...and sometimes it really doesn't.
Okay, so going in and out of quarantine forty-seven times started to get just a little bit tedious, and the seventeen-hour work day did begin to get a tiny bit long by the end of it, however when it involves coming here..
...and meeting these guys..
...you tend to suck it in and thank your lucky stars.
I have to say the Takahe were really cool. They were originally thought to be extinct, but were rediscovered in the 1940s. Today there are 225 of them surviving in New Zealand. They reckon numbers have slowly whittled away due to loss of habitat and introduced predators. But I reckon they only have themselves to blame for their demise - I mean look at them, they look so goddamned tasty.
There are twelve Takahe on the island, and we got to meet five of them. They would saunter over and say hi. Yesterday when I told my niece that I had met a blue bird with red lipstick and red stockings and shoes, I don't think she could decide whether I was telling the truth or mixing my meds.
While I had an enormous amount of time for the Takahe, I didn't find the brown frog quite so captivating. They were small, brown, nocturnal, looked like, well, bark and didn't actually appear to be that bright. 
'FROG ON THE TRACK!'
'Where?'
'Just where you are about to put your left foot!'
'But that's just a piece of bark - oh.'
Walk, walk, wal-
'FROG ON THE TRACK!'
'Huh?'
'Just up to your right.'
'You'd think if they had any sense of self preservation, they'd leapfrog their little brown butts out of the way, if I can't see them, how can I know not to stand on them?'
And in one sentence I effectively alienated myself from all the frog lovers around me (but possibly not quite as badly as one of the bods on my team being overheard suggesting that a basil and pine nut stuffing would go really well with roast Takahe.)
