Meet the feijoa that really wants to be a kiwifruit
This little feijoa appears to be suffering from an identity crisis - it prefers to be a kiwifruit instead.
Matthew Cooper, 70, was picking up feijoas off his driveway when he found this little chap, shaped exactly like our unofficial national emblem, complete with the classic worm-seeking beak.
‘‘It was just sitting there on its own. I picked it up and thought ‘oh this looks different’. I didn’t put it in with the others.’’
He took a couple of pictures of it and put them on Facebook to show his friends.
‘‘So, that’s about five people,’’ he joked.
He immediately got comments from his son in New York and his daughter, who is on holiday in Rio.
Later he put pictures of the little feijoa kiwi on some Taranaki buy and sell Facebook sites. Just to show people, he said.
Soon after he had 869 hits and counting.
‘‘My phone hasn’t stopped, which is annoying.’’
And Cooper’s little feijoa kiwi is not alone. In Nelson, Richard Everts found something similar in his backyard and said he was lucky to get to it before the dog did.
While he had seen a few oddlyshaped feijoas in his time, he had never come across one that resembled a bird before.
‘‘Most of them are oval, but occasionally you get strange shapes from where they have rubbed up against a tree branch or something like that.
‘‘It is just one of the box, it is a freak of nature.’’
Everts said he had no special plans for the kiwi-shaped fruit, other than to maybe eat it for dessert.
‘‘It just seems a pity to cut it open.’’
Everts said the family loved feijoas so much so that they had about four feijoa trees, and at this time of year, the trees bore more fruit than they could process each day.