Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Morepork chick

Gollum is fading from public memory but lives on in The Bush – the third theme of Te Ara, launched on 24 September 2007. A small endemic fish, the Gollum galaxias (Galaxias gollumoides) was discovered on Stewart Island in the 1990s and is featured in the Freshwater fish entry. New to science, it was so named for its bug eyes – a characteristic of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the rings character, Gollum – and a trait shared with this morepork chick from the Birds of prey entry.

Another interestingly named species is stinkwood (Coprosma foetidissima). The genus Coprosma was coined by German scientists Johann Reinhold Forster and son Georg in 1776. As the plant ‘stank very violently,’ they derived a name from the Latin ‘copros’ (dung) and ‘foetidus’ (strong-smelling). (J. R. Forster was the German naturalist of James Cook’s second voyage to New Zealand, who ‘drove everybody almost frantic with irritation’, according to J. C. Beaglehole.)

New Zealand scientists could do worse than look at Mark Isaak’s Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature for inspiration when naming new species. It features the beetle Agra cadabra and spider Apopyllus now.

Summer. The word conveys associations – sun, swimming, youth, listening to Hüsker Dü’s ‘Celebrated summer’.

Getting drunk out on the beach, or playing in a band
And getting out of school meant getting out of hand

New Zealand’s regional climates

I wish. I spent my school holidays in an empty Dunedin. Scarfies long gone. Locals inland. The north end a ghost town save a few flat painters. The ODT morphed into double-page spreads of red boozed-up flesh in Central O.

My parents moved north. Over the break Auckland has little traffic – the best time to visit. Last December looking down Newmarket’s Broadway I saw no cars, expected tumbleweeds.

Up north you head for the beach, down south the interior. Late December and early January weather can still suck the kumara – conditions are most settled in February and March. The hottest recorded day was 7 February 1973. The mercury reached 42.4°C at Rangiora (Canterbury) and Jordan (Marlborough) and 39.2°C at Ruatoria (East Coast).

I’ll be here. A cold beer on a hot day is the time of your life. Don’t shorten it working on a tan.

Make it your celebrated summer.