolved some 30 million years ago. It developed, of course, with no mammalian predators at all (only avian ones, like hawks or crows), so introduced animals such as ferrets and stoats have wrought much damage to the Kiwi population, and predate Kiwi chicks (though an adult will give a stoat a good kicking, apparently). Even hedgehogs are their enemies, since a hedgehog is not above making a nice proteinaceous meal out of a Kiwi egg.

Ah, yes. The eggs. They are enormous, compared with the bird in which they develop.

Somehow or other, a female Kiwi can develop an egg like that in about a week. An X-ray gives an extraordinary picture.

One wonders how uncomfortable it is for the poor bird to deliver it, but somehow she does, and she delivers it into the care of the male (with whom she is likely bonded monogamously). Then, because she hasn’t had anything to eat for a week because of the size of the egg, she goes off to find food, developing the while a second egg (from her other ovary), which she then also delivers into the male’s care. That is then her job done; she has no further interest in eggs or chicks at all.  The bloke Kiwi has to incubate these eggs for 80 days before they hatch. When they do, the chicks are basically fully-formed Kiwis who need no teaching about how to feed themselves, which is just as well, since the male makes no effort to teach them anything.

There are actually five types of Kiwi; the North Island has mainly Brown Kiwis, about 25,000 of them. The other types are: Rowi Kiwi, about the same size as a Brown Kiwi, but a greyer colour, and critically endangered with around 500 birds at the moment; Great Spotted Kiwi, the largest and toughest, spotted only on the South Island; Little Spotted Kiwi, which is, erm, small, and exists almost entirely in remote island colonies; and Tokoeka Kiwi, the Southern Brown Kiwi, which we might get to see later on this trip as it is not entirely nocturnal.

Unsurprisingly there were some stuffed kiwis for us to look at.  A male

The red tag is to allow tracking. If it’s not moving, it’s incubating an egg, which can be brought to the hatchery

and a female

To be absolutely certain in distinguishing one sex from the other it is necessary to analyse their DNA, but typically males are smaller and skinnier, and females larger and rounder. One can see their whiskers

and (if one looks very carefully) their nostrils, which are at the end of their bills, making them officially the birds with the shortest beaks in the world. It is possible to make a coat out of their feathers

and this would be for extremely high-ranking Māori. It takes a lot of birds to make a coat like that, and, these days, the species is under threat.  The National Hatchery exists to try to increase the chances of survival of Kiwi eggs. There are about 68,000 Kiwi left in all of New Zealand and the nation is losing 2% of its unmanaged Kiwi every year. The Brown Kiwi population is steadily declining by about 1-2% a year. Without ongoing support, experts estimate it will be extinct in the wild within two generations: only 50% of Kiwi eggs in the wild hatch; of those that do, only 5% of the resulting chicks survive to adulthood. The centre has overseen the successful hatching of nearly 3,000 eggs since it came into operation some 20 years ago.

The final part of our tour was to see the support the centre gives for hatching chicks. Eggs are located using a variety of tactics, such as tagging the males – if they’re stationary, they’re likely incubating – to locate eggs and bring them to the hatchery. They are carefully incubated, the chicks are microchipped, checked for health, measured and fed to bring them to the point where they are heavy and strong enough to withstand a stoat and so can be released back into the wild; they are then set free in the same region that the egg was found. This is not traumatic for either the male or the chick, since the former doesn’t care for the latter and the latter is pretty much ready for the wild and hasn’t imprinted at all on people during its time in the hatchery.  It’s a funny old business, but deeply interesting to learn about what they do and to find out how extraordinarily weird these creatures are.

That was our scheduled activity for the day. Rather than relaxing for the rest of it, Jane (of course) found Something Interesting To Do in the evening. That will be the subject of the next post. Heads-up – there will be a certain amount of photographic nerdery in it as well as some pretty pictures.

North! to Anjajavy (part 2) – Flight from Tana

Leave a Reply

Tuesday June 18 2024 – Our flight today was described in our itinerary as “early”, and the driver who deposited us at the Relais des Plateaux told us that we would be picked up at 0615, which meant something of a brisk start. The hotel’s official breakfast time start was 0600, so at 0555 we were knocking on the door on a mission to stuff ourselves quickly with as much pastry as would easily accompany a hasty cup of Twining’s Finest Earl Grey.

It all worked perfectly well, and we were picked up by the very chap who had welcomed us to Madagascar two and a half weeks ago, whose name rhymes with “hyena” and, for reasons I will explain in a later post, we now know is spelt Aine. If he were Irish, that would be pronounced “Onya”, but he isn’t, so ‘yena it is. He asked us how our drive down RN7 went and we were able to tell him how good it was; it turns out that he has acted as driver for that route before, and has worked with Kenny and Haja, so knew what the conditions were like.

