by Sophia Hall
Cue the typical post-study abroad conversation. Someone exclaims my name with a vivid brightness–Sophia!––and says:
I haven’t seen you in so long! Where have you been?
No matter the setting, whether in the too-few minutes before class begins or in the red haze of a house party, comes everyone’s immediate follow-up:
Where?
Once I reply, another flurry:
I’ve always wanted to go there.
That would be my dream honeymoon trip.
And, of course, the obligatory:
Wow, I love the Lord of the Rings!
Most Penn students don’t study abroad. From college requirement constraints to the pressures of pre-professional tracks, leaving Locust Walk feels impossible.
So when I share that I left Penn for a semester, everyone’s attention becomes caught. They can’t imagine themselves in my position, making the decision to forsake carefully-cultivated friend groups, the social stratosphere, club affiliations, hell, even the panic of midterms. The daily panic feels familiar. Call it Stockholm Syndrome. Even my friend, who subletted my room during the fall with the intention of studying abroad in the spring, also decided to stay on campus. Now that I’m back, it’s easy to feel like I never left. But sometimes I catch myself staring at the Philly skyline out of my window and wishing the skyscrapers were mountain peaks instead.
New Zealand. Its original name in Māori, Aotearoa, means Land of the Long White Cloud. Remote, isolated, with mountains that spiral into clouds and cliffs that sheer off at impossibly steep angles. A country smaller than the size of Colorado, with 5 sheep for every person. Despite its tiny area, it’s shockingly difficult to drive around. The puny one-lane highways quiver next to the gargantuan Jersey Turnpike. And yes, it’s home to Mt. Doom and the Hobbits, for all the Middle-English nerds out there.
I delved deeper into the vertices of New Zealand literature, history, and culture through my studies at the University of Otago. The transliteration of the University’s name in Maori is Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, which means a “place of many firsts,” and it’s already lived up to its name. As a junior at Penn, I thought a lot of my college firsts were already set in stone––my first friends, my first midterms, my first nights going out. But now I suddenly had new opportunities to make abroad (and college) firsts at Otago. I experienced my first flatmates in off-campus housing, my first rugby game, my first time being so far away from home for months on end.
Part of New Zealand uniqueness can be attributed to its relative recency in the geologic timescale. I used to think––like most people––that there are only seven continents on the globe, but recent research concerning crustal composition and thickness has confirmed that the continent of Zealandia is both the Earth’s newest and smallest continent. Breaking off from the mega-continent of Gondwana during the Paleocene, 55-70 million years ago, Zealandia was only populated by almost entirely birds. The continent’s only mammalian resident was a bat. Due to a lack of natural land-based predators, many birds never developed flight and remain entirely flightless to this day.
However, this lack of evolution resulted in the devastation, endangerment and eventual extinction of many birds during Māori and European arrival, less than 700 years ago. Yes, you heard that right. By the time humans reached New Zealand, the Roman Empire had already risen and fallen, the Black Plague had already wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire had already conducted his lavish pilgrimage to Mecca.
With the introduction of humans came smaller mammals, from rats and hedgehogs to domesticated dogs, which resulted in the massive loss of species and the near extinction of others. The population of New Zealand’s national bird, the kiwi, plummeted from an estimated 12 million to fewer than 70,000 birds by the late 1990s and 2000s. In 1912, conservationists noticed that there were only five individual Little Spotted Kiwi left on Kapiti Island suffering from a severe genetic bottleneck. Humans decided to step in. With their help, the birds were able to rebound to a population of 1200. Knowing the circumstances and shaping forces behind the birds of New Zealand made my first encounters with them even more meaningful.
Despite their decimation by small mammals, the birds I’ve seen here have been plentiful and gorgeous. Each morning, as I walked out from my flat, I saw two paradise shelducks––nicknamed Peanut and Butter––plopped inside a puddle on the rugby field. Every time I saw a new bird, I felt a small victory. While some birds require patience and quiet to spot, like the nocturnal kiwi or shy parakeets, others utterly lack a fear of humans.
I remember meeting two curious kea in Mt. Cook National Park. Kea are the world’s only alpine parrot, adapted to live in the snow-covered peaks of the South Island. Known as the “clown of the mountain,” these cheeky, mischievous birds try to steal food from unsuspecting hikers and tourists.
Bird-watching requires both attention and appreciation, things I always try to incorporate into my own poetry. In Aotearoa, my new practice of watching birds and writing poetry began to develop a symbiotic relationship. My images arced across the page just like flight paths. Even if I was just writing a few lines of verse on the rugby field, the background honks of Peanut and Butter entwined with my own inner dialogue.
Near Rakiura, also known as Stewart Island, I accomplished a lot of bird-watching. New Zealand’s third-largest island, Rakiura is home to the Southern brown kiwi along with other rare birds. From Half Moon Bay, a water taxi dropped me off on Ulva Island, where I saw over ten new species of birds, including the kererū (wood pigeon), saddlebacks, and the flaming-orange-and-black variable oystercatcher. By practicing silence while walking, careful not to snap a twig or rustle against a bush, I was able to spook less birds and more than I normally would have. In turn, I gained more poetic inspiration. Quiet attention and poetry writing fulfilled the others’ aims.
One of the quirks of Ulva Island is that it successfully eradicated its rat population in the “Great Rat Eradication of 1993” and allowed the native birds to thrive. Seriously, the rhetoric against rodents and other small mammals by conservationists runs deep with rage and deep-seeded resentment.
Part of this campaign against mammals, Predator Free 2050 is an ambitious New Zealand government initiative aiming to eradicate the most damaging introduced predators—rats, stoats, and possums—nationwide by 2050 to protect native biodiversity. In urban and rural areas, on tramping trails or bike paths, you can spot traps and poison baits.
And most of the population is on board. “The only good possum is a dead possum” is a popular phrase I’ve heard uttered by both bar patrons and grandmas in knitting circles alike, to hearty assent. Yarn and clothing made from possum wool is a staple item sold in stores. My flatmate began crocheting a possum yarn sweater.
After exploring Ulva Island, I went on a wildlife cruise where I spotted the Fiordland crested penguin. Then, the boat docked on the beach of an island highly populated with the elusive kiwi. Our small group walked at a pace not dissimilar to a zombie crawl, with nothing but small hand flashlights to light the way. The guides used infrared scopes to spot the heat waves of the tiny bird. The pace was torturous for someone like me who is used to speed-walking on concrete sidewalks. But slowing down in the quiet dark allowed me the mental space to compose lines of this haiku:
shuffle in silence
quiet hush in hopes to coax
out marrow-boned bird
All of a sudden, we stopped. Off to the left, just feet away, I saw a giant kiwi. Damp and mottle-furred, it scrounged around on the damp forest floor with its elongated, needle-like beak. My body stiffened as it shuffled along the forest floor. Its body undulated like a slinky, its round body and elongated neck utterly at odds with gravity. A smile radiated across my face. Despite the cold, rain, and achingly slow pace, it had been worth it to see this bird in its natural habitat.
After I finished taking exams the next month––yes, I did go to my classes, contrary to popular belief––I tramped along the Abel Tasman Coastal Track. One of New Zealand’s famous “Great Walks,” I was exposed to endless stretches of coastline, tidal estuaries, and beech forests. On the hike, I saw weka for the first time. Like the kea of Mt. Cook, weka are mischievous, bold, and utterly fearless with regards to humans. Unlike kea, they are flightless! Imagine the roadrunner from Looney Tunes, or a miniature T-rex, then place it into a tropical oceanside setting. There’s your weka. At Anchorage Hut, a small divot by a water spigot provided a little wash basin for a mother weka and her baby chicks. As they dove in and out of the puddle, their fluff sparkled with specks of water and light.
Dunedin, my host city, has its own fair share of unusual bird life. It hosts the only mainland colony of Northern Royal Albatross, and little blue penguins come to shore every night at Pilot’s Beach. Journeying out onto the peninsula to see these birds felt like an integral part of my study abroad experience.
