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Last week, staff from the iSites at Tauranga and Mount Maunganui visited Katikati to familiarise themselves with the local attractions.

This week's Write Space by Margaret Beverland.

As a member of the Haiku Pathway committee, I had 20 minutes to acquaint them with our unique Pathway, Katikati's millennium project, and to point out its attraction as a tourist destination.

Earlier this year, I had been on an Alaskan cruise, and by the time we stopped at Juneau, I was ready to get away from the cruise crowd.

On this stop I elected not to go whale watching, zip lining, kayaking or viewing a salmon-canning factory.

I caught the local bus out to the Mendenhall Glacier and went for a walk, found my land legs again and enjoyed the peace and wild beauty of the landscape.

So this was my plug for the Pathway.

Somewhere peaceful and unique, and it is that, being the only such pathway, outside of Japan, in the Southern Hemisphere.

While working on the maintenance of the haiku boulders I have been approached by visitors who have been astonished to find a walk with so much bird life where they least expected it, stretching from the coast and along the river that flows through the centre of a small town. And of course the boulders with their poems blow them away.

There is quite a variety of birds that inhabit the Pathway, and as I rattled off names to my iSite visitors, one young woman gasped and said, ‘Pukekos! Oh, they are horrible birds. I only learned today that they kill baby ducklings.'

The poor old pukeko gets a lot of stick for killing cute, fluffy ducklings.

My neighbour, who recently moved down from Auckland, would annihilate every pukeko in the land in her bid to save fluffy little ducklings.

Stoats, rats, eels, hawk, cats – domestic and wild – and dogs kill ducklings too. So far, there has been no mention of annihilating all these as well, just the pukeko going about the business of survival as Nature intended.

I mentioned my neighbour to the young woman from iSite and told her my stock answer to such reasoning.

'Once you are through with pukekos, will you then migrate to Africa and kill all lions, cheetahs and other feline species that kill dear little bambi-esque type creatures to dine on?”

An intelligent person, my iSite visitor got my line of reasoning.

Nature, amazing and beautiful on the one hand can be, to our civilised thinking, quite cruel on the other.

This maintained a healthy balance of the species, until man became civilised and began to develop the world.

How many species have we lost in the name of progress? Man has so much to answer for; pukeko, with their own cute fluffy chicks, are innocent. Let them be.