Wildlife encounters

I've said this to a lot of people now, but you don't necessarily come to New Zealand for the wildlife.  Sure they have a few unique and awesome animals, the kiwi and tuatara jump to mind immediately, but for the most part, you don't really experience too much wildlife.  A few birds will be singing in the morning, a few night noises, but especially after being in Australia where every morning you are awakened by the sounds of several species of birds all trying to make the most obnoxious or beautiful sound, being in New Zealand you tend to forget there are such things as "wild animals". 

 Today I was reminded.  Not by anything spectacular mind you, but by cicadas and sparrows (maybe neither being native?  Well the sparrows aren't for sure).  The cicadas would crawl out of the ground in their larval stage at night, climb up my tent, then hatch into adults. It was a little annoying, the scratching all night on the outside of my tent.  Also potentially disconcerting, those guys can be a little freaky.  But luckily as a kid I loved to find the shed shells, collect them and put them on my siblings, parents or grandma (don't worry, they were all pretty used to it).  So I wasn't too afraid of them, I knew they weren't going to chew through my tent or anything. But in the morning I got another disturbance, this time from the sparrows, flying up under the fly of my tent and snatching the newly hatched cicadas, so I would wake up to sparrows beating their wings against my tent.  Taking down my tent there were still several cicadas that escaped the sparrows, although how much longer they survived after I transferred them to trees it's hard to say.  As well as the cicadas, I had a few spiders taking up residence under the fly of my tent.  What can I say, it's a good shelter!