Trout and salmon get all the attention. They're not the only thing worth watching.

Trout and salmon get all the attention, but they're far from the only thing worth watching out here. The forests, shorelines and mountainsides around Lake Wānaka and Lake Hāwea are stacked with native life, and a day on the water is just as much a wildlife tour as it is a fishing trip — you just have to look up from the rod every now and then.

A day on the water is just as much a wildlife tour as it is a fishing trip.

Beech Forest and Alpine Tussock

The lower hillsides around both lakes are cloaked in native beech forest — silver beech and mountain beech, depending on altitude and which way the slope faces — forming dense, hushed stands that in places run right down and dip their roots in the water. Climb higher and the beech gives way to tussock, that golden, wind-combed grass that owns the high country above the treeline and turns the mountains that particular burnished colour through the drier months.

Birdlife on the Water

The lakes themselves are busy with native waterbirds if you know where to look. Paradise shelducks are the easiest to spot, cruising in pairs along the shoreline — the male grey-headed, the female unmistakable with her stark white head. New Zealand scaup, small dark diving ducks, work the quieter bays, vanishing underwater after food instead of dabbling at the surface like everyone else. Pied shags and little shags perch on rocks and jetties with their wings spread out to dry, looking faintly ridiculous and entirely unbothered by it. And back in the beech forest, keep an ear out — bellbird and tūī both put on a proper show, layering notes on top of each other in a way no speaker system could fake.

Native Fish Below the Surface

Trout and salmon aren't the only fish in the water — they're sharing it with New Zealand's own natives. Long-finned eels, some of them old enough to have outlived several generations of the trout swimming past them, live throughout both lakes and their feeder streams, and get noticeably more active after dark. Smaller and far less flashy, native galaxiid species hang on in some of the little streams feeding the lakes — easy to overlook, but genuinely important to the whole freshwater picture even if you'll probably never see one.

A Landscape Worth Slowing Down For

None of this competes with the fishing — it's part of the same thing. A slow trolling run past a shelduck working a bay, or a still morning with mist hanging low in the beech forest above the shoreline, is exactly as much a part of a day out here as whatever ends up on the end of the line. Sometimes more.

Want to see it all from the water? A full-day lake tour takes you past exactly this kind of scenery and wildlife.