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

Sat Apr 20 06:31:16 UTC 2013

  Jewel:

Does New Zealand really have tuataras?

You're saying the only mammals before discovery were 3 types of bats?

So this means that before discovery New Zealand only hhad birds, lizards and
bats?

How very interesting; I love learning stuff like this.  We humans really know
how to screw up ecosystems.  I'm sure all kinds of harmful plants wer
introduced as well.

Does your property get over run with rabbits?

I would love to hear more about this.

Nella

Quoting Jewel <jewelblanch at kinect.co.nz>:

> 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.
>
>
>
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