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Arrived in Auckland!


fmueller

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To all the folks who provided me with a warm welcome and good advice when I announced that I would move from Ohio to Auckland - I am here now!

Probably not as interesting for you as for non-Kiwis, but I have added some photos from our first days to my web site:

http://www.fmueller.com/home/photograph ... mber-2014/

Love the Tui!

Tui-2.jpg

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Winter? What winter? Winter is when there is snow on the ground. Auckland might have a no-swimming season, but so far there have been only a couple of days when I found it a little chilly for shorts, and most folks in Ohio would probably consider me a wuss for that :bggrn:

The dogs did good. It's only 10 days in quarantine now. They do lots of testing before, and the preparations begin a year before they leave. At any rate, we send them off before the movers picked up our stuff in Ohio. When we arrived in NZ, it was only a few days before we could pick them up, and we had to hureurry to get a rental house and a car - easier to do without them around.

Right now Panda is sleeping on his new dog bed and Molly is woofing at the Tui outside.

Furniture is a bit thin on the ground here. I am guessing easily another months before most of our worldly belongings will arrive in a container.

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welcome along

I see that the tank you just got housed Giant kokopu in a past life, come on try something new in fishkeeping. I suspect the stream at the end of you road will have whitebait in it at the moment (along with bullies and koura?)- to start a native collection

I've been face to face with a Koura in that stream, getting to that spot was a pain, but I was being paid to be there. I actually grew up in that valley.

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David R - Some problems go away if you throw money at them. I am not usually in the luxurious position to be able to do so, but in this case my wife's new employer footed the bill to pay a re-location company to find something for us. We had looked forever online without any luck - always 'no pets allowed'. They showed us 6 places in one day. 3 were dumps, 2 were decent options, 1 was head and shoulders above the rest, and we picked it. I asked them how they do it, and they ring up everybody with a decent property, present their client in the best possible light, and talk them into the dogs! Apparently if you make a gazillion phone calls, eventually you find some people who change their mind on the pets!

Caryl - I have a brother in law in Blenheim. He works for one of the bottling plants and usually has a good drop at home or two. Next time I visit, I'll let you know, and maybe I can check out your tanks!

SanityChelle - Thanks for the tip!

aotealotl - Ich hoere da gibt's die besten Aprikosen :wink:

blueether, #!CrunchBang - tell me more about that native option. My wife's work has been thinking about a native display tank. At this stage it is just an idea they have been entertaining, and they told my wife when she mentioned I am into fish. If I really wanted to pursue this, presumably they'd pay for the setup, and maybe a small fee for maintenance, but that would all have to be fleshed out. I have not really followed it up, because I don't know much about native NZ fish. Assuming that I would not sell my new tank, how large of a tank would they need to make this worthwhile? #!CrunchBang, are you a grad at AUT?

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Welcome!

That's a very nice postcard-worthy photo of a Tui. I haven't seen a high-angle shot of one before.

Male red-finned bullies (Gobiomorphus huttoni) and koaro are two of our native freshwater fish which have a lot of colour. They need a saltwater phase in their lifecycle though. Other bullies are more drab but you can watch their whole lifecycle in a freshwater tank.

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Yellow - I was pretty happy with my Tui shots, but what probably prevents them from being postcard status is that they show a native NZ bird in an Aussie bush. If the Tui was in a Kowhai, that would be a whole different story :)

blueether - They want a really showy tank with natives. IMHO they are setting themselves up for disappointment, because natives are never going to be showy in the way marine fish or Malawi cichlids are. That's what I would recommend for a public show tank, because they are going to grab the attention of anybody just walking past the tank. For a home tank, I am more of a Tanganyikan guy, and natives might fall in a similar category. They can also be colorful, but you need to sit down in front of the tank and spend a bit of time to appreciate it - and maybe observe some of their interesting behaviors.

aotealotl - I have my sources 8)

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It's only because your signature says "Graduate". To me this implied that you are still at uni, but I guess the term might be used differently in NZ. My wife works for the poor cousins - AUT. She is a chemist, but in the applied science department, where most of her colleagues are ecologists.

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