Thursday, February 6, 2014

New Zealand birds

I went to a bird conservatory and I saw a lot of different species of birds. Here are some of the birds that I saw there. I have seen a lot of birds in New Zealand.


This bird is called a Kea. When I was there, they had a kea that was very funny. It came out of its little hut and started to crawl ( literally) to us and looked straight at us through the glass. It was kinda creepy and weird, but I was fine with it. They are endangered animals because they are hard to breed and there are few females in the population.


This bird is called a Paradise Duck. Its not endangered, but its really interesting to me. This duck was at a pond were they give people free duck food to feed the ducks. They were bigger than the normal ducks in the pond and the males were quite aggressive.


A lot of you may know about this bird. It's the Kiwi. It is more endangered than any of the other bird species of New Zealand. It's just too delicious to animals and very vulnerable. It only comes out at night. I saw a wild one; one that wasn't in a zoo. It was so cool!!

 
 
I thought that leaving something funny might make my blog not so boring.
Here are some funny bird pictures.
Enjoy!!!
 
 






Maybe I put too many! Oops, I got carried away.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Waitangi day

Today is a very special day for New Zealand. Its the day of when the British and the Maori had peace with each other. So its sorta like the 4th of July, but they just decided to have peace between one another.

The date is February, 6, 1840 when they signed the treaty of peace.
This is a picture of one of the 40 Maori chiefs that came to the ceremony, signing the treaty.
 


The person who wanted to have a peace treaty was the governor William Hobson. But the person that made it happen was Resident James Busby, he called the 40 chiefs over and the treaty was signed by all of them.
This is William Hobson's house where the treaty was signed.
I was there and there is a gigantic field in the front of the house.
 
 
 
They wanted the rest of New Zealand's chiefs to sign the treaty too, so they made nine copies of the treaty and sent them all over New Zealand. After, all 500 chiefs signed the treaty.
 
 
This is one of the nine treaties that were made.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Maori came up with the flag of New Zealand and a symbol too.
 
Here is the symbol of New Zealand.

Here is New Zealand's flag. It has the British flag in the corner.
 
 
 
Thanks for viewing!
 
 
 


Monday, February 3, 2014

Butterflies

I did research on butterflies when I went to a butterfly exhibit and I learned a lot.
There was the paper kite butterfly, my favorite.

 
From: Southeast Asia 
Size: 9-10 cm
Color: Yellow and Black
Habit:
They like to stay in groups with the same kind of butterflies and they like cool places.

Then there are the Great egg-flies.


From: Madagascar, Asia, and Australia
Size: 7-9 cm
Color: black, blue, and white
Habit:
They like to land on people and are very territorial.


There are the Asian swallowtail.

From:Asia
Size: 10-13 cm
Color: black and white
Habit:
These little guys are very playful with other butterflies and love flying at fast speeds.


That's all I gathered while I was in there but I learned a lot about the beautiful creatures.


Thanks for viewing!


Sunday, February 2, 2014

Horse camp

 
 


I went to this awesome horse camp for a week and I enjoyed it. The only thing that I had a problem with was well, everyone had a problem with, but it was the food. I didn't know if they were trying to kill us on purpose or not. We had to train for eight hours a day and the first thing in the morning they gave us toast. Ok, yeah that sounds fine, right? Well, for lunch, after we had four hours of hard training, they give us small portions of spaghetti on toast. I was kinda annoyed, but I thought that small breakfast and lunch with a filling dinner, was what they were planning.

So, I cooled off, but after another four hours of hard training we went in to dinner and guess. what. we. got. Yes, you guessed right.... toast wrapped around sausages. That pushed me off the edge. One of my classmates saw how annoyed I was and came up to me. She said " But at least we get ketchup," holding up the red bottle. Good grief, we really did sound as if we were in boot camp. I didn't know how long the girl was there, but I guess for a while because she was as thin as paper.

 The only thing that kept us alive was the magical, wonderful, life saving..... candy store. I praised mom for giving me a lot of money because I bought a lot so did the other girls, but we lived. That was the only downer.

Now to the awesome part, we did treks and jumping with other cool stuff, too. I had a black horse named Jazz. She was "face shy". ( "Face shy" means that, a horse does not like to be touched on the face or have something fast move around their face.) She was very obedient and nice. Most of the time. I think I spoiled her but, who cares, I had a blast.

I did fall off Jazz two times. The first time I fell off when we where in a canter. ( Cantering is the closest speed to galloping or right under it.) The second was when I went over a jump. Both hurt a lot, but I sucked it up and kept going and after a while the pain disappeared. After the week, I sadly said goodbye to my two friends with awesome names. Their names where Roshni and Lilith. The best horseback friends ever.

After I got home I swear I lost a pound or two and I was craving meat. So, I was more like a real life Gollum, I guess.
This is Jazz and me.

This is the full body of Jazz, she is one of the biggest on the farm.
 
Me, after horse camp.