The check-in process was pretty much exactly the same for flying to Anjajavy as it had been to get to Masoala, with people and bags alike being weighed. The difference was that there would be a greater number of passengers, and the consequence of that was the need for a larger aeroplane,

a Cessna 208 Caravan, as it happens. In all, there were seven passengers – us; a younger couple, Jenny and Sam; and three older folk who were carrying with them in several inconvenient polystyrene containers the packed breakfast that their hotel had provided them. We all climbed aboard and set off on the dot of 0700 for the 100-minute flight to Anjajavy.

As we left Antananarivo, I was once again struck by the staggering extent of the rice paddies near the city.

Beyond them, there was, as one might expect, a fair bit of agriculture going on.

As on our previous flight north, after climbing, clouds obscured the view for a while.  When they cleared, we were over quite mountainous terrain

but one could still see areas that had been cultivated;

even in what looked like the most rugged terrain, one could see areas that were being farmed.

After we’d been aloft for about an hour, the landscape changed into something less mountainous – quite possibly a central plateau – looking pretty rugged and untouched,

but even here, one could spot terraces and other evidence of farming.

This landscape changed again, into something that seemed less touched by human hand

though I wonder whether the scars in the land are evidence of the erosion that follows deforestation activity. It wasn’t then much longer until further landscape changes and we could once again see that the land was being farmed.

I couldn’t make out whether that fire was intentional burning of an area or an actual bush fire. Malagasy farming does involve some systematic burning, and so it could be either, and I wasn’t in a position to ask which it was.

Shortly thereafter, we could just make out the north-west coast

with some areas of forest, but continued evidence of agriculture pretty much wherever a river permitted it,

and, once again, extensive rice paddies.

Then we were down and at 0900 walked into Anjajavy’s self-proclaimed “International Airport”!

where we were greeted by Frederic, the manager of “Le Lodge”, our accommodation for the coming days.

He welcomed us to the peninsula and gave us a short introduction, specifically telling us about the 30-minute car journey that awaited us.

I was glad when Frederic joined us as we rode on the back of our vehicle, because it meant that he could give us some (in my case consciousness-expanding) background on Anjajavy.

Looking at the place on Google Maps, it’s clear that the place we would be staying, Le Lodge, is a resort, with a central building, villas and swimming pool and that kind of thing.

What I hadn’t realised was quite how remote the place is.  The nearest town is 100km away, and the journey there takes several hours, so, as manager of the Lodge, he has to make sure that it is self-sufficient; as he can’t whistle up a plumber or an engineer to fix problems, he has to make sure that he has all the skills, as well as provisions of all kinds, and equipment, onsite.  Le Lodge has 24 villas, but Frederic is the manager of over 180 people. Most of these, he told us, we would never see, because they were there to keep the place operational, not to serve us punters. That is because of something else I hadn’t realised, which is the scope of Le Lodge’s eco/diversity activities. Frederic is also the manager of the 2,500 acre (1,000 ha) Private Reserve  in which Le Lodge stands, and of the 24,000-acre Protected Area which surrounds the Reserve.  That’s where a large fraction of his workforce is employed – the biodiversity of the Protected Area is something that Le Lodge is committed to protect and preserve.

This commitment leads Le Lodge to be the host for several scientific research and conservation projects. One involves re-introducing the Giant Tortoises that went extinct here several hundred years ago because of human activity: they provided a convenient and self-preserving source of fresh meat for sailors! Luckily some escaped and survived on the Seychelles, from where they have been restocked. A second involves re-introducing the Aye-Aye, the local population having been basically killed off by superstitious local people who regard them as ill-omens. This therefore requires a considerable effort in re-education, as well as the provision of two of the actual animals thus far, with more to follow over the next two years.

Frederic is committed to working with the local villages, and 80% of his staff come from the area. He was eloquent about the benefit to him and to them of working together. He has a considerable education project on his hands, since, to start with, some of the people didn’t even speak conventional Malagasy (using rather their own rather different and specific dialect), let alone French or English, and also had strong superstitions (eg concerning the Aye-Aye) which had to be sensitively handled as part of the education process.

If he hadn’t told us about this on the journey over, I don’t think we would have suspected that there was so much extra to the place. We would just have seen a marvellous central lodge

with very swish villas,

lovely gardens,

a beautiful beach

and an infinity pool.

It’s a superb place, but then again it’s Relais et Chateaux, same as gaffs such as Cliveden in the UK, so one would jolly bien pense donc. Le Lodge itself was built in around 2000 (from the wood of the Palisander tree, so its development, ironically, wouldn’t be permitted today) and is an absolutely wonderful environment – beautifully comfortable villas, an excellent restaurant and many resort-type activities to be contemplated and possibly undertaken – nature expeditions, sailing, snorkelling, kayaking, etc etc.

