High Country Lark

by Neville Peat

  I’d asked Per earlier if he could show me a couple of the intriguingly named sites at Paradise: the Garden of Eden, Rock of Ages and Adam’s Armchair. He’s giving up an hour of his horse-trekking work to show me these things. We climb into his ute and drive through the Middle Earth beech forest to the Garden of Eden, a sun-trap of a glade, open to the north and cuddled by beech forest on three sides. Besides a red-brown weatherboard cottage for visitors, with a north-facing verandah and armchairs, Eden has a smaller Hobbit-like structure, grass-roofed, that serves as a sauna. With personal heating of that sort, Eden is complete.

  ‘This way for Adam’s Armchair,’ says Per. ‘I’m up here every other week — it’s our water supply.’ He points out a black polythene pipe snaking through crown fern beside the little tinkling stream. Striding ahead, he leads me steadily upwards by way of a rough-hewn track till we get to an ancient red beech tree, long deceased, perhaps toppled by wind. Between the great buttresses of this fallen lord of the forest there is a natural seat, high off the ground. Adam must have had long legs.

  ‘And back here,’ says Per, ‘that’s the Rock of Ages.’ He points out a worthy contender for the name, a massive block, the size of a mansion, garnished by mosses, ferns and an occasional epiphytic tree. From Adam’s Armchair you could mistake the Rock of Ages for a vegetated cliff or the forest interior extending dimly into the distance.

  Per needs to get back to his horses, and I need to get on my way to — here’s hoping — a meeting with the Lark. The road continues north along the valley floor to Mill Flat, where pasture for red cattle replaced the red-beech forest a long time ago. Over some decades the forest was converted to weatherboards and posts, sent off by lake steamer to Kingston then by rail into Southland to house farmers and fence their fat lambs. Matai and rimu trees partnering the beech in this forest were turned into elegant flooring and framing timber for southern settlements.

  At the top end of Mill Flat a cattle stop marks the end of Arcadia land. It’s all conservation land or national park from here. The road runs on now through Dan’s Paddock, a showcase for matagouri, and through ford after ford, till, at Chinaman’s Flat, apparently once a discrete campsite for early Chinese gold-miners, a shiny new information kiosk announces the beginning of the Rees-Dart track at nearby Chinaman’s Bluff. Last chance to use a flush toilet, too. Flush toilet? What would Bill O’Leary and his contemporaries make of that?

  Bill gets hero treatment on the information panels. Granny Aitken is also featured, and so, too, the valiant mohua and Operation Ark’s battle to protect the nationally endangered forest songbird from furry predators in this area.

  It’s a powerful place, Chinaman’s Bluff. It is tempting to call the mighty cliffs limestone, as there’s a resemblance: in fact, they are made of older stuff, rocks going back to a time when the embryonic New Zealand land mass lay beneath the sea floor, and part of it was transforming under intense heat and pressure to become the schist of Otago. The bluff’s great southern wall protects campers from raging northerly winds. In January 1988, Ron and Sara Keen from Dunedin were camping here with another couple. Ron, a surveyor, was used to the outdoors and to birdlife. He had spent a lot of time in Mount Aspiring National Park. Around dawn, both couples were awoken by a melodic bird call so powerful it made for lively conversation over breakfast. All agreed the call wasn’t from a tūī or a bellbird. They concluded it must have been the voice of a South Island kōkako.

  Over the generations, Chinaman’s Bluff has gazed down on a passing parade of people of many motivations, including surveyors, explorers, prospectors, mountaineers, campers, trampers, kayakers, rafters, jetboaters, and farmers driving cattle or sheep. Sheep did not fare as well as cattle on the remote, wet flats through the middle reaches of the Dart Valley — Dredge Flat, Daley’s Flat, Cattle Flat — and eventually all farm stock was removed as the conservation ethic asserted itself, claiming ecological damage from cattle encroaching into unfenced forest margins.

