Somes Island

We recently visited Somes Island which is located in Wellington Harbour. The island has plenty of history having been at various times an internment camp, a quarantine station and a military base but these days is a protected nature reserve. A number of endangered species have been reintroduced to the island including blue penguins, red-crowned parakeets (kākāriki) and tuatara which are New Zealand’s largest reptiles.

We caught a ferry and after a short but rather rough crossing we reached the island and had fun setting up the tent (up to 12 people are allowed to camp overnight) in a howling gale. I would highly recommend camping as many of the islands inhabitants are nocturnal.

 

The Camp site.

 

Somes Island is quite small and we managed to walk all the way around in about an hour. We saw a number of kākāriki and fantails, but not much else.

 

 We found this small lighthouse quite close to the campsite.

 

Most of the island is pretty rugged.

Kākāriki

 

In the evening we wandered down to the beach on the lookout for blue penguins. The birds spend their days at sea foraging for food and come ashore in the evenings and live underground in burrows or holes. We didn’t see anything for quite a while but eventually they started to come ashore, not that they were that easy to spot, as they are the world’s smallest penguin and it was rather dark.

 

Blue Penguin.

We could have spent all evening looking at the penguins but decided to go exploring on the islands various bush tracks on the lookout for tuatara. We spent ages while looking for them and were considering giving up when we came round a bend and found one of them in the middle of the track and then a few seconds later a second one. For both of us this was the highlight of the trip as the tuatara are not easy to find with none of our fellow campers seeing any at all.

Tuatara.