A day in the life of Mangere Island
A desolate exclamation mark off the west coast of Pitt Island in the Chathams, wind-scoured, wave-lashed Mangere Island is the last outpost before extinction for a variety of unique animals and plants.
A desolate exclamation mark off the west coast of Pitt Island in the Chathams, wind-scoured, wave-lashed Mangere Island is the last outpost before extinction for a variety of unique animals and plants.
In late july of this year, a family on a fishing expedition to the northern end of Muriwai Beach, northwest of Auckland, came upon the carcasses of two freshly dead whales. With the aid of a cellphone, they notified the Department of Conservation (DoC) of their find. It turned out that the whales belonged to the rarest species of baleen whale, the pygmy right whale, of which only a dozen specimens had been found in New Zealand previously, and not many more elsewhere in the world. The pair were a full-grown six-metre female and her two-metre calf. "The state of the umbilical cord suggested that the calf was less than a week old," said Jo Ritchie of DoC. "It is the first time a calf that is clearly newborn has been found anywhere in the world." The site of the stranding was close to the RNZAF Kaipara weapons range, and a call to the air force for help promptly brought a helicopter with 11 men from Whenuapai air base. However, it proved impossible to move the female by hand, and a log carrier from nearby Woodhill forest was pressed into service to carry her to the roadhead. "When they lifted her up, milk just poured out of her mammary glands," said Ritchie. Both mother and calf were transferred to cold storage at Massey University's Cetacean Research Centre, where they joined a third young whale of the same species, also found at Muriwai two years ago. "Finding two calves in the same area is most exciting, because it strongly suggests that the species is breeding along this part of the west coast," Ritchie explained. Pygmy right whales have occasionally been seen or found stranded around South Africa, Tierra del Fuego and southern Australia, including Tasmania. Sightings at sea have been few—partly because the pygmy right is about as inconspicuous as a whale can be. This is not a whale which indulges in the acrobatics performed by many other types, and its flukes are never lifted from the water. It spends little time on the surface, and its blow is indistinct. Only the snout breaks the water when the whale comes up to breathe. One distinguishing feature of the pygmy right is the dorsal fin two-thirds of the way back along its body, a feature which right and gray whales lack. However, because the pygmy right rarely exposes its back, the fin is not spotted frequently. The mode of swimming adopted by this whale is distinctive. The whole body is thrown into a series of up-and-down undulations, rather than only the tail flukes being raised and lowered, as in other whales. So unusual was the opportunity afforded by Massey's freezer full of whales that three biologists from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and one each from Australia and Japan visited in late August to dissect the whales. Their skeletons will eventually grace the National Museum in Wellington.
Deputy editor and longtime beachcomber Warren Judd pays a visit to a museum where the exhibitions are changed daily and entry is free.
One day , nearly 140 million years ago, towards the end of the Jurassic epoch, a male locust was blown offshore from the Australia-Antarctic coast of Gondwana in a westerly storm. Or perhaps it was carried out to sea in a volcanic ash cloud, or maybe it was just trying to emigrate. Whatever the case, perhaps 50 km offshore, exhausted, it fell into the sea and was no doubt snapped up by a passing fish—except for its left wing, which was torn off and settled slowly through the water to the muddy seafloor a couple of hundred metres below. That wing, now just a faint imprint in a rock, was found in 1978 by two students from the University of Auckland Geology Department during its annual field mapping camp for second year students south of Port Waikato. Fossil insects are rare in New Zealand rocks, and because this wing is the oldest so far known, its correct identification was a matter of significance. After being examined by experts in England and Australia, the species has now been named Notohagla mauii, "Maui's southern locust," and its taxonomic relationships analysed. The pattern of veins on the wing places its owner in the family Prophalangopsidae, which was erected for a single species of living "primitive" locust from India. A variety of central Asian fossil insects of Jurassic-Cretaceous age (190-65 million years ago) that once lived on that portion of the great old southern continent Gondwana, have since been placed in the family. No prophalangopsid other than Notohagla is known from the Southern Hemisphere. However, wetas, a large group which also has a gondwanan distribution (southern Africa, Madagascar, south-east Himalaya, Australia, New Caledonia and Chile as well as New Zealand), are regarded as being closely related to the prophalangopsids. A modern Australian winged weta has vein patterns closely similar to those of various Jurassic prophalangopsids, and this modern weta also possessses an area of small tubercles on the upper surface of the wing that is matched in Notohagla. All of this suggests that our unique flightless wetas may have originated from prophalangopsids via an insect such as Notohagla.