with a single stroke
albatross dips, defiant
black swoop against sky
Lastly, part of my interest in these birds stem from learning about the legendary moa, the now-extinct bird that roamed Aotearoa freely before human arrival. These gentle giants stood at three meters tall, over double the size of an average human! They were the tallest birds to ever exist. At the Royal Albatross Centre, one of the conservationists told me that a large site of moa bones is located off the roadside on the Otago Peninsula, which has now been turned into a golf course. That story inspired me to write this last poem:
Birdie
They built a golf course over the graveyard
of buried moa bones. I learned of this haunting
last week on a bird tour. As Portobello Road
curves towards Tairoa Head, just look to your left
and listen through the ocean’s roar. Imagine:
the rev of engines become the revived rumblings
of these giant ratites. In less than a century
of human settlement, all were gone. Salt sprays
their silhouette into my psyche and now all I see
is the ghost of the last one on the peninsula,
alone, a flightless long-necked creature, large
enough to feed an entire family for weeks. Eggs
the size of cantaloupes, eyes the size of golf balls
being teed off every Saturday in casual attempts
of survival, where being below par becomes a cry
of celebration, cause to scream eagle albatross
condor birdie birdie birdie birdie birdie birdie
birdie the bones echo back
emptiness
The bittersweet beauty of this experience lies in the brevity. Attention is of the utmost importance. As in bird-watching, success depends on full presence of mind and body. One wrong step onto a stray twig––snap––and five months disappear in a flurry of green-white-blue kereru wood pigeon feathers. When I was hesitant about planning a trip to the alpine hot springs of the Copland Track because of the 13-hour roundtrip drive involved, my flatmate lovingly berated me:
Sophia, don’t be ridiculous. When are we ever going to be in New Zealand again?
This kind of existentialist approach to the abroad experience motivates me every day. I don’t know the next time I’ll be in New Zealand, or even in the Southern Hemisphere, again. All the friends I’ve made here come from varying geographical hometowns, ranging from Wellington to Vancouver and from New Jersey to SoCal, so I have no idea when I’ll see them again now that I have boarded the plane home. Of course, there’s always social media and texting to stay connected, but the importance of the experience is the here and now.
At Penn, time hovers over our shoulders, revs with the traffic on Walnut and Spruce, and speed-walks down Locust to make it to a 10:15 on time. Perhaps I’m carrying the fast-paced nature of Penn with me on my abroad journey.
However, there on the South Island, I already had the gift of time. Due to the time difference, I was sixteen hours ahead of my friends and family on the East Coast. My early Monday mornings were their cozy Sunday afternoons. Staying connected across these time zones usually requires mental math and late night willpower. But this abstract notion of living in the “future” reminded me that I had the luxury of enjoying each moment as it passes. Why rush through these important moments abroad? Just relax, slow down, and revel in the experience.
My semester in New Zealand have taught me to do exactly that. I saw the beautiful fjords and waterfalls of Milford Sound on a (very rainy) boat ride. I participated in adventure tourism in Queenstown by sky-diving and skiing. Along the West Coast, I hiked through the very humid and wet Alex Knob Track just for a view of the Franz Josef Glacier. The combination of high elevation and cold temperatures turned the rain to snow halfway up the trail. Even though the weather was miserable, I was elated. How often do you hike in a coastal rainforest during a snow flurry just for a glimpse of a glacier? I drove through Arthur’s Pass, a breathtaking valley cradled by mountains, and reveled in the glacial blue of Lake Tekapo. The steep white peaks of Mt. Cook National Park just exude majesty. The sheer variety of beauty I could experience in this country in less than a week was unreal.
So when people at Penn ask me their final question––was it fun?––I have no idea how to reply in a way that captures the fullness of my experience. How can I explain that I’ll forever be changed? I have been caught in the grips of this landscape and poetry may be my only release. My body may be back in Philly, but my soul soars with the red-tipped wings of alpine parrots, cascades with ephemeral waterfalls, and aches with the glacial weight of permanent change.
So I ramble:
It was so much fun! I did ––––– and then –– and also –––
And then I catch myself because I know they most likely have stopped listening five seconds ago, their attention caught by another shiny, dangling thing––the song switches at a party, the professor begins lecturing––and the pace of life goes on. The exhilaration of always having something else to accomplish, another assignment to turn in, another delusionship to fixate on while SABS-ing at ARCH.
But now, when a robin perches on a chained-up bicycle by Riepe or the ducks huddle on the frozen-over Schuylkill, I can pause. Breathe. Remember the lessons of poetic attention. Navigate my last few months at Penn the way I once explored Aotearoa: with curiosity, care. And once life becomes still and an inner quiet settles, perhaps then a bird will flutter into view, letting me catch a rare glimpse that blurs into infinity.
The Woodlands 