New Zealand

by William Pember Reeves

IN MILFORD SOUND

Scarcely anywhere can the eye take in the whole of an inlet at once. The narrower fiords wind, the wider are sprinkled with islets. As the vessel slowly moves on, the scene changes; a fresh vista opens out with every mile; the gazer comes to every bend with undiminished expectation. The two longest of the gulfs measure twenty-two miles from gates to inmost ends. Milford is barely nine miles long—but how many scenes are met with in those nine! No sooner does the sense of confinement between dark and terrific heights become oppressive than some high prospect opens out to the upward gaze, and the sunshine lightens up the wooded shoulders and glittering snow-fields of some distant mount. Then the whole realm is so utterly wild, so unspoiled and unprofaned. Man has done nothing to injure or wreck it. Nowhere have you to avert your eyes to avoid seeing blackened tracts, the work of axe and fire. The absurdities of man’s architecture are not here, nor his litter, dirt and stenches. The clean, beautiful wilderness goes on and on, far as the eye can travel and farther by many a league. Protected on one side by the ocean, on the other by the mountainous labyrinth, it stretches with its deep gulfs and virgin valleys to remain the delight and refreshment of generations wearied with the smoke and soilure of the cities of men.

ON THE CLINTON RIVER

We often call this largest of our national parks a paradise. To apply the term to such a wilderness is a curious instance of change in the use of words. The Persian “paradise” was a hunting-ground where the great king could chase wild beasts without interruption. In our south-west, on the contrary, guns and bird-snaring are alike forbidden, and animal life is preserved, not to be hunted, but to be observed. As most of my readers know, the birds of our islands, by their variety and singularity, atone for the almost complete absence of four-footed mammals. The most curious are the flightless kinds. Not that these comprise all that is interesting in our bird-life by any means. The rare stitch-bird; those beautiful singers, the tui, bell-bird, and saddle-back; many marine birds, and those friendly little creatures the robins and fantails of the bush, amuse others as well as the zoologists. But the flightless birds—the roa, the grey kiwi, the takahé, the kakapo, the flightless duck of the Aucklands, and the weka—are our chief scientific treasures, unless the tuatara lizard and the short-tailed bat may be considered to rival them. Some of our ground-birds have the further claim on the attention of science, that they are the relatives of the extinct and gigantic moa. That monstrous, and probably harmless, animal was exterminated by fires and Maori hunters centuries ago. Bones, eggs, and feathers remain to attest its former numbers, and the roa and kiwi to give the unscientific a notion of its looks and habits. The story of the thigh-bone which found its way to Sir Richard Owen seventy years ago, and of his diagnosis therefrom of a walking bird about the size of an ostrich, is one of the romances of zoology. The earlier moas were far taller and more ponderous than any ostrich. Their relationship to the ancient moas of Madagascar, as well as their colossal stature, are further suggestions that New Zealand is what it looks—the relics of a submerged southern continent. After the discovery of moa skeletons there were great hopes that living survivors of some of the tall birds would yet be found, and the unexplored and intricate south-west was by common consent the most promising field in which to search. In 1848 a rail over three feet high—the takahé—was caught by sealers in Dusky Sound. Fifty years later, when hope had almost died out, another takahé was taken alive—the bird that now stands stuffed in a German museum. But, alas! this rail is the solitary “find” that has rewarded us in the last sixty years, and the expectation of lighting upon any flightless bird larger than a roa flutters very faintly now. All the more, therefore, ought we to bestow thought on the preservation of the odd and curious wild life that is left to us. The outlook for our native birds has long been very far from bright. Many years ago the Norway rat had penetrated every corner of the islands. Cats, descended from wanderers of the domestic species, are to be found in forest and mountain, and have grown fiercer and more active with each decade. Sparrows, blackbirds, and thrushes compete for Nature’s supplies of honey and insects. Last, and, perhaps, their worst enemies of all, are the stoats, weasels, and ferrets, which sheep-farmers were foolish enough to import a quarter of a century ago to combat the rabbit. Luckily, more effectual methods of coping with rabbits have since been perfected, for had we to trust to imported vermin our pastures would be in a bad case. As it is, the stoat and weasel levy toll on many a poultry yard, and their ravages among the unhappy wild birds of the forest are more deplorable still. In both islands they have found their way across from the east coast to the west: rivers, lakes, rock, snow, and ice have been powerless to stop them. Even the native birds that can fly lose their eggs and nestlings. The flightless birds are helpless. Weasels can kill much more formidable game than kiwi and kakapo; a single weasel has been known to dispose of a kea parrot in captivity. Pressed, then, by these and their other foes, the native birds are disappearing in wide tracts of the main islands. Twenty years ago this was sufficiently notorious; and at length in the ’nineties the Government was aroused to do something to save a remnant. Throughout the whole of the Great Reserve of the south-west shooting was, and still is, discouraged. But this is not enough. Only on islets off the coast can the birds be safe from ferrets and similar vermin, to say nothing of human collectors and sportsmen.

