Just as in Australia we mainly focused on birds, but the whole landscape and vegetation is very special, with many unique trees and plants, including ferns and tree ferns.

Many of the trees have beautiful and extraordinary flowers.

Some trees have a juvenile stage which doesn’t look much like the adult tree.

Juvenile lancewood; small tree with mature leaves; mature leaves appearing on juvenile

The NZ flax was in flower, attracting birds such as Tui.

Many flowers were in blossom.

Green hood orchid; the yellow lupins were introduced

There were butterflies and bees everywhere. We mainly saw cabbage white and monarchs, as well as monarch caterpillars.

The only native mammals we saw were fur seals, sunbathing on the rocks or swimming

Some birds were happy to hang around to have their photos taken, especially if they sensed there might be picnic crumbs dropped. Others were very shy, so this selection by no means covers all we saw, which included Kiwi, Saddleback, Whitehead, Silvereye, Grey warbler, Bellbird, Kaka, Brown quail, Brown teal and NZ dotterel, to mention only the NZ specials.