The Swimming Carnival.....

Now *that's* a dedicated Time Keeper:


We popped on down to the Papamoa Swim Club Carnival and we watched the lovely Ngaio competing:




How's that for a winning margin (that's her finished already at the back)? You Go Girl!!! It was a 200m race at the end of the meet so she did really well:


And we watched the very talented Huia strutting her stuff:




That style is almost identical, they must be sisters ;o)




The Ngaio or Mousehole tree (Myoporum laetum) is a tree in the family Myoporaceae native to New Zealand.
It is evergreen, grows to a height of 50-70 feet, and bears white or near white blossoms in late winter to mid spring.
According to Maori legend, a Ngaio tree can be seen on the moon:
The man in the moon becomes, in Maori legend, a woman, one Rona by name. This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water to a stream. In her hand she carried an empty calabash. Stumbling in the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at it some such epithet as "You old tattooed face, there!" But the moon-goddess heard, and reaching down caught up the insulting Rona, calabash and all, into the sky. In vain the frightened woman clutched, as she rose, the tops of a ngaio-tree. The roots gave way, and Rona with her calabash and her tree are placed in the front of the moon for ever, an awful warning to all who are tempted to mock at divinities in their haste.
From : The Long White Cloud by William Pember Reeves (1899)
Myoporum laetum is considered an invasive exotic species by the California Exotic Pest Plant Council.

Extinct Birds: The Huia
The huia was only found in New Zealand.
There was something very special about the huia – the male and female birds had very different beaks. The male's beak was short and straight and the females beak was long and curved.
The huia was very distinctive because of its beak, beautiful black feathers, the tail feathers tipped with white, and its bright orange wattle. The huia was related to the saddleback and the kokako, they are all wattle-birds.
Fossils show that the huia could once be found throughout the North Island of New Zealand.
When European settlers arrived in New Zealand the huia was found only in the lower half of the North Island, from East Cape to Wellington. This tells us that the number of huia was in decline before Europeans arrived in New Zealand.