[Ag-eq] A little peep into New Zealand ecology

[Jewel]

New Zealand broke away from the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland and floated off to make its 
own way in the evolving world about 80 million years ago.

This isolation gave rise too many unique species of birds, ranging from the rifleman, about the size 
of a humming bird to the giant Moa, the largest of which weighed in at 500 pounds and topped 12 feet 
in height;  interestingly, the female far exceeded the male both in weight and height.  Her ladyship 
was 1 and a half times the weight and 2.8 times the height.
There was only one predator, and a fiercesome one at that:  the giant forest eagle:  Haast's eagle: 
whose sole prey was the Moa, so as the other birds had nothing to fear, and their food supply being 
within walking distance on the ground or in the trees, many of them gave up flight altogether, and 
the others were very poor fliers just retaining enough flight to be able to jump from one tree to 
the next! therefore, while Australia gave rise to many and varied species of marsupial, New Zealand 
became the home of the flightless and ground-nesting bird.
This was an idyllic place for these flightless birds:  that is:  idyllic until this paradise was 
discovered by Koti, a polynesian explorer.
He wasted no time in sailing back to his people in polynesia with news of this wonderful land he had 
stumbled across"  a land "flowing with milk and honey" not really but you get my drift, just sitting 
there a hop, step and a jump away in the south-west Pacific waiting for them, so they packed their 
belongings into, what is known as The Great Fleet" and came!
Whether it was intentional or not, and I think that it, probably, was intentional as it would have 
been a food source, they brought bush rats:  Kiore: [pronounced i as in steel, o as in stork and e 
as in step].
I doubt that the Kiore had to much of an effect on the bird population as it is, primarily, a seed 
eater, but these rapacious human beings who were now spreading throughout the land were a  very 
different story.
The birds were just so easy to catch, and the Moa, in particular, provided such a huge return for 
the  easy hunt that they were exterminated within a couple of hundred years of the arrival of the 
Maori, and with the Moa went the forest eagle:
"No moa Moa, no moa eagle!"
The tenuous remnants of this once bird's heaven was to be, even more, severely threatened with the 
arrival of Europeans.
Firstly, the british navigator Captain James Cook released pigs and goats,  and after him came 
whalers and sealers with their ubiquitous hangers-on of Norwegian ship rats,  and then in the second 
half of the 19th century, with the rapid escalation of European settlement,Clansy lowered the boom!
The founding fathers, in their wisdom,  HOLLOW  LAUGHTER!   started by importing 6 pairs of rabbits, 
the progeny of which were intended to provide * sport for the gentlemen farmers, but the 6 pairs of 
rabbits vanished into the countryside, and got on with what rabbits are supremely good at, and 
before too many years had past, there were millions of bunnies chewing their way through the land.
This flood of voracious mouths had to be stopped, so, in what proved to be a futile, attempt at 
control,  weasels, stoats and ferrets which were very efficient predators at home in Britain were 
imported, but it was no time at all before these little killing machines figured out that, rather 
than use up energy pursuing the fleet-footed and crafty bunny, there were  much easier meals just 
sitting around with signs out saying:  "DINE  HERE!"  and once they had dispatched the adult bird, 
there was a damned good chance that, not far away, they would find a nest of chicks or eggs:  Oh 
goody goody gum drops:  life is so sweet!
Another introduced animal which has become, yet one more, of the list of exotic animals that have 
become a plague of biblical proportions is the Australian Ringed-tail possum.
Some bright spark thought that possums could provide material for a fur industry!  Oh the sorrow 
that hare-brained thought has given rise to!
I can't even dream of how many millions of dollars have been spent trying to control the feral 
population, but none of the controls have much noticeable effect.  They do untold damage to the bush 
by stripping it of thousands of tons of leaves and flowers, and now it has been found that their 
apetite doesn't stop at leaves and flowers, but they are rather partial to little chicks and eggs as 
well!
 New Zealand does not have, and never has had snakes;  our only reptiles are several varieties of 
geckos and skinks, along  with the pseudoreptile,  the one and only Tuatara which existed at the 
time of the dinosaur and has, note the present tense,  far outlived it!  Our only native mammals are 
3 species of bat;  one is thought to be extinct, but healthy colonies of the remaining two have, 
recently, been discovered.  One of them, the short-eared bat I think, is, like so many of the birds 
that completed the process thousands of years ago, , moving towards giving up flight.  It, rarely, 
takes to the air, and just scuttles around on the ground

Jewel.