This and that
BIRDS AND ANIMALS
When we arrived there were no pet animals around at all. Dick had his farm dog, but she was a working dog and stayed in her kennel away from the living area.
Wideawake at Denham Bay.
Another beautiful bird we called the "fairy tern". There were muttonbirds which nested in the tussock grass and were so tame you could pick them up. Unfortunately they often flew into the antenna wires and injured themselves. There was even an occasional albatross cruising majestically past the Island.
There were land birds of course, the most numerous of which was the Tui. Someone hung a pot of honey in a tree just outside the hostel, and there were always some Tuis hanging round getting a free lunch.
They too were tame and one could approach to within a metre of them. We saw yellowhammers but, surprisingly, no sparrows. We also saw kingfishers. Finally there were small parakeets, but they lived on a small island called Mayor Island about a kilometre off shore. They often flew over to the main Island and sometimes were seen round the Fishing Rock area.
There were only three types of animal that roamed wild on the island. Goats, cats and rats. Goats had been liberated on all the Islands of the Kermedec group, the idea being that if people became stranded on one of the islands, there would be fresh meat available.
On Raoul the goats thrived to the extent they became a real menace to the Island's flora. Several culls had been carried out the most recent being the previous year. However there were still some sizable groups left and it was not unusual to see a small herd on the slopes of the crater rim half a kilometre from the hostel. Members of our group regularly hunted them and reduced the population by a hundred of so during the year.
Early on in the year, Mac came back from one trip with a very young kid in his shirt. He had shot its mother and brought the kid back. Then he did not know what to do with it. No one else did either, neither was anyone willing to knock it on the head, so in the end I took on the job of looking after it.
It wouldn't drink from a bottle, (Dick had a supply of teats), so I fed it from a battery hydrometer by squirting milk down its throat - most of it any way. It was totally black except for a white patch on its chest, so I named it P.J., after Peter Jones who was a somewhat famous All Black at the time.
PJ.
PJ thrived and soon became a favourite around the Met. station, except possibly when he decided to gambol on the plotting tables in the middle of a radiosonde flight.
We left him there when our year was over. I am not sure what the incoming crew did with him, but he was a good pet.
No one knew where the cats came from but they were there in numbers. They must have done a lot of damage to the bird life, but would also have kept the rat population down.
Bill caught one kitten and made a pet of it. It was a pretty black and white thing, and soon changed from a spitting, scratching, bundle of anger, to a typical fat cat, lolling around, waiting to be fed.
Cindy was its name!
Rats were a nuisance, they tended to get into our food supply and were trapped and shot where possible. They never reached plague proportions as they did once during the time the Bell family was on the Island.
Rats, cats and goats, was not a good mix of animals to have on an Island which originally had only bird life on it. I understand that DOC is trying to eradicate all three and I wish them luck in their endeavours.
I understand too, that there were once wild pigs there, but the cullers managed to get rid of them.
HUNTING
There was a total of five guns on the island during my stay. Mac had brought a hunting rifle with him. He kept this locked away and only brought it out when he was going out shooting goats, which was fair enough.
Horse had brought a neat little .22 with him which he would lend to anyone. This was ideal for shooting rats and cats. It was a semi automatic so you just had to keep pulling the trigger to fire several shots, handy when your rat is running for its life.
The other rifles were official ones that stayed on the Island. These were two army type 303's and a single barrel shotgun. They were kept in one of the huts along with heaps of ammunition.
Any one could use them and I often took one of the 303's down to the beach for target practice. I did not actually shoot any animals (except rats) while I was there. They were also useful for signalling purposes if for instance anyone got lost or hurt while out by themselves.
Other members of the party hunted goats and over the year perhaps more then a hundred were killed. Which was definitely good for the environment.
ORANGE GROVES.
One of several failed attempts to make something productive of Raoul was the planting of groves of orange trees. The idea was to have a readily available supply of citrus fruits for the NZ markets.
In the orange grove.
When all was complete and the trees about to bear fruit, objections from Pacific Islands, and, I suspect, a change of heart by the government of the time, coupled with a major earthquake that demolished the jetty at boat cove - the cliff fell on it- caused the project to be abandoned.
When we arrived the trees were well and truly mature and had been untended for many years. Still there were acres of them all bearing fruit. Lemons, grapefruit and several varieties of oranges.
When the fruit ripened it was simply a matter of going to your favourite tree and selecting what you wanted.
It wasn't long before all the easily accessible fruit was taken. After that I found the easiest way to get an orange or two was to drive the tractor into the tree sufficiently hard to shake it and pick up what you wanted from those that fell off.
Most of the fruit was simply wasted apart from what we used and whatever could be gathered for the crew of the three ships that visited us.
ENTERTAINMENT.
Watching "Tarzan of the apes" Mac. Chris. Dick. Bill
The film was funny to us, even when run at normal speed, as the subtitles were comical. For instance, Jane, when being carried off into the jungle by an ape, screamed, according to the subtitle "Help. Help. Assistance!"
We watched that movie many times, forwards, backwards, and using our own dialogue. It gave us some good entertainment. In the pictures everyone seems interested. It must have been one of the first showings,no one knew quite what to expect.
George in the lower picture is the "old cook" he was replaced half way through the year.
Watching "Tarzan of the apes" Horse. Noel. George. Mac
Mostly the evenings were spent talking playing snooker or listening to the radio. Raoul was a great site for radio listening, it was so far from man made interference and other local stations that it was possible to receive stations from all over, having a very good antenna also helped. The broadcast band in particular pulled in stations from Hawaii and the west coast of America as well as New Zealand stations. We had a regular spot on the request programme on one of the Wanganui radio stations. Announcers seemed quite tickled to say "and now here is one for the boys on Raoul Island"