We decided to spend the last day of 2009 at Rainbow Springs Kiwi Nature Park.

Water! We saw beautiful a beautiful rainbow pool loaded with trout, when we saw the 4 month old trout we were amazed at the size of the other trout and wondered just how old they must be. The Trout are quite athletic and can leap up waterfalls. They are also quite clever at catching the food pellets, the ones that the ducks and ducklings miss. We saw 2 mother ducks with their ducklings, one family was 2 days old and the others 3 weeks old – they were very cute.

With map in hand, our map girl knew where we should visit next and we set off on our journey around the Nature park.

 

 

We enjoyed some more crunchy NZ rose apples for morning tea and fed the trout.  As we crossed a bridge, James announced, “more wart” and lay down to check the temperature for us!

 

 

Our NZ bird education commenced with the Kea, an alpine parrot that was very entertaining, it is sometimes considered the clown parrot. The entertaining Kea can also play soccer, we thought Jayden and Jack would be delighted to see them play a game.

We saw a kiwi in the Nocturnal house. The kiwis have lived in New Zealand for 70 million years.  We saw lots of native birds, the Tui, a Kereru, a wood pigeon and Kaka, a North Island parrot.

James was delighted to see the Arapawa Island sheep, “more sheep!”

We decided to have a picnic lunch on the Fairy lawn. It was great being surrounded by farm animals.  One of the most interesting was the Kune Kune pig  he was very sociable and seemed quite placid in nature. His nose was huge and James was fascinated by this. The Ponui Donkey are apparently a feral donkey breed in NZ, we thought they were cute.  There were also rabbits, wallabies, chickens and noisy roosters.

At 6.30pm we went down to the Lake front to see the New Year’s Eve celebrations.  We saw the fair, music stage and playground before we went back to the zoo for a very special kiwi encounter.  We explored the zoo, fed trout, ducks, swans, and saw heaps of birds and animals.  Jennifer and James had an absolute ball playing with a kea (parrot) who was hand raised.  Her name was Jenny and she hopped along the fence line.  Our two copied her and this game went on for about 15 minutes, we’re not sure who would have tired first or who was having the most fun, it was gorgeous to watch.

 

 

 

At 9pm we went to the special kiwi encounter, it was great to see them up close and in their natural environment.  We were amazed at how quickly they ran and their feathers were quite pointy.  We all had to be very quiet so we did not frighten the kiwi’s and we were very pleased that every our gorgeous children were so considerate of the birds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rainbow trout were quite amazing, they all swam in a circle and it looked brilliant under the pretty lights.  We didn’t know that trout and fish will generally orientate themselves head first into a current, particularly when living in rivers or streams.

 

 

 

We arrived home at about 10pm and you can guess who went straight to sleep without a peep.  At midnight we watched great fireworks on Lake Rotorua from our back veranda and ended up being surrounded by them as displays went off in every direction.  Our little man seemed to want to join in the festivities and slid off his bed – whoops, but he was OK.