Two mysterious orange road cones appeared overnight yesterday - atop a pair of Norfolk pines in Stillwater, north of Auckland.
"They've got to be 30m or 40m off the ground - [the trees are] huge," said Phil Shaw, 80.
"One of the pines had a cone put on it ages ago, back last summer probably, but now there are two, and they're the two biggest pines here.
"You wonder how in the world they'd get up there," he said.
"Whoever took them up there had to be fairly strong. It wouldn't be a small person ... It would be shaky when they got to the top, too," said the local resident.
He said the pines on private property were best viewed from the Stillwater Boat Club. Because of their height, he said the homeowners hadn't noticed the orange plastic additions.
Norfolk Pines can grow to 50m to 65m.