No sooner had meteorological instruments such as thermometers and barometers been invented than experimenters wanted to take them up into the sky to study the atmosphere. The easiest way to accomplish this was to carry them up a mountain. Perier was the first to do so when, in 1648, at the request of his brother-in-law, the mathematician Pascal, he took a barometer up a peak in the Auvergne mountains in France and found that atmospheric pressure fell by about 15 per cent during the 1000-metre climb. The invention of the hot-air balloon offered another way to explore the sky. When the Montgolfier brothers' made the first ascent in Paris, 1783, King Louis XVI decreed that it was too dangerous for people to fly in the balloon, so the first mammal into the sky was a sheep. It was accompanied in its cage by a cock, a duck and a barometer. The lift for the balloon was provided by hot air coining from a fire lit underneath it. However, the Montgolfier brothers did not realise that it was heat which made the balloon rise (by making the air in the balloon less dense, and therefore buoyant compared to surrounding air). They thought that lift came from some unnamed gas given off by the fire, and that the amount of gas produced depended on what was being burnt. The best ingredients, in their estimation, were damp straw, wool, rotting meat, and old shoes. The stench of this concoction as it burnt occasioned a rapid retreat on the part of King Louis and Marie Antoinette, who watched proceedings from a distance. The flight was a great success, although brief, and an injury sustained by the cock was taken to be evidence of the dangers of the sky until several witnesses testified that the cock had been kicked by the sheep before take-off. The first manned ascent took place two months later, in another Montgolfier hot-air balloon, followed a month later by a much longer flight in a balloon filled with hydrogen called "flammable air." Scientists were quick to exploit the opportunities ballooning provided. One of the earliest experiments took place in Birmingham in 1784, when James Watt released a hydrogen balloon with a fire cracker and time fuse. The intention was to discover if the reverberating sound of thunder was caused by echoes or successive explosions. After six minutes the cracker exploded with a sound satisfyingly like thunder. In 1804, Gay-Lussac ascended to 7000 m, and found that the atmosphere became drier with altitude, but that otherwise the chemical composition was the same as at the surface. Perhaps the most famous of the scientific ascents took place in England in 1862, when Coxwell and Glaisher ascended to around 10,000 m in a hydrogen balloon, measuring temperature, humidity and pressure, every minute. The sudden ascent to high altitudes caused great distress to the two aeronauts as they ran low on oxygen. Glaisher's account of the flight is more famous for his dispassionate description of his symptoms than for the measurements he took. He first lost the use of his arms and legs, then his vision blurred and he could no longer hold his head upright. He then lost the power of speech, followed by his sight, before completely losing consciousness. By this stage ice was forming on the ropes, and the balloon was in danger of rising so far that the men would die as was to happen to two French scientists a decade later. Coxwell was still conscious, although he had lost the use of his hands. He was able to grasp the release cord with his teeth and nod his head to let some hydrogen out of the balloon (above), so that they began to descend. Glaisher regained the use of his faculties after an interval of 15 minutes and resumed his temperature and pressure readings. For decades, these measurements remained the best set of observations taken in the sky. High-altitude ballooning continued to make valuable contributions to atmospheric science into this century, including the surprising discovery that temperature stops falling above a certain height subsequently called the troposphere. However, from the point of view of meteorology, the most important development was the use of small unmanned balloons with lightweight recording instruments which descended by parachute after the balloon burst. The invention of aeroplanes presented new possibilities for a exploring the sky. Initially frail, early aircraft avoided clouds and any sort of bad weather. However, as they were made more robust, they were able to survive increasingly boisterous encounters with weather. During the Second World War, many advances were made both in aircraft and in exploration of the weather. Bombers flying at high altitude over Europe encountered and described the extremely strong winds of the jet streams. In the tropical Pacific, where weather observations had been sparse, the enormous increase in the number of wind observations from aircraft laid the basis for rapid advances in understanding tropical meteorology. But perhaps the greatest achievement was the penetration of tropical cyclones by US air force planes. In 1945, a tropical cyclone struck the US Navy near Japan, sinking many ships and taking the lives of hundreds of sailors. This event helped focus attention on the need for tracking and forecasting the movement of tropical cyclones in order to mitigate their disastrous effects. Reconnaissance flights into the eye of tropical cyclones played a vital role in forecasting the movement of these storms for three decades, and, although the flights were