02 Here be Monsters!

Before human contact New Zealand’s wildlife evolved in isolation over millions of years, a distinct ecosystem of varied inhabitants consisting mostly of a wide variety of birds. Some had become permanent ground-dwellers (there were few predators to evade) while some grew vast; the Moa stood up to 3.7 meters tall, or the Haast’s Eagle which had a wingspan of 2 to 3 meters and is the largest eagle to ever have existed. Others grew eccentric and inquisitive like the Kākāpō whose diet consists of lead nail heads and car rubber, the weta have their ears on their knee’s or the national flightless Kiwi which have the shortest beak of any bird in the world due to their nostrils being at the end of their long beak (beak length in birds is measured from the nostril to the tip).

This natural and rampant diversity was altered in the thirteenth century  (between 1250 to 1280) with the first migrants from Polynesia. New Zealand didn’t make it onto the world map until a few centuries later after Able Tasman was sent to discover an imagined southern land mass at the bottom of the globe (to balance the known land in the north). He anchored in Golden Bay in 1642 (he named it Murderer’s Bay after a run in with the local Māori).  Around this time World maps began to be finalized by cartographers and the unknown began to become the newly discovered and the colonized. Previously it’s geographic location on seafaring maps may have depicted a hybrid sea monster/animal to describe dangerous waters and the threat of a all lives lost at sea, inscribed with the words: “Here be sea monsters”.

European migration provided the major influx of people following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Along with the initial settlers and those that followed, also came predatory species like the Pacific rat, cats, stoats, possum, weasels, hedgehog, rabbits and ferrets. It wasn't long before the local inhabitants and habitations began disappearing. With this arrival came the felling of vast forests for pasture land, many of the native birds had no protection, their long evolution had left them unequipped to defend themselves against the influx of the tooth and the claw. The list of New Zealand species known to have become extinct since human settlement includes one bat, at least 51 birds, three frogs, three lizards, one freshwater fish, four plant species, and a number of invertebrates*…. and 1000's more now endangered.

Landfall (sketch). after Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze