Mature Flâneur Down Under
After the Eruption: Rangitoto Island, New Zealand
Weird things happen on this volcanic island
I was walking along the volcano when I thought I heard R2D2 in the trees. It was a weird combination of clicks and musical whistles that sounded as if they came from the plucky little Star Wars robot. I looked around and spied a medium-sized, black-and-brown bird winging between the branches. It had this strange little white tuft on its throat, the sort of thing a French aristocrat might have worn in a bygone age. When it settled, I was able to take a picture. Later, I identified it as a tūi bird.
Although to me the bird looked rather drab, save for its neck tuft, online I discovered the bird’s true colors: when the light hits those brown and black feathers just right, they shimmer with iridescent hues of turquoise, bronze, and cerulean blue. In ages past their feathers were used to adorn the traditional cloaks of Māori chiefs. The tūi’s calls are also colorful, producing flute-like whistles interspersed with coughs, grunts, clicks and wheezes. They are mimics, able to play back everything from farm machinery to human voices. And, they played a crucial role in the evolution of life on Rangitoto —New Zealand’s newest volcano.
Rangitoto erupted in Auckland harbour about 600 years ago — within memory of the Māori tribes who lived nearby, and who gave the island the name, which means “Red Sky” in their language. At that time, a great gob of magma broke through the earth’s mantle — worn thin in New Zealand, where tectonic plates are still colliding. When the hot lava cracked the ocean floor, the seawater turned to steam, creating massive explosions that indeed would have turned the night sky red. As the lava kept coming, eventually it built a cone above the surface of the water, allowing the hot magma to spew into the sky. Lumps hardened in mid-air into weird artistic shapes, before crashing into the rivers of lava flowing across the newly emerged land. As the lava flowed, the surface cooled and solidified, then crumpled when the lava rivers swelled again. This created vast fields of broken rock. In other places, when the lava ceased to flow, it left underground lava tunnels behind.
I imagine this raw, steaming land was much like all of New Zealand, as it emerged from the sea, 23 million years ago: lifeless, bare rock. In some ways, the story of Rangitoto is the story of New Zealand, but in fast motion. For the island today is mostly covered in vegitation and teeming with life. A trip to Rangitoto is a journey through lush forests and evolutionary quirks that are still puzzling the scientists who study it.
I took the ferry from downtown Auckland that arrives three times a week at Rangitoto and disgorges day trippers (and a few hardy overnight campers). There is no water on the island, and no food, so everything must be packed in and all trash packed out. Fortunately, there’s a well made trail from the ferry terminal to the peak, with a rough track that cuts across the island to a lighthouse on the westernmost point of the island, and then along the southern coast. Most visitors do the hour-long trek to the peak, then straight back to the boat. But I oped (like any decent flâneur) for the circuitous route via the lighthouse, to avoid retracing my steps.
One of the first things one notices on the path is that that there are big patches of raw lava rock interspersed with larger patches of vegetation. Helpful placards along the way explain how these islands of vegetation developed. the first arrivals on Rangitoto were spores of lichen and mosses, which gradually covered the bare rock. When they built up a sufficent layer of organic matter, seeds that had drifted over from the mainland took root; here and there, ferns and bushes began to appear, and then a few trees. With the trees, came the bugs and birds (like the tūi) that feast on ripening fruit; the latter left their droppings behind, including whatever seeds they carried in their poop. And so wherever one tree survived, a mini-ecosystem evolved around it. Little islands of vegetation gradually spread out across the lava field and merged with others, until today most of the island is a connected forest.
The path to the top of Rangitoto allows for a detour to visit some of the lava tunnels left behind by the cooling lava flows. These proved cramped, dark, and deep. Rather than risk bashing my head on the nubbly, dark tunnel roof, or breaking my poor old knees with a long-crouch-and-crawl approach, I opted for the shortest tunnel. I could spy a dot of light shining through from the other end. This still required feeling my way through, hands in dank and moss-covered walls. Here and there I had to squeeze through narrow, irregular spaces, contorting my body to match the irregular shape of the lava tube so that it felt as if I were playing Twister while spelunking. Note to anyone considering this trek: bring a headlamp rather than rely on your smartphone light. A lava tunnel is not a good place to drop your phone!
Back in the main track, as I neared he cone of the volcano, the path steepened and the vegetation deepened. The soil here was thick enough to support large, tall trees, so that the forest more resembled a tropical jungle. Supposedly in the nooks and crannies of these trees over fifty different species of orchids grow.
Eventually I reached the rim of the volcano, some 200 meters (600 feet) across. Even the crater within was covered with trees. A placard on the rim explained that less than 175 years ago, this cone and its crater were mostly bare rock — as evidenced by this sketch, below, from a visitor from the mid-ninteeth century. The rate as which the forest has overtaken the rock is astonishing.
I walked round the rim of the cone to the high point of the island — a flat and rather unremarkable spot containing a picnic area and public toilets — but with a remarkable view of Auckland in the distance.
From the cone I look the long road home along a black track made of pulverized volcanic rock. It lead to the lighthouse and beach at Mackenzie point, and then back round to the ferry dock. Along the shore I noticed one other strange feature of the island: mangrove trees on the shoreline growing right out of the lava. This one has puzzled the scientists who study the island because mangroves typically grow in the muck of swampy wetlands. Here, they spring up directly from volcanic rubble. That was not though to be proper behavior for mangroves, until now.
All along the trail, I passed little wooden boxes with wire mesh sides; these are traps for possums and other invasive species that have made it onto the island. They eat the eggs of native birds, so there’s a concerted effort to cull the pests. Visitors to the island are required to thoroughly check their knapsacks before they get onboard the island ferry. The ferry attendant told us that in one case, they had caught a snake trying to smuggle aboard in someones bag!
Even human pests have been removed from the island. As I neared the dock, I passed a stretch of shoreline with perhaps a dozen old cottages — the final remnant of a vacation community on Rangitoto that once numbered in the hundreds. All in all, there were 200 or so of these “baches,” built over 100 years ago in ramshackle manner by the owners. Most of these have been removed, with just a few preserved, along with a small museum for the sake of history. These days, no one lives full time on the island — except the remaining pests, and the birds that helped create the forest. Including the tuneful tūi.
Rangitoto was my first taste of New Zealand outside of a city. So much of this land remains rugged and wild — and yet all of it has been affected by humans. The unleashing of pets and pests upon this land — a land with no preexisting mammals — has created an imbalance that modern New Zealanders are belatedly striving hard to address. Most alarmingly, the numbers of kiwi — the national bird— is being reduced by half every then years in unmanaged areas. So it’s heartening to see the work being done on places like Rangitoto to repair the damage, and to find New Zealanders zealously embracing a new role on this island as protectors of life and observers of the amazing processes of Nature, as she unfolds her green hand upon this land.
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In case you missed it, here is my first story on New Zealand:
And please take a peak at my forthcoming travel book — you can read the first chapter using the “look inside” feature on Amazon.
