Mainz Daily Photo

Kina @ Kina – #896

This is kina, the Māori name for the sea urchin or Evechinus chloroticus.
When they’re all dressed up with spines and stuff, there’s a distinct similarity to a hedgehog (the Middle English name for which was Urcheon).
Not quite as fast, of course, and with a smaller brain (no brain at all, actually – just nerve cells).
And no legs.
A delicacy, so they say, but – despite being an omnivore (necessary for survival as a child, given Mum’s cooking skills…), I’ve never tried one.
You’re allowed to harvest 50 a day.
We only saw 7.
All dead….
Around here, though, Kina means the Kina Peninsula, the Tasman Golf Club and the Kina Cliffs (or Moutere Bluffs), a fairly fragile geological structure of pebbles held together by clay and gradually reverting to its original components.
Helped along – if you believed the papers at the time – by a rich American who bought great chunks of land on the coastline and thought it would be a Good Idea (it wasn’t..) to do some landscaping with a bulldozer.

Threats were made to confiscate his toys.

The cliffs were saved.

This entry was published on 25 February, 2010 at 20:00. It’s filed under not the nelson daily photo and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

2 thoughts on “Kina @ Kina – #896

  1. Pingback: If this is Kina Beach….. #1828 | Mainz Daily Photo

  2. >Oh, those damned pushy Americans! The "sand" reminds me a bit of some of the landscape on the Hawaiian Islands. It appears to be such a beautiful area!

Leave a reply - you don't need to enter your email address, but I moderate new visitors to avoid getting murdered by spam.

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: