Waitomo, NZ By Allison

November 06, 2023

Hello! I have been in NZ for 1 week now and have visited some pretty cool places, and learned some amazing things! In New Zealand, there are lines in the hills! Do you know why this is? Well, this is because New Zealand is coming out of the ocean as fast as our fingernails grow due to the tectonic plates bringing it out of the water. The people in New Zealand chop trees down which destabilizes stabilize the ground and causes it to slip down because of gravity. Gravity pulls it down, and it creates these little bumps in the hills, which, from a far distance, looks like lines in the hills, because of the ground moving down.

Today, November 7 I went to a glowworm cave and a Kiwi bird sanctuary. Did you know that kiwi birds get kicked out of the house when they are 14-30 days old? If they don’t leave by then, it’s parents will quite literally kick it out of the house! Once it has left the house, it will no longer be allowed to come back to the house. If the kiwi bird comes back to the house, it’s parents will chase it away! Within the first 6 months is when a kiwi bird is least likely to survive because it is not very big or strong. Only about 1 out of 20 kiwi birds survive in the wild in the first 6 months. After that, it is much stronger so it’s chances of survival go up to 75-90 percent. From when a kiwi bird is first born, its parents don’t feed it at all and it has to find food for itself. I also learned that when a kiwi bird lays an egg, it is the equivalent of an adult woman giving birth to a five year old child.

The glowworms don’t actually attach to the top of the cave, it makes a little hammock for itself and then drops lines down that looks like fishing line (and are also called fishing line) and uses that to catch food. Glow worms eat caddisfly and mayfly regularly. We went down a raft to see the glowworms in a cave and once you really let your eyes adjust, you can see it really really well. The brighter glow worms are the older glow worms because they’re bigger so they have a bigger light at the end of their tail. These glowworms are only found in New Zealand and parts of Australia. There are other insects that are called glowworms, but they are not the same as these glowworms. These glowworms are actually a fly, and they make a cocoon like a butterfly. When they turn into a fly, they only live for two or three days. I would totally recommend the tour, and it was an amazing experience with a breathtaking sight.

Some photos of the animal enclosure, scenery, and glowworms