Adventures in the South Pacific: New Zealand's North Island

Compared to the South Island, New Zealand's North Island is highly developed and very little of the original forest remains. The climate on this island is somewhat milder than on the South Island, and it is here that the majority of New Zealand's cities and farms are located. Native wildlife is, understandably, less common on the North Island. While on the South Island we could see some native animals reliably every day, on the North Island those same animals were much rarer. Needless to say, the animals introduced by humans, such as house sparrows and mynahs, are far more common on the North Island.
A few native animals, however, have managed to adapt to the man-made conditions. The pukeko, or purple swamphen, is a long-legged wading bird related to rails and coots that is found in both Australia and New Zealand. It is quite fond of open, grassy areas, and has actually expanded its range in New Zealand as humans have cleared the forests. Nowadays, pukekos can be found in virtually any grassy field of substantial size in New Zealand.
The same is true of the swamp harrier, New Zealand's largest living bird of prey. In the past New Zealand was home to a second species called the Eyles's harrier, which inhabited forests. It died out along about 600 years ago, due to the destruction of the forests. When the forests disappeared, however, the plains-dwelling swamp harrier expanded its own range, and like the pukeko it is now found throughout New Zealand.
We put so much effort and thought into the idea of preserving ecosystems in their "natural state" that we sometimes lose sight of the fact that they have often not been in a "natural state" for a long time. New Zealand itself is a human artifact. Even the native animals and plants that do remain are very different ecologically than their ancestors only a few centuries ago. What this means is that that New Zealand--and all places like it-- are best understood as systems rather than separate collections of individuals. What's left of New Zealand is simply too unique to waste.



A tui--a common New Zealand songbird-- sips nectar from a New Zealand flax. Both the bird and the plant are still common, but for how much longer?

Adventures in the South Pacific: New Zealand's South Island

After spending a week in Australia, we traveled to New Zealand. This was a very different experience from Australia. In Australia, if you saw a new species, there was a fairly good chance that it was a native one. In New Zealand, on the other hand, the native species are almost gone, at least in the populated areas where I visited. The native ecosystems that do remain are few and far between, and are more common on the South Island than the North Island.
Humans arrived in New Zealand much later than they did in Australia, around the year 1200. These colonists, the ancestors of the Maori who still live in New Zealand today, had a devastating effect on New Zealand's wildlife. Among the casualties were the nine or so species of flightless moa, two turkey-sized omnivores called adzebills, giant grazing geese, and the immense Haast's eagle--the largest eagle that ever lived. All were wiped out by the Maori before Europeans so much as set foot on New Zealand, giving the lie to the notion that non-technological societies live in "harmony with nature."
But tracts of native forest still persist on the South Island, some still retaining so much of their primeval character that, hiking along a trail through one, I could easily picture a moa lumbering up it. The podocarps and tree ferns that once covered the islands are still present, and provide shelter for the surviving native birds-- fantails, pigeons, honeyeaters, robins, and the like. At night, kiwis forage for worms, grubs, and snails under the leaf litter, while the remaining predatory birds-- falcons, owls, and the ever-present swamp harrier-- reap their share of the smaller birds.
At first glance it seems New Zealand possesses a vibrant ecosystem, but in reality it is operating with a skeleton crew. Most of the larger herbivores and predators are now extinct, leaving New Zealand's ecosystems, even in the protected areas, feeling oddly empty. The trees are there, but there are no moas to feed on their leaves.


The Haast's eagle and the moa were once the largest predator and herbivore respectively in New Zealand. After they were killed off by human colonists, their extinction has left a major gap in the ecosystem.

Adventures In The South Pacific: The Great Barrier Reef

We spent most of our time in Australia birding in the rainforest, but we also spent a significant amount of time along the coasts, and one day was completely taken up by a glass bottom boat/snorkel tour over the Great Barrier Reef.
In contrast to the rainforests, the reef showed readily apparent signs of human damage. You might be familiar with photographs of coral reefs that show it vibrantly colored, with corals, sponges, and sea anemones in every shade imaginable. There were certainly still some colorful corals in the part we visited, but for the most part their colors were beginning to fade away, and many of them seemed unhealthy. We were, after all, visiting in the aftermath of one of the largest recorded coral die-offs in recent memory. Increasing water temperature and acidity causes the symbiotic algae corals use for nutrients to "bleach" and die, leaving only the dead shell behind. That said, the "bleaching" in the area we visited was nowhere near as bad as it is in some other parts of the reef, and abundant animal life was still present, such as giant clams, parrotfish, and sea turtles.
We also visited a sandbar island that was used as a rookery by a nesting colony of brown noddies (a type of tern). Like many seabirds, noddies nest on these offshore islands to prevent their chicks from being preyed upon by ground-dwelling predators. On many of these islands, introduced predators such as rats have decimated the seabird populations, and now the only ones left are usually ones that are officially protected, like the one we went to.
The reef gave me a very different impression from the rainforest. In the rainforest, the ecosystem I was surrounded by truly felt like an untouched wilderness in many places. The coral reef was not like that. It was certainly impressive and beautiful, but at the same time it felt as though it had seen better days

.
Though still full of life, the part of the Great Barrier Reef we visited was showing signs of bleaching.

Adventures in the South Pacific: The Australian Rainforest

Over the past month, I took an extensive trip to Australia and New Zealand, with the primary intention of observing the wildlife in those places. What follows will be a four-part blog essay on how those places have been impacted by humans, and what sort of human impact I personally encountered during my visit there.
Australia was colonized by humans about 40,000 years ago through what is now Indonesia and New Guinea. These people became the ancestors of today's Aboriginal people, who are considered to be the "natives" of Australia. At the time, Australia as a whole was a much wetter, more densely forested continent than it is now. The area of Australia that we visited--the northern tip of Queensland--is still forested, but much of the interior of Australia is now grassland or desert and is referred to as the Outback.
It was also during this time that many of Australia's large native animals, including twenty-foot monitor lizards, half-ton flightless birds, and wombats the size of hippos, became extinct. It is now believed that human hunting was the reason for this. Today, the largest land animals in Australia are red kangaroos.
Australia's biodiversity is still rich, and most of the wildlife that we saw--including kangaroos, wallabies, flying foxes, cassowaries, lorikeets, and cockatoos-- was native. However, we also saw some introduced species, including mynas and cane toads, both of which were ubiquitous in the more developed areas that we visited. However, the rainforest is under threat as well. Often as we drove from one hiking area to another, we passed by tracts of forest that had been felled to make way for crops.
Yet for all the destruction it has endured, the rainforests of Australia survived in their primal state remarkably well. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for some of the other places we visited.


The southern, or double-wattled cassowary, one of Australia's largest living birds and a highly specialized creature of the rainforest.