This one goes out to all the critters and creepy crawlies we’ve encountered so far in New Zealand! Thankfully NZ doesn’t have any major predators (and ZERO snakes!), so nothing we’ve encountered has been too frightening. No crocs, scorpions, tarantulas around, unless you happen to accidentally cross the Tasman Sea 🙂
FARM ANIMALS
Yes, New Zealand is known for their sheep (over 4 for every person!). However, in our neck of the woods, dairy cows are far more common. We still see the occasional sheep, but since we live on a working dairy farm, cows are now a part of our daily life. We often have to wait for them to cross the road, and it’s fun when they’re rotated to the paddocks next to our house so we can see them up close. Foster absolutely loves them!
Coming from the USA, where factory farms are common, it’s so refreshing to see these happy cows move to a new, green pasture every day. Because they’re rotated so frequently, we haven’t noticed any bad smells, even through we’re surrounded by the farm. It’s astonishing how fast a herd can mow down a paddock of grass in one day!
Once we even had a cow end up at the end of our driveway…she must have gotten over the cow crossing ropes somehow and wandered down the road trying to figure out how to get back in with her herd. She stayed right next to them but was very confused to be on the wrong side of the fence, and she sure looked worried when we started coming down the driveway! To be fair, we were pretty surprised too. 🙂
We also now have a tiny flock of chickens! What started out as two quickly turned into four…chicken math 🙂
We have two darker Hylines named Sprinkles and Muffin, and two lighter Orpingtons named Peach and Rosie (Halston’s been on a Mario kick 😉 They are all young and won’t be laying for a few more months, but we’re excited that our dream of having chickens has finally come true. They spend their days free ranging around the yard for bugs and peeking in the house to see what we’re doing. Ayden built a fabulous coop for them and eventually will add a larger run on it so they have lots of space if we need to be gone and can’t let them out.
BIRDS
I wish I could say that we’ve seen a kiwi, but since they’re nocturnal, we’re not likely to see one unless we happen to get lucky while hiking (called tramping in New Zealand). We HAVE, however, gotten to hear the kiwi singing at night, since we live right next to the bush of the National Forest. It’s a little bit magical, standing outside in the pitch black, milky way overhead, and realizing that there are dozens of kiwi just down in the valley that we get to look at every day.
We do get to see plenty of other birds though; some native to NZ, some transplants like us 🙂
Below, left to right:
Ring-Necked Pheasant. You know how growing up in the Midwest, we used to see these all the time on the side of the road and now we almost never do? It’s because they’re all in New Zealand. Seriously, they’re all over the farmland here. They were brought over by English colonizers in the 1800s.
Sacred Kingfisher. This poor guy flew right into our living room window, which is how I got such a close shot. He was fine, just needed some quiet time for his head to stop spinning! He let us marvel over him and get a good look at his iridescent feathers, then flew off. Kingfishers are native to NZ, and usually are a brighter blue-green color (I think this one’s color isn’t as bright because it was young, plus I was taking pictures against the sun).
Pūkeko. Also known as our beloved swamp hen. This picture was from our very first day in Auckland, but we often will see a whole family of them on the side of the road. They aren’t awesome fliers and are a little awkward, but people love them anyways. They are considered native to NZ, and likely flew over from Australia around 1000 years ago.
Fantail. This cutie found its way into school and couldn’t find the door out. He eventually made it out after a lot of fuss from those of us around after school! Just today I had another fantail find its way into my classroom (can you tell we leave the doors wide open around here? :). He was chasing a fly around my room, then jumped around on tables and chairs like he was checking the place out. I had opened the doors up wide at this point, so I’m sure he could have left if he’d wanted to. Eventually he got bored and flew out, but not before leaving one of my students a present on their table…don’t worry, I cleaned it up 😛 Fantails are endemic to NZ, meaning they aren’t found anywhere else in the world.
Australian Magpie. If you watch Bluey, this is the dive-bombing bird in Curry Quest. They were introduced from Australia in the 1800s to help control insects and are now very common. They’re kind of like what I would consider a crow back home…just kind of around. The contrast between their black and white feathers make them hard to miss!
Variable Oystercatcher. We finally made it to the beach this past weekend (it only took us two months!) and our friends who came with us pointed out some of the sea birds. These guys are endemic to New Zealand and predictably spend their time on the shore looking for shellfish. It’s estimated that there are only 6,000-7,000 individuals in NZ (for contrast, there are 68,000 estimated kiwi birds).
Honorable mentions. We see lots of other birds, but haven’t gotten pictures of everything…birds are fast. We see a lot of Swamp Harriers around our area, which is a bird of prey similar in size to a hawk. They often are seen making quick work of the roadkill from the day before! We also see lots of sparrows, starlings, and finches; normal-for-us birds that originated in our shared colonizers’ homeland 😉 Ayden has even seen some kind of bright green parakeet or parrot a few times! I’m sure we’ll see many more types of birds over time…we live in New Zealand after all!
Also, in case you didn’t know, New Zealand was the home to a giant, flightless bird, the moa. Look these things up, they were MASSIVE. Like 12 feet tall. As I understand it, when the Māori first arrived to NZ around 1300 AD, they went a little crazy hunting the moa and wiped them all out by the end of the 1600s. On one hand, I wish they weren’t extinct because it would be SO cool to see a moa in person. On the other hand…maybe I’m a little thankful they’re not about to run through my yard 🥴
MAMMALS
Let’s be real, this is just about the possums.
