Environment – Night watch magic

Once the sun goes down, especially in winter, we humans hunker indoors, attached to screens or distracted by other media and distanced from the natural world. Weather, and the fact that we’re nocturnal sleepers, means that we’re in the dark about the goings on of the night. But, night watch reveals another muted, astounding, diverse and intriguing world.

Walking around at night, I’ve seen a clutch of wax-eyes huddled on the edge of a branch. A ruru roosting in the rafters of my carport, as well as dozens with their chests puffed out in a nighttime chorus on forest walks.

I’ve heard whales huffing off the coast. I’ve seen and heard rafts of penguins in the bay at Tiritiri Matangi, making their way onto land and shuffling across the beach to their roosts. And tuatara, moon bathing on concrete paths still warm from the sun. I’ve seen geckos in flax bushes, weta on branches and kiwi congregating at track crossroads on Motuora Island. I’ve had bats fluttering past my head when I stood on a high ridge counting kiwi calls on Te Hauturu o Toi/Little Barrier Island.

Then there is the phosphorescence and bioluminescence that lights up like lace on the edges of waves. Kayaking in the dark, I’ve also seen phosphorescence floating in globs and glowing like candles in the warm water off Waiwera, and the traces of startled and skittering fish and rays trailing through the bay as they’ve been disturbed by our shadowy shapes on the surface of the sea.

Insects are out at night as well, from psychedelic blue flatworms (maybe a caenoplana coerulea – a blue planarium) to puriri moths gathered around a street light, and more ruru gathered around them, feasting.

The struts, rigging and horizontal architecture of sheet web spiders are magnificent – and disturbing – at night. Some sheet web spiders can grow up to the size of a palm, and their webs can span up to a metre. When I was walking through a coastal forest at night a couple of weeks ago, it seemed there were spiders and their sheet webs everywhere. Each web had a large spider in its centre and, at one point, a spider saw us and scarpered to another less visible part of his web. It showed the spider was aware of our awareness of him, another example of sentience and theory of mind.

Elsewhere on the same forest track, we saw orb web spiders’ vertical, symmetrical, cartwheel-shaped webs radiating out with spokes from the centre. Their construction showed planning and geometry. They also showed huge effort and resourcefulness. Orb web spiders generally take their webs down at dawn and reconstruct them in the evening.

Some of those spiders and other insects might put us off wandering around in the dark, but there’s magic and mystery in the night, if only we look.