Wild Welly

I was down by the entrance to the Homer Tunnel leading to Milford Sound with my friend Dorotheé a few months ago, trying to thumb down a ride back to Te Anau as the sun got dangerously low, when she asked me if I'd seen a kea since I'd been here. Had I known to what extent it would become my cross to bear, I think I would have gone back to that moment and lied.

As it was, I hadn't, but I decided I wanted to. We reckoned we heard a few squawking in the trees above us, but never laid eyes on the green alpine parrot endemic to the South Island of New Zealand. The kea is a funny creature, routinely described as cheeky, intelligent, jokers, and a nuisance. Do not feed the kea, the signs say – you won't be able to get rid of them. And be careful where you park your car, when you get up towards Milford Sound or Arthur's Pass – they'll peck at the rubber around your tires, and if you leave the door to the outhouse open, someone else is liable to come around before too long and find toilet paper flung every which way, worse than a crappy principal's house on Halloween.

Or Christmas, if you're this dude.

We went to Milford Sound again the next day. No kea. I went through Arthur's Pass – three times, camping one night handy to the village of the same name, some 700 m in elevation. No kea. I visited Mt. Cook Village and went along a walkway called Kea Point. No kea. I left the South Island as a chump, eluded by Squawks the Parrot from Donkey Kong.

Except that Saturday was a fine day in Wellington, and I went to the Wellington Zoo, a forerunner in carbon reduction and the so-called best little zoo in the world, its collection including an African savanna, a couple of islands that act as havens for monkeys, and two kea. We finally met eye-to-eye, and I was able to move on as a slightly better person.

I'm pretty sure I've been to a zoo before, but I'm at a loss to say where it was or what I saw there. So this might as well have been my first time seeing the big cats and the other hairy weirdos roaming the green fields just outside of the city core. The good thing about Wellington Zoo, like Zealandia, is that the animal handlers and feeders have spread out interpretation talks throughout the day, so that you don't just go in, do a circuit, take a few pictures, and go home.

So, after the kea, I went to the large area they've set off for a community of chimpanzees. From the wriggly squirrel monkeys to these much bigger apes, there's something really cool about seeing a creature that's so close to a human. The way they interact with each other, prodding and grooming, the way they move their bodies (especially their hands), the way they look at you when you look at them – it's a bit uncanny, but it's also really engaging.

The chimpanzees came right over to the little stream that separates their area from the raised fence, holding their hands out to catch apples that got flung at them. They're a decent catch, too – I guess because if they fumble, some other monkey is liable to rush over and take the food. One chimp dropped his apple in the water, and as it slowly floated away he leaned over, reached in with a dainty hand, and shook it off before bringing it to his mouth – no lumbering in the water for him.

I've been rolling my eyes at the fiasco Justin Bieber's been going through, losing his pet monkey – but I feel for him now. I want a monkey. Any kind will do.

Up through the savanna and replica African village, there were ostrich, wild dogs, nyala, meerkats, and two hefty giraffes looking over the whole thing. In order to get up close to them, you had to go up onto a raised platform, getting about level with their head. Hold out a tree leaf given to you by a volunteer, and you'll get a sloppy tongue shoot out and make short work of it – if you get a chance to feed a giraffe, make sure you take it.

The lions and tigers were less menacing than they could be if a few gazelle were involved, basking in the sunlight. These oversized felines spend a lot of time sleeping – all the more to build up their energy to tear the hell out of the freshest meat on the menu.

Speaking of fresh meat, there are plenty of these friendly little reminders plastered around the display areas:

And die. That's the final panel they're implying, kids.

An amphitheatre in the middle of the zoo, the Wild Theatre, hosts a little performance a few times a day. Two zoo keepers brought out an Australian cockatiel (well, actually the audience did – it flew out and did a swoop over our heads by a round of applause) and got it whizzing around on command, giving it some exercise and developing motor skills by getting it to play fetch with some plastic blocks.

