We've had a good first week in New Zealand. We arrived on Monday after four movies on a 12-hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland. The travel highlight was bumping into Charlton Heston in the L.A. airport. The weather was chilly when we arrived, but we knew it was spring when we passed a blooming forsythia bush on the drive in from the Christchurch airport. I went outside at 6 a.m. to see the full moon one morning, and Orion was high in the sky.
Keas are large alpine parrots that live a life of mischief.
Fred Allendorf, here attending a conference reception in Wellington with his wife Michel Colville, spent the first half of his stay at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Christchurch. The couple now is in Wellington, where Allendorf is researching and teaching at Victoria University . An amazing creature. Biologists still do not know where it spawns. It's thought that it spawns someplace northeast of New Zealand in the deep ocean.