THE STRANGE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand consists of two islands, together more than 1,000 miles
long and of about 200,000 square miles area. It is 1,000 miles distant
from New Caledonia, the nearest island of any considerable size, and
is 1,500 miles from the great Continental island of Australia. There
is no other island in the world so large and at the same time so
remote from other considerable tracts of land. Australia is closely
connected by island groups at a distance of only 100 miles to Asia.
The isolation of New Zealand is unique. The seas around it are of vast
depth and of proportionately great age. During the chalk
period--before the great deposits and changes of the earth's face
which we assign to the Tertiary period--New Zealand consisted of a
number of small scattered islands, which gradually, as the floor of
the sea rose in that part of the world, became a continent stretching
northward and joining New Guinea. In that very ancient time the land
was covered with ferns and large trees. Birds (as we now know them)
had only lately come into existence in the northern hemisphere, and
when New Zealand for a time joined that area the birds, as well as a
few lizards and one kind of frog, migrated south and colonised the new
land. It is probable that the very peculiar lizard-like reptile of New
Zealand--the "tuatara" or Sphenodon--entered its area at a still
earlier stage of surface change. That creature (only 20 in. long) is
the only living representative of very remarkable extinct reptiles
which lived in the area which now is England, and, in fact, in all
parts of the world, during the Triassic period, further behind the
chalk in date than the chalk is behind our own day. For ages, this
"type" with its peculiar beak-like jaws, has survived only in New
Zealand. Living specimens have been brought to this country, and are
to be seen at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. Having
received, as it were, a small cargo of birds and reptiles, but no
hairy, warm-blooded quadruped, no mammal, New Zealand became at the
end of the chalk-period detached from the northern continent, and
isolated, and has remained so ever since. Migratory birds from the
north visited it, and at a late date two kinds of bat reached it and
established themselves.
Thus we are prepared for the very curious state of things in this
large tract of land. Looking at New Zealand as it was a thousand years
ago, we find there were no mammals living on it excepting a couple of
bats and the seals (so-called sea lions, sea elephants, and others)
which frequent its coasts. There were 180 species of birds, and many
of these quite peculiar to the island. Many of the birds showed in the
absence of any predatory enemies--there being no carnivorous
quadrupeds to hunt them or their young--a tendency to lose the power
of flight, and some had done so altogether. The gigantic, wingless
Moas--allied to the ostrich and the cassawary--had grown up there, and
were the masters of the situation. There were many species of
these--one of great height--one fourth taller than the biggest known
ostrich; others with short legs of monstrous thickness and strength.
Allied to these are the four species of Kiwi or apteryx, still
existing there. They are very strange wingless birds, about the size
of a large Dorking fowl. The Kiwis are still in existence, but the
Moas and some of the other flightless birds have died out since the
arrival of the Maori man, who killed and ate them.
A bird which was believed sixty years ago both by the natives and
white men to have become extinct, the Takahe, or Notornis, was known
by its bones and from the traditions of the natives. Much to the
delight of naturalists, four live specimens of it were obtained at
intervals in the last century, the last as late as 1898. The beautiful
dark plumage and thick and short beak, which is bright red, as are the
legs, are well known from the two specimens preserved in the Natural
History Museum. The Notornis is a heavy, flightless "rail." Rails are
remarkable for their size and variety in New Zealand, where there are
twenty species, some of them very sluggish in flight, or like
Notornis, flightless (the wood hens). Amongst the flightless birds of
New Zealand is a duck, as helpless as the heaviest farmyard product,
and yet a wild bird, and then there are the penguins, which swim with
their wings, but never fly, and belong entirely to the southern
hemisphere. Many species are found on the shores of New Zealand. Other
noteworthy birds of New Zealand are the twelve kinds of cormorants,
the wry-bill plover, the only bird in the world with its beak turned
to one side, the practically flightless Kakapo, or ground parrot
(Stringops), the Huia, a bird like a crow in appearance, whose male
has a short straight beak, whilst the female has a long one, greatly
curved; the detested Kea, the parrot which kills the sheep, introduced
by the colonists, by digging out with its beak from their backs the
fat round the kidneys; also very peculiar owls and wrens, and the fine
singing bell-birds.
The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not
only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds,
many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes
in this vast area--no crocodiles, no tortoises--only fourteen small
kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species
of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were
fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very
remarkable. Insects and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders,
centipedes, land-snails and earth-worms were all flourishing in the
forests of New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving in large measure
as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of
Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living
products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying
duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied
population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the
absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the
late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called
"placental" mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of
the world except New Zealand! Strange as Australia is, New Zealand is
yet stranger. Long as the isolation of Australia has endured, and
archaic and primitive in essential characters as is its living freight
of animals and plants navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation
to our present days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a
more ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the earth
according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living
fauna and flora and their geological structure, and the fossilised
remains of their past inhabitants, it becomes necessary to separate
the whole land surface into two primary sections: (_a_) New Zealand,
and (_b_) the rest of the world, "Theriogoea," or the land of beasts
(mammals). Then we divide Theriogoea into (1) the land of Marsupials
(Australia) and (2) the land of Placentals (the rest of the world).
This last great area is divisible according to the same principles
into the great northern belt of land, the Holarctic region and the
(three not equally distinct) great southward-reaching land
surfaces--the Neo-tropical (South America), the Ethiopian (Africa,
south of the Sahara), and the Oriental (India and Malay).
The bird-ruled quietude of New Zealand was disturbed 500 years ago by
the arrival of the Polynesian Islanders, the Maoris, in their canoes.
