Hiwi The Kiwi

                     The Entertaining Minstrel From Hiwi The Kiwi

Today Hiwi The Kiwi visited St Mary’s. The Minstrel sang some songs at the start while my class was waiting for the other classes to arrive. After that, he taught us some actions and words we should repeat. The first song he included us in was Pukeko Echo.  Sometimes he would say “Put a little sugar in that shake” and we would all do this dance, we had to stand up for this fun song. We clapped while we walked from side to side, and we did the roly poly thing with our hands.

He told us about how to save our fish and our seabirds. He said to pick up a fish with a wet towel so you don’t give the fish sunburn with your bare hands. Sometimes some of the scales can peel off of the fish as well if you touch it with your bare hands. Make sure to put down your hook and bait down in the water as quick as possible as well, because some seabirds are looking for a feed, and they’re gonna go for your bait not knowing there’s a hook, and you might end up catching a seabird, not a fish! He made this song about how you could catch a seabird and not a fish. It goes a little something like “I want a snapper! Not an albatross!”

He was very entertaining. He said to always wear a lifejacket before you go on a boat or a yacht or anything else. And if your dad just leaves the lifejacket at the front of the boat and says he’ll just quickly put it on when there’s a boat emergency, tell him to stop. STOP. STOP! It might be too late to put on the lifejacket, what if it happens so fast that he doesn’t have enough time to put on his lifejacket because it’s already sunk with the boat? He told us about a story. There was a 4 year-old girl who wore a lifejacket, but her dad left it at the front of the boat and didn’t put it on. The boat crashed, and it was too late, he couldn’t survive and get his lifejacket. The little girl stayed in the water for 3 hours until a rescue boat came and found her floating. But her dad died, because he didn’t put on his lifejacket.

Back to the real world, there were some things he said, like Fish for the future, save our seabirds, and he also talked about how we need to save black petrol birds. Hiwi the kiwi is on a mission to save these poor black petrol birds. There are hardly any left! Black petrol birds nest at the Little Great Barrier Islands in Auckland. He said to bring a plastic bag every time you go fishing and pick up every bit of rubbish on the sea so we can save our hungry seabirds from eating those little plastic bottle caps and other plastic things.

One seabird ate a little blue milk bottle cap thinking it was a fish, and then nothing else could go down the seabird’s throat and the seabird couldn’t eat anything anymore because the blue bottle cap blocked the food from going into it’s belly. I felt so bad for the seabirds because they were dying. Okay, enough about seabirds, more about fish!

Make sure to bring a fish measurer on your boat. A fish measurer should tell you how long a normal fish type should be, It should tell you the length of a snapper, a piranha, etc. If the fish is smaller than what it should be, that means it’s a little baby fish, so you throw it back into the water. If the fish is too big, DON’T KEEP IT! Throw it back right now, this instant, don’t wait and take a picture, just throw it back in. Wait, yup, you can wait to take a picture because it’s so big, but after you MUST put it back into the water. If it’s too big, that means the fish is pregnant. So if you take it home, the baby fish inside it’s tummy never got a chance to be born like other fish! So sad. And that’s why you should put that big whopper back into the ocean.

The Minstrel is a great storyteller, and I enjoyed meeting him at the hall at St Mary’s. Oh. My. Lord. I just realized that I have written so much that I must’ve got lost in my mind telling you all about it! You’ve probably stopped reading already, or have you? Oh my lord, 787 words! Yay.