Conservation comes down to values. Do we only focus on the charismatic animals and the things we can see, or do we conserve the out-of-sight, out-of-mind Lilliputs? If that world collapses, you can be sure ours is next.
I’m standing in the basement of our National Museum Te Papa Tongarewa surrounded by the ghostly remains of New Zealand’s bygone bird fauna.
The eastern moa is stuck fast in the swamp, its thick legs having punched through the peat into the liquid blue clay beneath. Death is inevitable, whether from starvation or from above.
Unable to move, the moa can only eat what it can reach around it, if anything. The forests that covered this area during warmer times are but a dim memory in the recesses of time. Instead, the swamp is surrounded by tussock grass and celery pine. Occasionally the moa tries to escape in vain from the swamp’s tight grasp, bumping against the bones of its brethren preserved in this death trap.
I’m staring at an evolutionary tree of New Zealand wrens when ‘damn it Travers’ rings out. The infamous Victorian collector Henry Hamersley Travers had just struck again.
In front of me also are the delicate historical skins of some of these tiny wrens, frozen in time since the day they were collected. While some are still with us like the pīwauwau rock wren (Xenicus gilviventris), others are extinct like mātuhituhi bush wren (X. longipes) that was only driven to extinction by rats a mere ten years before I was born. More so than fossil bones, these precious skins are hauntingly beautiful in their detail. No need to infer what they looked like alive.
It’s skins like these, and other historical museum specimens, that offer scientists and conservationists a unique window into how our unique biodiversity was faring at the time of European arrival. Having survived the impacts of Polynesian colonisation, some by the skin of their beak, our biodiversity was about to face a new swathe of threats from further environmental modification, ruthless predators, and the museum trade. Continue reading “Lost in translation or deliberate falsification?”
I’m deep in the middle of the Kā Tiritiri o te Moana Southern Alps with Michael Knapp collecting beech leaves and ripping apart rotting logs on the hunt for giant collembola. Some 17 years later, these precious beech samples would allow Michael and I to answer one of the longest-running debates in New Zealand botany.
When Polynesians arrived on that fateful day in Aotearoa New Zealand some 750 years ago, around 80% of the country was covered in large tracts of forest that would have made an Ent proud. However, wind back the clock to the height of the last Ice Age 19,000-29,000 years ago and we enter an alien world. Sea levels were 120 metres lower, connecting the three main islands of New Zealand – you could walk from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to Ōtepoti Dunedin without having to take the Interisland Ferry across Raukawa Moana Cook Strait. The Lake Taupō super volcano had just erupted burying most of Te Ika-a-Māui North Island under ash, while at the same time the Southern Alps were covered in a vast ice sheet. Forests became climate refugees and retreated to warmer northern areas of both main islands, and White Walkers roamed the land…nope, sorry, that’s Game of Thrones. Continue reading “Climate refugee or hardy local? Solving a botanical mystery”
‘Are you sitting down?’ the ominous words came down the phone line. Usually, that means something less than happy is about to be imparted. ‘It’s about your grandparents ….’
I grew up in the sunshine capital of Aotearoa New Zealand. My maternal grandparents lived just down the road. My grandfather was always a big part of my life. When not working in his immaculate garden that had featured on Maggie Barry’s Garden Show, he would be pottering around ours. ‘Escaping Grandma’, he would joke. In his workshop (one that would put Father Christmas to shame), he built us the wooden toys my own kids still play with and helped me refurbish my centreboard yacht. Grandpa’s steamed fruit pudding was always a firm favourite and something we, as his grandchildren, have been trying to recreate ever since. He was the best grandfather a kid could have, and the type of grandpa I want for my kids, especially given my own Dad’s early death when I was thirteen. Continue reading “Skeletons in the closet: my ancestry DNA story”
“See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me. And no one knows how far it goes”.
If you’ve seen Disney’s Moana, like me you probably just sung those first few lines whilst picturing a traditional double-hulled canoe sailing out into the sunny, blue abyss.
Discovering new lands: a modern reconstruction of a traditional double-hulled voyaging canoe. FlickrCC.
Sparked from a desire to explore the final frontier, to boldly go where no one has gone before, or driven from Hawaiki as a result of resource depletion, overpopulation or just plain old exile, ancient Polynesian sea voyages were no such fairy-tale. Imagine watching solid-ground fade away into the horizon knowing there’s a good chance you’ll sail into forever, die at the mercy of the Polynesian sea deity Tangaroa and be lost from the knowledge of men. Not surprisingly this notion was missing from Moana. Continue reading “Aotearoa: Land of the long or short chronology”
A moa walks across a vast flood plain, its feet sinking into the soft mud. Once buried by the next flood, the footprints left behind harden. Millions of years later, a farmhand taking the dogs for a swim on a hot day makes the discovery of a lifetime.
Seven footprints, around 25 cm in diameter, were recently discovered in the bed of the Kye Burn River, near Ranfurly, exposed after summer flooding. Such is the importance of this discovery, they represent the first moa trackway for the South Island and potentially the oldest in Aotearoa New Zealand. Thanks to the hard work of Otago Museum and scientists from the University of Otago’s Geology Department, this ara-moa has been saved from being erased from our biological heritage forever.
An Australian company’s application to mine a fossil-rich site in the south of New Zealand has been met with fierce criticism and a campaign to protect it in perpetuity.
Visit any major museum in Aotearoa New Zealand and you will see a giant moa skeleton on display. The first thing you notice, apart from its enormous size, is the complete lack of wing bones. The answer to how the tūpuna of moa arrived on our shores and subsequently lost their wings has been one of New Zealand’s greatest evolutionary mysteries.
Pin the wings on the moa….what wings? The South Island giant moa skeleton in the entrance of Canterbury Museum that so fascinated my five-year-old palaeontologist.
Moa, and our other national bird, the kiwi, are members of an ancient super group of birds called palaeognaths (derived from the Greek for ‘old jaws’, referring to the primitive-looking roof of their mouth), very different to their evolutionary rivals, the neognaths (new jaw) that include all other birds alive today. Continue reading “How to make a flightless bird”
In a rockshelter at the base of a giant two-storey house-sized boulder, Jamie and Janet strike pay dirt. A few centimetres under the floor of this dry overhang are the tell tale signs of a prehistoric megafaunal latrine.
We’re going on a moa hunt: bones and coprolites can be found under giant boulders like this one. Photo courtesy of Jamie Wood.
Jamie Wood and Janet Wilmshurst, from Maanaki Whenua Landcare Research, are deep within an ancient Fangorn-like forest at Daley’s Flat in the upper reaches of the Dart River Valley. Snow-capped mountains, tall enough to make you feel quite insignificant in the geological timescale, surround this U-shaped glacial valley.
The floor of this goblin forest, dominated by red and mountain beech, is carpeted in a thick blanket of moss. Put a foot wrong and you’re likely to fall down a crevasse into the dark unknown. Starting life as an epic rock avalanche brought down by an Alpine Fault rupture at least 1000 years ago (in what turns out to be the only case in the world of using prehistoric bird poo to date an earthquake), the area is now home to some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s precious and picturesque indigenous forest, relatively untouched by humans. It has escaped Polynesian and European burning, climate change, forestry and agriculture. The biggest risk are the pesky deer, which leave distinct browse lines in the forest understory – everything palatable below the line has been eaten out. Continue reading “Are deer the new moa revisited: the MythBusters episode”
