I was not just tagging along with the boys to see what they got up to. My part of the survey was, what else, to check out the plant life.

Every day I would go out, with either GR or DC, and tag along as they did their stuff. I really do mean tag along, I would be rummaging in the shrubbery and they would be striding off into the distance hunting goats or birds. Honestly, you can't botanise properly at walking speed. On the last day I spend and hour botanising by myself around the tunnel. I probably managed to walk all of 500 m in that time. It certainly only took me 10 minutes to walk back to the start.

But still, I wanted to see quite a bit of the area, and just didn't feel confident enough to wander off by myself. So I compromised and would jog between foraging sessions, or make the boys wait for me while I caught up.

This is where I have to make a confession. I am not a botanist, though that is what I am most interested in, I am an ecologist. At University, I took Zoology and Cell Biology for my undergraduate papers, Botany didn't really feature. That developed later in my academic career. For my PhD I had to rapidly relearn a whole range of tree species, but didn't really bother with the shrubs, herbs or ferns and totally ignored all the grasses. I did explain this to my interview panel when I applied for this job, but they picked me anyway. So, now I am on a very steep learning curve, trying to squeeze in a whole range of species I've never encountered before.

I love it!!!!!! Great fun, but it can get a bit much at times. I took pieces from any plant species that I didn't know and dried them between newspaper. Then I spend a week going through them and trying to identify them. I developed a major case of "identification overload". I asked our botanist to check my conclusions just to be sure.

The final total: 170 species identified (not bad for a beginner, but not a very rich flora either). The biases in my botanical interest show up quite well. I identified more that 40 trees and shrubs and found about 12 different species of orchid. Only about 12 species of grass, and there must be many more than that out there. Still great finding all those orchid species.

The most exciting one is a Gastrodia orchid (G. cunninghamii), a really cool plant. Only about 30 cm tall in this picture. It is an epiparasite, which means parasitic but not directly so. This orchid can not manufacture it's own energy by photosynthesis, like every other plant does, but draws energy from an associated fungus. This fungus in turn can be parasitic on other plants (often beech trees) or be digesting rotted wood. This explains why the orchid is brown all over, no photosynthetic tissue at all. There are four species of Gastrodia in New Zealand and they are distinguished by the length of the stem, number of flowers and colour (shades of brown) and arrangement of flower parts.

This 12-cm tall Pterostylis banksii is neat for another reason. It is insect pollinated and inside the flower there is a catapulting lip. When an insect lands on that it triggers and slams the insect into the pollen sacks at the back of the flower. Forceful pollen pick up, any pollen collected from another flower also brushes off on the pistil, which lurks in the back of the flower. I quite enjoy playing insect and triggering the flower by poking grass at the lip. The trigger resets itself after a while, ready to deal with another insect.

Most of the orchids in New Zealand are very small; the two above (Corybas macranthus on the left and Chiloglottis cornuta on the right) are 4 and 5 cm tall respectively. Therefore, you really have to keep your eye on the ground to spot them. It was very hard to find intact flowering orchids. One reason is that they only flower for a short period and then disappear underground until next year. The other is that with high stock and wild animal numbers any orchids that do flower promptly get their heads bitten off.

I found about 23 species of fern (or fern associate such as the more primitive Lycopodiums) from tall tree ferns to delicate, one cell thick, filmy ferns. My favourites are the appropriately named kidney fern (Cardiomanes reniforme), the maidenhair fern (Adiantum cunninghamii) and the fibrous tree fern (Dicksonia fibrosa).

The kidney fern is one of the filmy ferns. The fronds are translucent and you look right through them. These ferns are surprisingly hardy and can be found in quite dry places, which is unusual because most filmy ferns need high moisture conditions. This makes sense, if you one have one layer of cells then it is very easy to lose moisture. When kidney fern fronds are sexually mature, they have a fringe of brown beads along the top edge, like a crown.

I like the maidenhair fern because it is a common houseplant. Houseplants don't start off that way, somebody has to find them in the forest first. So finding these plants growing in their original situation is intriguing and amusing. This species of maidenhair fern is quite common in the wild. The other larger species is much less common.

Most Dicksonia fibrosa tree ferns (also known as the golden tree fern) were crowned by new fronds, which look absolutely stunning in the early morning light. The trunks are very wide and look rather as if a cocos mat has been wrapped around the trunk (hence the name fibrosa). In one area, I found that most trunks had one to eight holes bored in them. They were about 5 cm in diameter and anything from a couple of centimetres to 20 cm deep. I couldn't work out what had caused these. Then DC found the evidence, a nest of kingfishers, mum scrunched up in a corner anxiously watching over 5 eggs as we peered in. Kingfishers are hole nesters, they often dig holes in clay banks, but I had never come across them nesting in tree ferns before.

I was hoping to tell you about my second ever helicopter trip and more about the Ruahines, but another bout of Glandular fever put me in bed for a week, so I missed out. Sometime soon hopefully.