East Coast, West Coast, Native and Not

Shakespear Regional Park on the East Coast of North Island

Karekare Beach on the West Coast of North Island

Some friendly Quakers have loaned us their car while they are on a trip, so we have taken advantage of having wheels this past week and visited the the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean as they lap up against the east and west sides of North Island.

On Friday, Oct 13, we headed west to the Waitakere Range – a beautiful area of steep hills and gullies west of Auckland that has been left mostly “bush” (natural) since 1895.  We will definitely go back and hike some of the many trails there, but on Friday we wanted to see Karekare beach, famous for being the spot where “The Piano” was filmed in the early 1990s.

We drove up and down the winding roads and got to a small parking lot where we could hear, but not see, the Tasman Sea. We had to walk up a steep muddy path, closely pressed in on by yucca grasses, bushes, and trees, and then suddenly we were on top of a small cliff and the Tasman Sea and the black sand of Karekare beach was below us.  To give you some sense of perspective, in the picture below, the tiny dots on the beach at the left are hikers!

The panoramic view of the beach at the top of this post was taken a bit later in the day, when we found the other road that took us directly to the beach access. Looking out to sea, the beach is incredibly flat at low tide (when we were there). Waves were breaking fairly far offshore and pushing a thin run-up of water some 30 feet or more up the beach.  But when you turn around, it is clear where all the black sand has come from: the eroding walls of the high cliffs that encompass the beach. There are places where you can stand in front of the cliffs and hear the echo of the roaring surf behind you as well as the real thing in front of you. Leaves you wondering exactly where the edge of the ocean is!

On Tuesday, Oct. 17, we continued our coastline explorations by driving north of Auckland to Shakespear Regional Park (named after an early settler family, not after the playwright!). The park is on the very tip of Whangaparaoa peninsula, which juts east out into the Hauraki Gulf, which opens up to the Pacific.

Shakespear Regional Park was a marvelous place of contrasts. In 2011, park rangers fenced off the end of the peninsula to make a predator-free reserve. By keeping out introduced mammalian predators such as dogs, rats, opossums, etc., they are gradually returning native bird and plant species to the area. But at the same time, the area is a working farm, with cattle and sheep in the pastures (or “paddocks” as they are referred to here).

The result is a fascinating landscape with walks that took us from long windswept beaches to high windswept pastures and then back down through native forest (the one place where the wind was gentler).  It was disconcerting how quickly we could move from a very familiar pastoral setting of sheep on close-cropped, windswept green pasture with european goldfinches and skylarks (all introduced in the 1860s), down into the native forest, where cabbage palms thrust their fiddleheads 10 feet above us, vines entangle the trees and we saw the plump native pigeon (the New Zealand Pigeon) roosting in the dark shadows. In many cases, the edge between ecosystems was the width of a wire fence.

The bird life was as full of contrasts as the landscape. We had fun counting the bird species we saw on the peninsula. We got up to 28, ranging from the common house sparrow to the endangered New Zealand Dotteral. I’m sure Mike will tell you more about the birds in due course.