New Zealand doesn’t have any native mammals except for a few species of bats, so anything else has been brought in. And you’ll recognize, I’m sure, that without any natural predators, NZ is an absolute dream if you are a possum.
Brought over from Australia in the 1800s to establish a fur trade, these cute little furballs are EVERYWHERE. I’m not even joking. We see 4-6 in our yard every night. They get into the compost. They try to eat the chicken feed. Once our hens start laying, they’ll try to eat the eggs. They eat the eggs of native, endangered birds. They eat and kill native plants. They also can carry bovine (cow) tuberculosis, which is bad news if you’re a dairy farmer (see above; we are surrounded by cows). These things are public enemy #1 in New Zealand.
I saw a meme that had the same picture of a possum, side-by-side, but one side was in Australia, where it is considered cute and lovable. The other side was in New Zealand, where everyone wants them dead 💀 And it’s true; we were told to speed up when we see one on the road (we haven’t brought ourselves to take one out yet, though!) We currently have one possum who is using our garage as an Airbnb, and there’s not much we can do about it until it decides to check out the trap that our landlord set for it.
We always see several possums on our rural road after dark, and the other day Ayden and I made a bet of how many we’d see on the 10 minute drive to our house. He said 3, I said 4. We saw TWELVE.
And let’s be clear; these guys are not bright. Clearly, from the close pictures I’ve been able to get, they don’t just run away when you see them. Unless you’re a few feet away from them and creating a ruckus, they don’t really care that you’ve spotted them. They give off big idgaf energy. Honeybadger don’t care. Even when they’re sitting in the road and see headlights careening towards them, do they run? Not until you’re slamming on the brakes 🙄I swear, if we had a car we cared about a little less, we probably could have taken out ten or so by now.
This all sounds very heartless, but I really do think they are very adorable. However, I do like all the native plants and birds, and New Zealand has a goal to be possum free by 2050…so 🤷♀️
Other mammals to mention include mice and rats. They can go right back to the sewer where they came from. Nope.
It’s getting colder here (southern hemisphere and all), and the mice are working hard to get inside. We now have some traps set, but there were a few excited mornings where we had to figure out how to get a live mouse out of the kitchen before the kids woke up. We’d dealt with mice in the garage plenty back home, but having them in the house is a big no for me 😭 Thankfully they seem to be isolated to the kitchen, and I think are only getting in somewhere by our water heater, which is closed off (and now fully sealed after we figured out they were coming in). Living in an old farmhouse isn’t all glitz and glam, but the traps are helping a lot, thankfully. Shoutout to Ayden for being a trooper and always taking care of getting the traps reset and digging a hole for when a poor little guy bites the dust.
Okay, but have you ever seen a rat? I hadn’t, not really. They’re big 😭
Something chewed a hole in the side of our compost bin, so for a while the rats were just getting a smorgasbord of food thrown out to them daily. Ugh. After we happened upon one inside and experienced the horror of seeing a 6-8 inch long rat come out of the hole in the side, we (Ayden) learned to approach the compost bin loudly and confidently to scare them out before throwing any food in on top of one 😅 We put a few bricks in front of the hole in the side, so hopefully that’s a deterant for now (the possums had also figured out that the compost was a great meal). Ayden also got a rotating composter, so hopefully having it elevated will help some too. THANK GOD the rats are not making an attempt to come inside or we would be moving. Though, I have to turn my brain off a little bit, because under the house is all open, and lord knows that the possums and rats probably all hang out under there. YUCK.
Also, I’ve learned to keep my guard up at school, because the mice and rats do find their way inside there. Exhibit A: dead mouse in my classroom today. I guess it’s better than a live one??
INSECTS
This is getting long so I won’t ramble too long about the bugs, but we have come across a few of note! Most famous is the wētā, which is pictured below on the blue background. They’re endemic to New Zealand, and some can get as huge as your hand! This one was only 2 or 3 inches long, which was a good size for our first one 🙂
Also I just have to brag about this preying mantis; he was caught in a spider web in our greenhouse, and I pulled him out and carefully pulled all the webs off of him until he was back on his feet. I love this picture of him looking back at me; maybe he was saying “thank you.”
Otherwise we have lots of normal bug like bees, flies, and spiders. There are only two types of venomous spiders in NZ (for comparison, the US has three), and it seems pretty unlikely to see them. The spiders we see daily are either daddy long legs, wolf spiders, jumping spiders, or sometime these gnarly looking scorpion spiders (still completely harmless, even though they don’t look it!) Sand flies BITE and leave nasty sores on your legs. Flies are abundant, but that makes sense considering our close proximity to a herd of cows. No mosquitos so far, but Google says they’re out there, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky to have a break from mosquito hell.
Shoutout to this huge beetle that was unfortunately spotted in our house and then became a tasty snack for a chicken.
FLOWERS
Okay, okay, these aren’t critters or creepy-crawlies, but we have a ton of pretty things happening in our yard right now that I need to show off. Someday I’ll do a full feature about the native plants we’ve learned about, but for now, enjoy the current blooms on our little homestead ❤️
That’s it for now! We’re settling in well and complaining about the possums, like true locals.
Until next time,
-Erin