Tag: wonder

Last dance

nikkirwrightLeave a comment

She is tattered, at the end of her short life. Her body shakes and shivers. I tiptoe closer but she’s too preoccupied to bother with me. Slowly she clasps a bunch of leaves with thin black legs and draws her abdomen up into a sickle shape, with the tip pressing under a leaf depositing a tiny pale-yellow egg. She repeats this process several times resting in between, vibrating. It’s a big effort and I marvel at her energy and determination. At her peak she may have been laying between 300-400 eggs at a rate of 40 eggs a day! Now on her last legs she is perhaps the last of the female monarchs that will visit our swan plant/milkweed. There is a slim chance her offspring might slowly pupate through winter and emerge as new adults in spring. And there are other reminders that this is a time, a season, of dying and release.

Continue reading “Last dance” →

Monarch dance

nikkirwrightLeave a comment

Earlier this year I watched as one of the first monarch butterflies circled the milkweed/swan plant below our deck. This time I grabbed a pencil and traced her flow on paper, intrigued at her mysterious path of many careful circuits. The drawing ends up a puzzling maze, as if meant to confuse. My notes read she spends minutes circling and making approaches to the plant, swooping past pumpkins, the mustard seed, the raspberries, the snowball tree, diverting attention? Perhaps checking it’s safe, scenting? It’s a dizzying energetic dance, never still. I trace the lines over and over trying to follow the complicated passage.

Continue reading “Monarch dance” →

Night of the Bag Moth

nikkirwright6 Comments
Bag Moth

It’s Aotearoa Moth Week! Science communicator, Morgane Merien says moths or pūrerehua are incredibly important. We have over 1800 species of moths in New Zealand, with around 90% of them being unique to here. They get a “bad rap” but are wonderful pollinators – second only to bees, an important food source for birds, and indicators of healthy environments (like a canary in a coal mine). Yet, relatively little is known about them and whether they too are declining like many insects.

Continue reading “Night of the Bag Moth” →

Queens and Storms

nikkirwright2 Comments

The weather has turned. A low-pressure bomb travelled up from Antarctica and into the Tasman Sea, lashing thunder, rain, hail and tornadoes onto our coast.

Walking down to Pauatahanui Inlet, my nose and eyes stream in the wind, tips of fingers icy. I notice a white-faced heron, hunched in ruffled grey coat, observing the brown waters that race into the inlet from Whitby’s streams and drains-turned-torrents, flipping storm water lids. Seagulls turn steeply, their undersides flashing white under pink clouds. The sound of traffic as evening commuters head home to warmth, children and dinners. A driver yawns. Back up at Postgate Park a huge gum tree has crashed down, perhaps overnight. Its remains lie in butchered lumps and splinters, after someone has been in with a chainsaw. Old yellow toadstools lie in the grass nearby, rotting like sloughed skin. On the news I hear that hundreds of kororā/little blue penguins have washed ashore up North at Ninety Mile Beach. A DOC spokesperson believes they are starving to death as climate change is creating waters too hot for the fish they feed on.

Continue reading “Queens and Storms” →