In a world first, the entire genome of every individual of the kākāpō species will be sequenced, giving researchers the ‘code’ to all living birds (and a few long-dead ones, too). This is vital information in the quest to solve the kākāpō’s biggest problems, granting the world’s weirdest parrot its best chance at long-term survival.
The Darran Mountains lie deep in the marrow of northern Fiordland—a chunky, perplexing range of diorites and sandstones, gneisses and granites. This is a land of extremes, with the country’s most remote summits, the greatest rainfall and the longest, hardest-to-climb alpine rock walls. Adventurers have been coming here since William Grave and Arthur Talbot in the late 1800s, to test themselves and forge new routes through this vertical landscape.
The tradition of kava has brought people together and consummated important social occasions in the Pacific for 3000 years. The use of kava is growing in New Zealand, with some 25,000 drinkers consuming up to 32 times the recommended pharmacological limit on any given weekend, then driving home. What is kava, and what role does it play in our society?
In the wilds of Kahurangi National Park, a tramper disappears two days before Christmas, sparking a huge search and rescue effort. Nearly four years on, Alistair Levy has still not been found.
Two contrasting landscapes are likely to linger in your mind after you’ve walked the Heaphy: one, a high, silent, tussock plateau; the other, a loud coastline where waves reach brashly towards groves of tropical palms and flowering rātā. These contrasts often accentuate divergent emotions of fear and attraction, awe and intimacy—it is all part of the appealing variety you experience on this traverse through forests and ancient geological structures in the northwest of Kahurangi National Park. Once beyond the first paddocks and scrubby spurs, the track enters a diverse forest that includes huge old red and hard beeches, rimu and miro, with distinctive mikimiki and toro trees in the understorey. The track crosses streams at regular intervals, and windows in the forest open towards the granite summits of the Lead Hills and Mt Olympus across the Aorere Valley, and beyond to the Dragons Teeth on the Douglas Range. The downs immediately make an impression by their strangeness: the high rolling plateau of open tussock and occasional forest contrasts with the rustling patches of mountain neinei and silver beech. Perhaps the downs landscape catches you off guard because mountainous country isn’t meant to be so smooth and flattish, and forests aren’t supposed to sit above alpine tussocklands. For whatever reason, it’s queer country and nearly everyone feels something of its eeriness, even if only retrospectively, once down in the semi-tropical forests of the Heaphy Valley. As you move over the downs the track traverses tussock flats where rivers like the Big cut raw into the old peneplain and begin coiling and curling in slow meanders before their sudden descent into mossy beech forest. Heading downriver, the track wends between exquisite avenues of nīkau palms and tree ferns, and massive northern rātā clear the surrounding canopy, festooned in perching and climbing plants. Kiekie and supplejack vines make much of this forest quite impenetrable, and warmth-loving species like kawakawa, rangiora and kōwhai complement the forest’s exotic nature. Further enhancing this section along the river’s final meander to the coast is a dramatic array of limestone landforms, including a rank of bluffs that not only walls in the southern bank, but also provides intriguing track-side architecture. A large surf invariably runs hard into the river, as it rushes across the swollen face of the sand. After three or four days walking, the almost violent power of the place seems paradoxically to create a sense of inner peace and contentment, especially at dusk when the sun boils into the western sea behind the rising spray of breaking waves.
While many ships founder in foul weather, a few are saved by a timely spell of calm.
A parcel arrived today, one that I had ordered so long ago I had nearly forgotten about it. Inside, nestled within volumes of packing material, was a single feather. It’s black, and broad, and the top quarter of the feather is brilliant white to the tip. Except that it’s not a feather. It’s made of ceramic, a giant-sized plaster replica of a feather belonging to a huia, a bird that was hunted to extinction more than a century ago—a bird gone so long that the shape and shade of its plumage are now a totem that powerfully signifies all that modernity abandoned and destroyed in this archipelago. For me, however, it also represents everything that makes New Zealand unique, and everything that still remains here. Kākāpō, for instance, a bird that probably should not be here at all. The mechanisms of its absurd mating behaviour, and lack of success therein, should have been at odds poor enough to guarantee its relegation to the annals of pre-history. The kākāpō’s unique lack of preparedness for mammalian predators should have sealed its fate completely, if it were not for the precipitous hanging valleys of Fiordland, and the rugged outcrop of Stewart Island. At one point in the 1990s, the total population was barely 50 individuals. On this tender genetic thread hung the future of the entire species. For four decades, conservationists have focused on the fortunes of the remaining individuals, increasing the population to 155. Today, as deputy editor Rebekah White reveals in this issue, scientists have turned their attention back to that frail genetic thread, analysing it in cross-section to reveal the fabric of the kākāpō genome, and the specific genes of every kākāpō in the population, to breed the population back to health. The new knowledge has already led to one of the most successful breeding seasons ever, which researchers hope will be enough to ensure the kākāpō won’t go the way of the South Island kōkako, which may now be lost forever, despite the ongoing search detailed in the May–June issue. (North Island kōkako, too, had a close shave, with only the intervention of vigilante conservationists to save them in 1978—examined in Andrea Graves’ new Currency column on page 21.) It was all too late, however, for the huia—though it may yet be saved, even a century after the fact. In a 2002 paper published in the journal Common Ground, palaeobiologist Jeffrey Yule mounted a philosophical argument to restore species using genetic cloning of viable DNA that meet a very narrow band of criteria—that they were driven to extinction by humans; that the extinction occurred very recently; that the habitat is present to support a wild population; and that scientific effort in cloning extinct species does not distract from the effort to conserve species still extant. Yule singled out New Zealand’s huia, Australia’s thylacine and North America’s passenger pigeon as examples that fit the criteria for ‘ethical’ cloning. (He even quoted a—now defunct—international university project to revive the huia that had already secured the support of the manawhenua, Ngāti Huia.) So while the plaster feather now swinging from a nail on my wall echoes a distant past, it may also represent a distant future. “Cloning could provide the means to not only correct specific past mistakes,” writes Yule, “but also the opportunity to demonstrate to a too-often-dispirited public that it is still within our power to repair some of what we have so carelessly broken.” Genetic technology is rapidly bringing us into a brave new era of conservation biology, for better or for worse.
Lessons from a big booming budgerigar.
New Zealand’s free dental health programme for schoolchildren was the first of its kind in the world.
A new type of underwater camera sees more than ever before.
A new theory suggests why supervolcanoes go huge.
Birds tell of their narrow escape.
Drymaplaneta semivitta
John Boys figured out how to transfer electricity through thin air.
Human failure to process information became the success of Brexit, and maybe Trump.
Works overwhelmed: All dead.
The photographer with a veterinary science degree.
One of the rarest ecologies in the world is hiding in plain sight, in the centre of the most central suburb of the largest city in New Zealand. Of more than 5000 hectares of rock forest that once shrouded the lava boulderfields of the Auckland isthmus, only tiny remnants survive, totalling just 29 hectares. Welcome to the secret world of the city’s last rock forest.
New Zealand’s 11 wilderness areas offer adventure, solitude and a glimpse of the world as it was. But what does the future hold for what one tramper termed our “hunting grounds for the imagination”?
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