AT THE HEAD OF LAKE TE-ANAU

It was decided, therefore, to set aside such island sanctuaries, and to station paid care-takers on them. There are now three of these insular refuges: Resolution Island, off Dusky Sound; Kapiti, in Cook’s Strait; and the Little Barrier Island, at the mouth of the Hauraki Gulf. The broken and richly-wooded Resolution contains some 50,000 acres, and is as good a place for its present uses as could be found. Remote from settlement, drenched by continual rains, it attracts no one but a casual sight-seer. On the other hand, its care-taker is in close touch with the whole region of the fiords, and can watch over and to some extent guard the wild life therein. The experiences of this officer, Mr. Richard Henry, are uncommon enough. For twelve years he lived near lakes Manapouri and Te Anau studying the birds on that side of the wilderness. Since 1900 he has been stationed on the western coast, at Pigeon Island, near Resolution. There, with such society as a boy and a dog can afford him, this guardian of birds passes year after year in a climate where the rainfall ranges, I suppose, from 140 inches to 200 in the twelvemonth. Inured to solitude and sandflies Mr. Henry appears sufficiently happy in watching the habits of his favourite birds, their enemies the beasts, and their neighbours the sea-fish. He can write as well as observe, and his reports and papers are looked for by all who care for Nature in our country.

It is odd that in so vast a wilderness, and one so densely clothed with vegetation as are the mountains and valleys of the south-west, there should not be room enough and to spare for the European singing-birds as well as the native kind. But if we are to believe the care-taker at Resolution Island—and better testimony than his could not easily be had,—the sparrow alone, to say nothing of the thrush and blackbird, is almost as deadly an enemy as the flightless birds have. For the sparrow not only takes a share of the insects which are supposed to be his food, but consumes more than his share of the honey of the rata and other native flowers. Six sparrows which Mr. Henry managed to kill with a lucky shot one summer morning were found to be plump and full of honey—it oozed out of their beaks. Thrushes and blackbirds are just as ready to take to a vegetable diet, so that the angry care-taker is driven to denounce the birds of Europe as “jabbering sparrows and other musical humbugs that come here under false pretences.” Then the native birds themselves are not always forbearing to each other. The wekas, the commonest and most active of the flightless birds, are remorseless thieves, and will steal the eggs of wild ducks or farm poultry indifferently. Though as big as a domestic fowl, wekas are no great fighters: a bantam cock, or even a bantam hen, will rout the biggest of them. On the other hand, Mr. Henry has seen a weka tackle a bush rat and pin it down in its hole under a log. That the weka will survive in considerable numbers even on the mainland seems likely. The fate of the two kinds of kiwi, the big brown roa and his small grey cousin, seems more doubtful.

Both are the most timid, harmless, and helpless of birds. All their strength and faculties seem concentrated in the long and sensitive beaks with which they probe the ground or catch insects that flutter near it. In soft peat or moss they will pierce as deeply as ten inches to secure a worm; and the extraordinary powers of hearing and scent which enable them to detect prey buried so far beneath the surface are nothing short of mysterious. Their part in the world that man controls would seem to be that of insect destroyers in gardens and orchards. Perhaps had colonists been wiser they would have been preserved and bred for this purpose for the last fifty years. As it is man has preferred to let the kiwis go and to import insectivorous allies, most of which have turned out to be doubtful blessings. Among both kiwis and wekas the males are the most dutiful of husbands and fathers. After the eggs are laid they do most of the sitting, and at a later stage provide the chicks with food. The female kiwi, too, is the larger bird, and has the longer beak—points of interest in the avifauna of a land where women’s franchise is law. Very different is the division of labour between the sexes in the case of the kakapo or night-parrot. This also is classed among flightless birds, not because it has no wings—for its wings are well developed—but because ages ago it lost the art of flying. Finding ground food plentiful in the wet mountain forests, and having no foes to fear, the night-parrot waxed fat and flightless. Now, after the coming of the stoat and weasel, it is too late for its habits to change. The male kakapo are famous for a peculiar drumming love-song, an odd tremulous sound that can be heard miles away. But though musical courtiers, they are by no means such self-sacrificing husbands as other flightless birds. They leave hatching and other work to the mothers, who are so worn by the process that the race only breeds in intermittent years. Tame and guileless as most native birds are apt to be, the kakapo exceeds them all in a kind of sleepy apathy. Mr. Henry tells how he once noticed one sitting on wood under a drooping fern. He nudged it with his finger and spoke to it, but the bird only muttered hoarsely, and appeared to go to sleep again as the disturber moved away.