So: j’y suis, j’y reste, and Jane likewise.  Starting tomorrow, we have three full days to explore the place, the activities and, of course, the bar. Stay in touch with these pages and I’ll keep you updated with our progress.

 

 

Day 17 – Aquiares – Fully Washed or Natural?

4 Replies

Tuesday 7 March 2023 – The day held a fully-guided, whole-day programme for us, to learn about the place we were staying – Aquiares; not a Spanish word at all, but from the pre-Columbian native language meaning “the land between rivers”.

The Hacienda set us up with a nice breakfast, with fried eggs and the ubiquitous Gallo Pinto, accompanied by coffee, served in a delightful filter pot.

This was a startling deviation from our usual breakfast fare which is tea, preferably Earl Grey, preferably with milk, because we’re English, so deal with it.  Coffee was provided and we never actually felt that asking for tea would be a good idea.  Jane, whose nose makes much more of scents that mine does, noticed a strong overtone of farmyard in the aroma of the coffee, which was also served without milk.  It was good coffee, but very different from what we would have had mid-morning at home.

And it is coffee that Aquiares is all about as a town, the Hacienda where we were staying is a refurbishment of the farmhouse for the coffee farm, and the day was to be about exploring coffee and Aqiares in more detail. Our guide Wilman, was, as far as locals were concerned, a stranger, since he hailed from Turrialba, a whole 5 miles distant. He gave us a full and intense day, as absorbing, entertaining and educational as our cacao session had been the day before, only much longer, deeper and more intense.

As we left the Hacienda, he bade us note the Ox Cart by its door, specifically its dimensions. Remember this for later.

Then we were taken deep into the coffee plantation.  This was possible because it’s huge – 926 hectares, the largest in Costa Rica and so big that it has 82 kilometres of trails in and around it. Our transport was not luxurious, but it was authentic, being one of the trucks used to transport the workers to the coal face.

Wilman disembarks from our “Tour Bus” into the coffee plantation

Since we were among the coffee plants,

Wilman then showed us how to pick coffee.  The things you pick are called “cherries” and the idea is that you pick the red ones.

Here’s what Jane and I ended up with after some 20 minutes of picking coffee.

It’s a back -breaking process, and the coffee plantation employs between 800 and 1,000 pickers (about half of whom are itinerants from Nicaragua) to pick the crop over about seven months of the year (July until February, roughly).

After we’d done this, he led us to a picking gang, whose chief was called Antonio

and a picker called Gerard but nicknamed Piggi, who showed us how it was really done.

Experienced pickers like Piggi would collect over thirty baskets every day. Antonio boasted that he once picked 80 baskets in a day (he started as a picker and worked his way up to be a chief, taking responsibility for a team of people picking in a certain area, marshalling them and making sure that the job is done effectively). The working day for a picker starts at 6am and finishes at midday, a siren at the factory sounding loudly (its a massive farm) to mark the beginning and end points.

Wilman also explained the anatomy of a cherry.  Inside the skin are two beans, which are covered in pulp, called mucillage (similar in principle to what we saw with cacao yesterday).

The mucillage is sweet and floral and the skin is fruity; these give the final product its distinctive taste.  This got us into the topic of varieties.  Although all the coffee plants at Aquiares are of the Arabica type, there are varieties within Arabica, each with their own characteristics and quality levels.  The finest quality beans are planted high on the hillside, the lower quality ones lower down.  So there is a tight control system to make sure that the right plants are seeded in the right place.  That said, we found a rogue bush.

This had found its way in through natural processes, and the beans would never get picked for the quality of coffee that was to be produced from that area.

Although the sun wasn’t beating down, the scenery was attractive.

 

The trees with orange flowers you can see are Poro trees and are important, as they are of the legume family, which means they enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen in it.  We could also see Aquiares town, with its coffee factory and church.

We then embarked on a walk, during which we could see the amazing extent of the plantation and the orderliness of the planting.

Wilman also told us about some of the farming methods used to maximise the crop while making the operation sustainable – cutting them back every so often to 60cm high, to increase bushiness;

planting new crops to replace older ones after about 25 years;

Young coffee plants
Mature coffee plants to same scale

and sometimes planting two close together so they compete to grow more cherries.

On the way, this being Costa Rica, we saw plenty of birds – vultures

and a Black Hawk

as well as many birds too small for me to photograph (I left my Big Lens behind for the day).

We descended further and further, past rainbow eucalyptus trees

which are not endemic but have been planted because they take moisture out of the soil and thus mitigate any rotting of the coffee plants, and also provide essential oils for creating other, non-coffee products.

Down and down we went

until we emerged at one of the rivers that give Aquiares its name.

