January 29, 2008

11 hours and counting…

We are in LA, preparing for takeoff! We arrived yesterday at LAX, and had to take a shuttle to a parking lot where a van picked us up and drove us to a sketchy alley where the rental car office was located… Hey, the price was right, so we ignored the crowbar marks on the window of the car, and headed to Glendale to our old friend Andy’s house. Both Ben and I are getting over some awful plague that was going around Park City last week so we laid low last night, and tried not to feel too bad about all the people we would be unable to see on our stop-over. Today is all about last minute tasks, so we will probably not get to do much of anything fun except admire the palm trees and enjoy the weather (which is amazing after Park City blizzards and the freak Seattle snowstorm we flew out of!)

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January 17, 2008
I’ve gotten really obsessed with these birds. They went extinct sometime between 1500-1900, after the arrival of the first humans to New Zealand. Depending on the species, they ranged in size from 2-6 feet tall. The picture above shows moa attacked by a Haast’s eagle, also now extinct, who often had a wingspan of up to 15 feet. The really cool thing about both these animals is that they filled similar ecological roles as a buffalo and lion would in the Sahara, or a deer and wolf in North America. Except that because mammals had never really eveolved in NZ, those roles were filled by bird species. It feels very alien and a little cannibalistic to think about, which is probably why I am so fascinated by it!

I’ve gotten really obsessed with these birds. They went extinct sometime between 1500-1900, after the arrival of the first humans to New Zealand. Depending on the species, they ranged in size from 2-6 feet tall. The picture above shows moa attacked by a Haast’s eagle, also now extinct, who often had a wingspan of up to 15 feet. The really cool thing about both these animals is that they filled similar ecological roles as a buffalo and lion would in the Sahara, or a deer and wolf in North America. Except that because mammals had never really eveolved in NZ, those roles were filled by bird species. It feels very alien and a little cannibalistic to think about, which is probably why I am so fascinated by it!

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mo·a [moh-uh] –noun any of several flightless birds of the family Dinornithidae, of New Zealand, related to the kiwis but resembling the ostrich: extinct since about the end of the 18th century.[Origin: 1810–20;

mo·a [moh-uh] –noun
any of several flightless birds of the family Dinornithidae, of New Zealand, related to the kiwis but resembling the ostrich: extinct since about the end of the 18th century.
[Origin: 1810–20;

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January 14, 2008

The two-week countdown…

We are now exactly two weeks away from our departure date! Ben and I leave Seattle the 28th of January, fly to LAX, spend the night, and depart for Auckland by way of Fiji on the night of the 29th. We arrive in Auckland January 31st, and my parents will arrive the next day.

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