Motuihe Island

Today we spent most of the day on Motuihe Island with our new friend Malkiat who invited us to volunteer for tree planting. Motuihe Island is being turned into the next sanctuary like Tiri Tiri Matangi, but is 20 years back in regrowth.


Just off the ferry - it's a rare clear day:

The previous week a team of volunteers from Smirnoff Vodka set the world records for trees planted in one day. Unfortunately they didn't do a very good job. Pukekos had pulled out hundreds of poorly planted seedlings to eat the bugs off the roots. So our task for the morning was to fix their shoddy work.



The island is quite small, but the soil is very rich. The first step to turn it into a native forest is to plant fast growing bushes which will out-compete and kill off the thick grass. Rangitoto volcano in the background of this picture:



Camille with our friend Malkiat. He befriended us at an Indian grocery store in February.



After lunch we perfected the fine art of skipping stones:




Suffering through an Auckland winter:







-Carl and Camille