dangerous, remarkably few aircraft were lost. Today's hourly high-quality satellite photographs have partially removed the need for flights into tropical cyclones on a routine basis, although they continue for research purposes. Heavily instrumented aircraft have also been used to investigate thunderstorms, flying close to and occasionally into them, measuring the airflow through them with Doppler radar and sampling the spectrum of water droplet and ice particle sizes, as well as measuring temperature and humidity. In New Zealand a research programme to study the effect of the Southern Alps on the weather has been organised by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) for this spring. Called SALPEX, the programme will include the use of an Australian Fokker F27 research aircraft, to be implemented by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). This aircraft is going to fly transects across the Alps and out over the Tasman Sea, measuring cloud particle types and size distributions ahead of, and near, active cold fronts approaching New Zealand in the westerly wind flow. Balloons will be released from Hokitika, Christchurch and Timaru, carrying instruments to measure temperature, humidity and wind speed throughout the depth of the atmosphere. Similar instruments will be dropped by parachute from the research aircraft over the Tasman Sea. These observations will be supplemented by the normal daily observations taken by MetService. A number of universities will be involved in SALPEX, both from New Zealand and overseas. In particular, the Physics Department of Auckland University will he using a vertical-pointing radar to measure rainfall rates. A better understanding of how high-intensity rainfall occurs will help improve forecasting of flash-floods. One of the problems the programme will focus on is "spillover" of rain to the eastern side of the Alps during northwest storms (see New Zealand Geographic, Issue 21). This spillover accounts for most of the water flowing into the lakes that provide the hulk of New Zealand's hydroelectric power. Letting water out of the lakes in anticipation of massive new inflows also plays an important role in flood control downstream from the lakes. Spillover seems to be favoured by strong northwest winds above mountain level, as well as by the presence of abundant ice particles. Because raindrops take some time to fall to earth, the faster the air is moving, the further the drops can be carried from where they originated. Hence raindrops created by the upward motion of air rising over the mountains will travel further downwind—away from the mountains—when the wind perpendicular to the mountains is stronger. Because ice crystals fall more slowly than liquid raindrops, they can travel even further beyond the mountains. A third factor that seems to be important in determining where the rain falls is the stability of low-level air. When the air is very stable, it resists upward motion. In such circumstances, low-level air approaching the South Island in a northwest airstream is blocked from rising over the Southern Alps. Instead, it is deflected to blow parallel to the mountains as a northeast airstream known as a harrier jet. What happens then is that the northwest wind further out over the Tasman Sea rises over the northeast airstream up against the land, almost as if the northeast barrier jet were part of the land. The effect is to shift the upward rain-generating movements in airmasses upstream, away from the mountains. When this happens, the heaviest rain falls close to the coast near Hokitika, rather than halfway up the Alps, and almost no rain makes it over the Main Divide to the eastern side of the Alps. When a front in the westerlies approaches the South Island, the stability of the low-level air decreases, until finally the northeast barrier jet breaks down. Then the surface air blows straight on to the land from the northwest, and the air rises directly over the Southern Alps. This seems to coincide with a shift of the rainfall maxima to over the Main Divide, or just east of it, and a significant spillover occurs. A better understanding of the timing of the breakdown of the barrier jet will lead to better forecasts of spillover rainfall. Northwest winds also bring warm temperatures to eastern districts of the South Island, and are sometimes strong enough to cause widespread destruction to forests and buildings. The SALPEX programme also intends to investigate this weather paticro, particularly the way in which the onset of the northwest gales is like a wave of air breaking in the sky, in a manner similar to an ocean wave breaking as it moves into shallow water. Because the Tasman Sea is an area in which little weather and atmospheric data has been collected, the aircraft flights will also provide a unique opportunity to compare fronts in the Tasman Sea with fronts that have been studied in other parts of the world, as well as studying how the frontal clouds are changed by their interaction with the land. The studies of cloud physics will also contribute to global climate research programmes focusing on the properties of precipitating clouds of different types and their interactions with the land.
Mere minutes to full time, with the All Blacks and their arch rivals the South African Springboks tied 12-12 in the 1995 World Cup final, faces at the Ponsonby Rugby Club reflect the strain of the national game. For many New Zealanders, rugby is the silver fern on the jersey of life.