  Till a few years ago four-wheel drive vehicles used to be able to get past Chinaman’s Bluff. Then floods in the Dart River cut into the gravelly, grassed apron of land that once carried the vehicle track, chopping off vehicle access and forcing a new alignment for the walking track. This involved some blasting and a new, curving metal bridge around a rock overhang.

  Weave a circle round him thrice

  And close your eyes with holy dread

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of Paradise

  ‘Kubla Khan’,

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  1816

  I am looking for a rock shelter about a ten-minute walk north, past where the vehicle wheel tracks are rudely interrupted by a two-metre drop into the river’s easternmost braid. At the northern end of these river flats, in the absence of any DOC signpost pointing out a rock shelter, I begin looking for signs of past activity at the forest edge.

  The forest here is partly open and dotted with ancient piles of rock debris brought down by the glacier. Bare and blackened patches suggest campsites in the past. I poke about, peering into the interior.

  ‘Hey, Lark! You in there?’

  I call again.

  This time there is a response. A voice but I still can’t see him.

  ‘Come on up! Another hundred yards.’

  There is no obvious track. I wonder how the Germans found him. Crunching my way over fallen branches I reach a boulder about the size of a two-storey house, the lower side of which is an overhang large enough to shelter two people, three at a squeeze. This can’t be the Lark’s lair. It is empty.

  ‘Come around the top side!’

  And there he is, a Swanndri-clad figure standing beside a dark gap formed by another gigantic straight-sided schist boulder that has come to rest against the lower rock. At least three storeys high, the one forming the roof is bigger than the Rock of Ages. Both boulders could have split off the cliff, probably thousands of years ago. The result of this clash of two monoliths is a shelter where half a dozen campers could comfortably find a roof over their heads.

  Siren’s song

  ‘Like a siren’s song, the call of the South Island kōkako is the most staggeringly beautiful birdsong in the world.’

  Rhys Buckingham, after hearing and seeing a kōkako, Glenroy River, Murchison, November 1996.

  ‘Welcome to Hotel Twilight,’ says the Lark. ‘It’s dusk all day.’

  True enough, the forest canopy high overhead together with the sloping roof of rock make the interior of the bivvy a gloomy place, and it takes me a few moments to discern the layout and its contents. The bivvy is open on two sides and campers in the past have obviously done some landscaping to form flat areas for cooking, conversing and sleeping.

  If the Earnslaw Burn’s Starlight Hotel is a spacious five-star camp site, this one would struggle to gain three stars. There is no starry mountain view and no water supply closer than the river. For seating, there are two wooden ABC beer crates, labelled with the company stamp: ‘Make your empties go another round’. Someone’s taken the advice: the bivvy contains no empties. A curious honeycomb pattern, not at all characteristic of schist, decorates the ceiling, suggestive of a bat roost. In a downpour, this place would be a winner, even with native long-tailed bats for company.

  ‘Not a patch on Earnslaw Burn in fine weather,’ says the Lark. ‘But if you’re caught short in a storm, it’s as good as gold.’

  Out of self-interest I ask about the sandflies, whether they’re a problem.

  ‘A few, yeah, before rain. But nowhere near the numbers waiting to ambush visitors at the kiosk and around the carpark. I just say the bar’s closed if they’re niggling me.’

  ‘Heard about you at the Glenorchy Races yesterday. Did the Germans camp with you?’

  The Lark leans towards a little gas burner hissing a billy towards a cup of tea. ‘No, I bumped into them down by the big erratic boulder. Boiling up a brew, I was. Grab a seat. It’s your turn now.’

>   The bivvy looks lived in, with the Lark’s sleeping bag laid out on an inflatable pad, and other accoutrements of camping strewn about. The first people here might well have come upon the scattered remains of moa, adzebill and other flightless birds, now extinct, that chose this shelter as their last resting place. Perhaps the moa-hunting Waitaha people knew this bivvy, too, stayed overnight and awoke to the kind of dawn chorus that made early European explorers gasp in wonder — a dawn chorus that included the bells of bellbirds, the trumpeted melodies of tūī, and the reverberating bong calls of kōkako. It would be several hundred years before the white men came with astonishingly new technology and a menagerie of weird and wonderful animals.

