A newly created duckpond

On my afternoon walk today I saw four immature mallards on a grassy knoll. They saw me more or less at the same time as I saw them and by the time I had repositioned myself to be able to include all four in the photo, they had entered the water of what is now a duckpond.

Before the rains of the last week, this pond did not exist. It is in a large dip between two properties, and water ran off each and filled the hollow. The land is higher towards the road, so the outflow is minimal. From the murkiness of the water, Iimagine that a lot of the water in the duckpond has run off the bush-covered slope below the lower pipeline.

The New Zealand Herald (Auckland's daily print newspaper) carried a photo this morning showing a large section of the Kopu to Hikuai road had been dragged downwards when a hillside slipped down. When I was a boy the family would occasionally travel to Whitianga on the east side of the Coromandel peninsula to visit friends of my parents. In those days we travelled on what was known as the Coroglen Road. This was a steep and very windy gravel road, on which one hoped to not meet a car coming the other way, as it was also rather narrow. Years later when I was at University, the Coroglen Road was made redundant when local roads in Kopu (on the west) and Hikuai (on the east) were joined. It is that join where the collapse has happened.

When my father was a boy his father had a dairy farm at Hikuai