There’s a waterfall there that even an Icelander might consider to be worthy of the name.

There are a lot of boulders and stones in the area

and Wilman told us that the previous July there had been so much rain – twice as much as the average rainfall for the whole month fell in one day – that the river actually changed course.  It used to run behind the diagonal line of bushes you see beyond the boulders in the middle of the picture.  All of the rocks had been moved there by the sheer volume and weight of water during that rainfall.  That must have been an impressive sight!

We toiled back up the slope to the Hacienda for a nice lunch – chicken, rice and beans! – and then Wilman took us on to part 2 of the day – a visit to the coffee factory and the village of Aquiares.

Aquiares was founded in the 1890s by farmers looking to take advantage of Costa Rica´s railroad to the port of Limón.  An English family, the Lindos, acquired it in the early 1900s and built houses in the village and around the plantation, to house the workers and to attract more into the area.  There are still some of the original houses there

as well as buildings that were the original theatre and supermarket.

Originally the theatre
The old supermarket

In order to qualify as a village, and also to support the incoming workers, who were largely Catholic, the Lindo family also imported a church.

The aluminium shell came from Belgium, the clock from Germany, the wood for the interior from Italy. There was some repair work going on – indeed, the church seemed to be supported by prayer alone –

and therefore it was open and we were able to take a look inside.

But the main thrust of the afternoon was to see round the factory, which turned out to be quite a brain-boggling visit, both from its scale and the variety of coffees it deals with.

It’s a big place

overlooked by the “Tree of Life”

from which the coffee farm takes its logo.

Coffee, Community and Conservation are three important things to the farm – conservation because 75% of the plantation is given over to coffee plants, but the other 25% is forest and trees which are not only the basis for the company’s conservation efforts but also make the entire operation carbon negative – it produces more oxygen than CO2.  The farm is also part of the Rainforest Aliance.

Wilman took us through the process of taking the picked cherries and turning them into beans to be shipped all over the world, both with a view of the original processes and also of the modern ones, which involve all sorts of conduits, feeds and sophisticated machinery for sorting the beans by quality and size.

The vast majority – 85% – of the cherries go through a process called “fully washed”, where beans are deposited into silos

(note that the green hopper is exactly the same size as the ox cart outside the Hacienda, which was originally used to transport the cherries or beans).

From here the cherries are flushed along with water, and are sorted as part of the washing process – poor quality cherries sink, good quality cherries go on to have the pulp and mucilage mechanically removed before ending up in a huge drier

and then are stored in silos as part of the maturation process.

Then the beans are sorted in various ways (by density, weight, size and colour)

and end up in sacks – white for lower quality, brown for higher quality.

You’ve been paying attention, so you’ll know that there are still 15% of the beans unaccounted for.  Well done. I have to say that by this stage in the day my brain was definitely begging for mercy as Wilman threw more and more complexities into the mix.

The 15% that are not “fully washed” may go through one of several small batch processes: “natural” where whole cherries are laid out and dried by the heat of the sun

Today’s cherries in the foreground, older ones behind it

Fermented cherries in the foregound

(in case of no sun – like today; it was raining outside – there’s a hot air blower, driven by a furnace fired by excavated old coffee plants,

as part of the sustainability aspects of the operation).  Retaining the pulp gives fruity notes to the finished product.

The “honey” process involves drying the beans with their mucilage covering which gives honeyed and floral notes.

The beans may be fermented, either in their own mucilage or added molasses or even kefir, and the various different varieties are treated in a variety of different ways. The number of combinations is bewildering but there are basically four coffee varieties and three treatments that form most of the company’s output. More details about the operation, the history and the credentials can be found on the company’s website, of course. My brain was begging for mercy by this point; having tried to understand the complexities of cacao yesterday, absorbing those of fine coffee today was proving a bit too much.

But the general lesson is clear – chocolate and coffee are as subtle, varied and complex as wine. The coffee we had at breakfast at the Hacienda was a Centroamericano  variety, made by the Natural process.  It will be interesting to get back home and try our usual coffee to see if all this education has had any effect at all.

So, foot- and brainsore, we headed back to the Hacienda, past a view of the factory and its coffee drying greenhouses

and some of the colourful houses in the village,

including one which I have to say I would find exceedingly annoying were I to live here.

However, I don’t, so it’s none of my bleedin’ business.

We took a light supper at the Hacienda and eventually headed for bed in slightly eerie circumstances – the Hacienda staff had gone home and we were the only guests.  We had the whole place to ourselves and it felt really quite odd.  This was also the second day without either gin or Earl Grey tea, which contributed further to the other-worldliness of the experience.  But we surived, and slept well in preparation for moving on the next day.

The morrow should be pretty dull.  We simply have to move on to our next destination, San Gerardo de Dota. What can possibly go wrong?