Seeing a kea was on my personal New Zealand bucket list – seeing a kiwi is on the universal New Zealand bucket list. Had to do it – the flightless, furry, nocturnal bird with the long nose for scrounging for food (apparently, the beak size is a measure of the distance between tip and nostrils – because the kiwi has nostrils right next to the tip, they've got a very long beak to look at, but a tiny beak on paper) is the New Zealand icon, an endangered little creature that's part of the national consciousness. And most kiwis (the people) actually haven't seen a kiwi (the bird) in the wild, not only because their numbers are so small, but also due to their late night, elusive nature.

A special Twilight House, Te Ao Mahina, is your best bet of seeing a kiwi in Wellington. In you go, to a narrow pathway in a darkened room, lit only by red lights (the bird can't see the colour red, so it looks like midnight to them). It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust, and as tree shapes slowly emerge, you can hear a busy rustling in the bushes. Kiwi, where are you?

Right there in the corner, minding its own business. Bigger than I thought when I first came Down Under – about the size of a rooster but, with that curved schnoz, in a league entirely of its own. In an adjacent room, another talk was underway, first bringing out a tuatara – another endemic creature, but this one an ancient reptile that fits in your hand and can trace its lineage back some 200 million years. So pretty much a dinosaur – I saw one behind a glass wall in Invercargill, but this time I got to rub my finger down its oddly fleshy back.

Then, out came Tahi, a one-legged kiwi that a farmer near Auckland accidentally caught in a trap and brought in to the Nest, the on-site veterinary clinic. The little guy came out for a feed, but didn't bother to stick around much longer. You'd almost call it a flyby . . . minus the flying part, of course.

Next up for feeding was the sun bear, a medium-sized honey bear from Southeast Asia with a patch of yellow beneath his furry black chin. This guy would be dwarfed by some of his grizzly peers, but you still wouldn't want to get between it and its dinner.

The Wellington Zoo never intended to house blue penguins, a tiny little thing that's actually the smallest of the penguins (Fairy Penguins are what they're called in Australia). These dudes call the coastline along Wellington their home, and these three in particular ended up here after coming to the vet and being unable to be released back into the wild (missing wings, missing eyes, and a slight case of thinking it's a person) – so, the otter enclosure got divided in half, and now the blue penguins have a place to play.

An expansion of their home is just one of the things that Wellington Zoo is working towards, with a much greater area for native creatures allotted for the near future. Conservation is a major priority for the zoo, encouraging people to cut back on their personal waste and buy eco-friendly products, recycling rain water in the washrooms, and telling everyone to keep their cats in the house at night and their dogs on leashes. It's a great privilege to see all these happy, healthy creatures together in one place, but it would be an even bigger one to know that they're safe in the wild. Even my buddy the kea, which used to number in the hundreds of thousands, has a current population between one and five thousand, and this is in New Zealand, where the natural environment and native species are sacrosanct.

Wilderness of the bush one day, concrete wilderness the next. Today was another gloriously sunny, warm day – right time of the year, wrong hemisphere. It's supposed to be winter down here, but it still felt mild at 14 degrees, and as I walked along the crowded waterfront to mill about with the locals, I didn't need my jacket anymore. It was the right kind of day though, as if the city was saying, “Nice seeing you mate, hope to see you again.”

For, just like that, the Wellington Saga is over. Nights on Cuba Street, wandering through Courtney Place (a conglomerate of flashing lights, cheap foreign takeaway places, and strip joints), tracing along the gentle waterfront, and taking in the small town-meets-city environment – it too has been a privilege. But with the morning comes a northbound journey, hitchhiking my way to Hawke's Bay on the East Coast, and the Art Deco city of Napier. Because at midnight tonight, it'll be the first of July – and suddenly, it's not true that I'll be home in Newfoundland in a few months.

It's more like weeks. Away we go, off on another lunatic adventure.

Cheers,

rb