Niue Island

Niue is located 1,491 miles northeast of New Zealand between Tonga and Samoa and Cook Islands. It is 100 square miles in area and is an upraised coral atoll. The major land features are caves, a steep limestone central plateau, sea cliffs and tide pools along coast, mountains and rainforests. In Niue they have warm days and at night it is cold. It is mostly raining and stormy. They have stormy and sunny but mostly storming.
Niue is unique because there are no endemic plants. All of the plants are either indigenous or native. Native plants consist of Gymnosporia vitiensis, Merrimai peltata (Iliana). Indigenouse plants consist of Schizaea dichotoma, Portulaca sameness, Calophyllum neo-ebudicum (tamanu). Tamanu is interesting because it is an introduced forestry tree, since it was not found on Niue until 1965. Large trees grow up to 75 feet in height. Elsewhere in Polynesia, where it is much more common, the hard, durable, beautiful, straight-grained wood is milled for commercial timber and is used locally for house posts, canoes, and making furniture and bowls. The fruits are commonly eaten by pigeons. Niueans use palm fronds to make grass skirts just like the Hawaiians didThere is only one endemic animal on Niue and that is the fish called Ecsenius niue, the combtooth blenny (www.fishbase.org). It lives in the reefs around Niue eating algae. Native animals include the Pacific Reef Heron (Egretta sacra), Great Frigate bird (Fregata minor), Wandering Tattler, and White Tern (Gigi’s Alba). This small tern is famous for laying its egg on bare thin branches in a small fork or depression without a nest. This behavior is unusual for terns, which generally nest on the ground.
Niue is off in the pacific by itself. No other islands are close by. Niue seems to have been settled by two groups. The first were from Samoa. The second were from Tonga. It took European missionaries awhile to get these islanders to become Christian. At first Niue was called