Peter Quinn, who has previously photographed whitebait (Issue 17), West Coast coal (Issue 26) and Highway 35 (Issue 28), was moved to photograph the North Island main trunk rail story on account of his grandfather. "He left the merchant navy between the wars and settled in Frankton, where he worked as a guard on the railways for most of the rest of his life," says Peter. "He died when I was about eleven, but I still remember climbing over the back fence of his railway cottage in Te Rapa to play in carriages that were lined up on the rails there. I wanted to find out a bit more about what he had been involved in, what railways were like. In fact, at Frankton I discovered that some of the old timers still remembered him, and they were helpful in getting me cab passes and other favours." Peter spent eight months photographing along the Main Trunk, but says that he spent far more time waiting for trains than he did actually taking pictures of them. "I would set myself up in a location with a good background and wait for a train to arrive. One would be scheduled for four or five P.,1. when the light was good, but not appear until six o'clock, by which time it was too dark. I'd have no option but to wait another 24 hours and hope the next day's train was on time. "I camped for three days near Mangaweka in searing 38° temperatures, while at the other extreme I spent days in sub-zero temperatures near Waiouru, trying to get worthwhile shots in the snow." The highlight? "Riding in the cab of a steam locomotive for three hours. They really feel alive. Even when they're stationary at the platform they are like a horse champing at the bit. Puffing through the suburbs of Auckland, it was amazing to see all the cars stopping, the people rushing to watch the steam train. I caught a glimpse of the power and romance of steam." "As a kid in England, I kept everything that moved: mice, hedgehogs, snakes, squirrels, and it was only later that I developed an interest in birds," says Geoff Moon, renowned bird photographer, author of several books on New Zealand birds, and author and photographer of our kingfisher story. After studying veterinary science at London Veterinary College, he emigrated to Warkworth in 1948. "At that time the New Zealand Government Veterinary Services Council decided that the country needed a full veterinary service, and recruited a lot of young British vets. One or two of my friends came out ahead of me and sent back favourable reports. I looked at a map and chose Warkworth as a destination based on its general location—rural, near the sea, and not too far from Auckland. People who chose more isolated spots like Eketahuna often ended up with unhappy wives, and returned to Britain at the end of their initial two-year contracts. "I stayed as a vet in Warkworth for 30 years. My territory ran from east coast to west, Dome Valley to Orewa, and at the time I serviced 460 dairy farms. Now there are not more than 40 in the area. I soon got an assistant, and we were pretty busy, especially in spring. Farmers rise early, so I'd get my first calls at five A.m., and sometimes it seemed as if the day's work didn't finish until six a.m. the next day. I drove 80,000 miles a year, all on gravel roads. I tell you, most rural vets would make great rally drivers! "I became particularly interested in the morepork, kingfisher and white-faced heron. Farmers could sometimes provide me with information about nest sites and where they had seen birds feeding, and when things weren't too busy, after tea I'd gradually build up hides. One of them, to enable me to photograph a white heron's nest, was 72 feet up a pine tree! Once the hide was finished, I'd photograph from it until, say, one in the morning, then go home and develop a few plates, and get to bed about three. Wretched farmers would start phoning again at five! "My early photography was done on glass plates—black-and-white, of course—and they were cumbersome, fragile things. Unlike modern 35 mm film, you couldn't carry many. "The first electronic flash units were coining out at the time, and I was able to use those. Changing a bulb once in the hide up the pine tree, I forgot that they stored 3000 volts in a capacitor and was thrown unconscious across the hide—preferable to out of it! The farmer thought someone had taken a shot at a possum." After he retired from the Warkworth practice in 1982, Geoff shifted to the bush in Titirangi, close to his beloved native birds, and he remains active in photography. He has worked as a cameraman for the National Film Unit on natural history projects, indulged in some vet locum work, and still likes to stay abreast of the veterinary literature. He is a fellow or member of several photographic societies, and in 1994 was awarded an OBE for services to the veterinary profession and photography.
An enthusiasts' steam train rides the Main Trunk Line across the Waikato River at Ngaruawahia. Conceived by the visionary politician Julius Vogel in 1870, the North Island rail trunk took almost 40 years to complete; a hard-won link piercing the heart of the land. Now, after close to a century of use, it remains a vital—and romantic—strand of the country's transport network.
The delicacy and brilliance of a hummingbird wedded to an industrial-strength beak that would do a woodpecker proud, the chimeric little kingfisher stakes a claim in our hearts. Returning with a snack for his family, this male prepares to land in the entrance of his nesting burrow in an old tree.
The Green crown of Hunua State Forest arched above me, a remnant of New Zealand's ancient wooded past, and home still to that rare and operatic wattlebird, the kokako. At my feet, a possum struggled in a trap, a creature which has lived in these islands barely 100 years, yet whose depredations threaten the very forest in which I stood.
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