They brought with them three kinds of vegetables which they
cultivated, a dog and a kind of rat. The dogs soon died out, but the
rat has remained, and is considered to have done little or no harm. It
was not one of the destructive proliferous rats of the northern
hemisphere. The Maoris hunted the big birds--the Moas and others--for
their flesh, and ate their eggs, and it is probable that they caused
or accelerated the extinction of the Moa and two or three other birds.
In the north island they nearly exterminated the white heron, the
plumes being valued by them. On the whole, very little damage was done
to the natural products of the islands by the Maoris. "It was with the
advent of the Europeans," says Mr. John Drummond, F.L.S., in his
interesting and well-illustrated book on 'The Animals of New Zealand,'
"that destruction began in earnest. It seemed as if they had been
commanded to destroy the ancient inhabitants." They killed right and
left, and, in addition, burnt up the primaeval forests and bushes till
a great part of the flora was consumed. It was never a very varied or
strong one, consisting only of some 1,400 species, which are now in
large proportion vanishing, whilst 600 species of plants, most of them
introduced accidentally rather than intentionally by the European
settlers, have taken their place.
Here I may state the great principle which, in regard to plants as
well as animals, determines the survival of intruders from one region
to another. It appears that setting aside any very special and
peculiar adaptations to quite exceptional conditions in a given area,
the living things, whether plants or animals, which are brought to or
naturally arrive at such an area, survive and supplant the indigenous
plants and animals of that area, if they themselves are kinds
(species) produced or formed in a larger or more variegated area; that
is to say, formed under severer conditions of competition and of
struggle with a larger variety of competitors, enemies and adverse
circumstances in general. Thus, the plants of remote oceanic islands
are destroyed, and their place and their food are taken by the more
hardy "capable" plants of Continental origin. And, in accordance with
the same principle, as Darwin especially maintained, the plants of the
northern hemisphere, produced as they are in a wide stretching belt
of land--Europe, temperate Asia, and North America--always push their
way down the great southern stretches of land (by cool mountain
roadways), and when they have arrived in the temperate regions of the
southern hemisphere, they have at various geological epochs starved
out, taken the place of, or literally "supplanted" the native southern
flora, which in every case has been formed on a narrow, restricted and
peninsula-like area. The same greater "potency" of the animals of the
Holartic region has in the past established them as intruders into
South America, Ethiopia and India, and has led to the inevitable
survival of the animal of the large area when brought into contact
with the animal of the small and restricted area. Applying these
principles to New Zealand, we see that no country, no area of land,
could have a worse chance for the survival of its animal and vegetable
children than that mysterious land, isolated for many millions of
years in the ocean, the home of the Tuatara, solitary survivor of an
immensely remote geologic age, the undisturbed kingdom of huge birds,
so easy-going that they have ceased to fly, and have even lost their
wings!
The first European animals to settle there were the pigs benevolently
introduced into New Zealand by Captain Cook. They multiplied apace,
served for food and sport both to the natives and the early settlers,
and destroyed the ancient Triassic reptile, the Tuatara, which only
survives now on rocky islands near the coast. In less than a hundred
years the settlers had introduced sheep and cattle, and looked upon
the abounding pigs as a scourge. In 1862, pig-hunters were employed to
destroy them--three hunters would kill 20,000 pigs in a year. Dogs,
cats and the European rats came in early with the settlers, and
destroyed the flightless birds, driving them for shelter to the
mountains. As the settlers increased they shot down millions of birds
of all kinds, and burnt up grass, shrub, and bush. At last, a few
years ago, the Government established three islands as "sanctuaries,"
where many of the more interesting birds survive, and are increasing.
Besides cattle and sheep (which have flourished exceedingly) the
colonists introduced rabbits, pheasants and the honey-bee, and later
on quails, hares, deer, and trout. Clover depends on bees for its
fertilisation and seeding. White clover, taken over there for pasture,
did not seed in New Zealand until the honey-bee was imported in 1842,
and later, as they could not seed red-clover without it, the colonists
had to introduce the humble-bee, and the red-clover now also seeds
freely and the imported farm-beasts have their accustomed food.
Besides the animals already named, the colonists have introduced
ferrets and weasels, to reduce the destructive excess of the imported
rabbits; and they, whilst failing to subdue the rabbits, have
themselves become a serious nuisance. Of small birds there were
introduced the house-sparrow, which is too prolific, and is hated by
the farmers; the greenfinch, a pest; the bullfinch, a failure. The
introduced skylark and the blackbird (alas! poor colonists) are not
the joy of New Zealanders--the farmers hate them. The European
settlers had the audacity to introduce also the most beautiful and
beloved of all birds, our own perfect "Robin Redbreast," and they add
want of manners to their violent and uncalled-for hospitality by
speaking ill of this sweetest and brightest of living things. After
this, I am rather glad to report that the esteemed table-delicacies,
pheasants and partridges, don't get on well in New Zealand; nor do
turtle-doves. The thrush is spreading and meets with the approval of
the hypercritical New Zealander. The hedge-sparrow, the chaffinch and
the goldfinch have flourished abundantly, but the linnet has failed. A
very interesting and important problem for New Zealand naturalists to
solve is that as to why one bird succeeds in their remote land and
another does not. The British trout have grown to an enormous size and
are destroying all other fresh-water life. Imported red-deer flourish,
and are shot with great satisfaction by the colonists. The American
elk has been introduced in the South Island, and the mountain
goats--the ibex and the thar--are to be acclimatized in the mountains,
so that unnatural sport may flourish in this ancient land of quiet and
of wondrous birds, turned topsy-turvy by enlightened man.