Country life

On my way back from a brief – they are always brief – visit to Hamilton this morning I was startled by a pheasant rising from the low right-hand side of State Highway 1 flying at a 45-degree angle to reach the top of the high trees on the left.

A couple of hundred metres further along, a harrier hawk sat at the side of the road, less than a metre back from the white line, pecking at a road-kill possum. Cars and trucks were whizzing by at 100 kph: it observed them calmly but didn’t budge from its lunch.

We didn’t get a lot of that when we lived in Auckland, half-way down Dominion Road.