  If only … if only, through some modern magic, the skins and skeletons of South Island kōkako found today in museum collections in New Zealand and overseas — as many as 200 skins — could be brought back to life. The species would have a chance then. Imitating the character of the bird itself, most of the skins are hidden from view — stored away in cool, dark places in museum basements, mute and staring glass-eyed. There are enough South Island kōkako at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to fill the valleys at the Head of Lake Wakatipu — twenty-eight specimens all told. Imagine the music of such a flock cascading through the Dart, Routeburn and Caples forests. Even farther from home than New York are the fourteen skins at Cambridge University Museum and the ten at Liverpool Museum. Eight skins are held at the Australian Museum in Sydney. New Zealand holdings including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s twenty-eight mounts and skins, nineteen at Canterbury Museum and thirteen in Otago Museum.

  Little more than statistics and curiosities now, and part of a sad record, they represent the feverish, competitive collecting and exporting that went on during the late nineteenth century. Add the birds taken for sport or pot to that toll and you can see why humans should be counted among the main predators of kōkako in the south, together with tree-climbing ship rats and stoats. Possums have also contributed to the slaughter, raiding nests for eggs and chicks (chicks confronted by possums are liable to leap out of the nest to their doom) and competing with the kōkako for forest fruit and young shoots. Habitat loss is not an issue for kōkako. There is ample protected space.

  Kōkako are long-lived. They may survive beyond twenty years. Reports of contact with the bird in the last twenty years suggest there are survivors still occupying remote catchments where predators are in low numbers going into the twenty-first century.

  How many New Zealand bird species have come back from the dead? Answer: enough to be significant. Certainly enough to encourage South Island kōkako searchers. The best-known example is the takahē, Porphyrio mantelli hochstetteri, ‘rediscovered’ in Fiordland’s subalpine Takahe Valley on the national park side of Lake Te Anau. Takahē were found browsing the tussock grassland there in 1948 — exactly fifty years after the previous record of the species.

  The takahē’s fame as a bird rebounding out of extinction has spread far and wide. Bus-borne Japanese tourists in particular are aware of it and many of them make a beeline for the takahē compound at the Te Anau Wildlife Centre when they pass through the town on the way to or from Milford Sound. There are other examples of ‘rediscovery’. In the 1970s, kākāpō, the flightless forest parrot of the night, were found in surprisingly good numbers in a remote southeast corner of Stewart Island, and a long-lost seabird, the magenta petrel of the Chatham Islands, Pterodroma magentae, also known as taiko, turned up on the southwest coast of Chatham Island in 1978. These birds were later found in nest burrows under forest. In 2003, another seabird, the New Zealand storm petrel Pealeornis māoriana, was ‘rediscovered’ by seabird enthusiasts in the Hauraki Gulf region one hundred years after the last sighting. Several of these dainty birds were photographed on subsequent trips. One was caught, banded and released.

  Trick of the light

  Wanting to see a South Island kōkako close up, I call the Otago Museum’s natural sciences curator, Otto Hyink, and make an appointment. Out the back of the museum, in the modern storage area, Otto lines up three birds for me. Two are perching on the same mount. Expecting to see the blue-grey plumage of the birds, I am puzzled by their colour under the fluorescent lighting. All three mounted birds are as brown as coffee beans, with one bird, seemingly younger, a paler form, and its wattles are both smaller and lighter in colour than those of the two other birds. Then I start photographing, using the digital camera’s built-in flash and play back the images on the camera’s LCD screen. The plumage is not brown but blue-grey, just like most of the photographs and paintings of the bird.

  A trick of the light conspiring with the unusual construction of the feathers explains the mystery of so many different descriptions of the South Island kōkako’s colour … ‘dark’, ‘very dark’, ‘almost blackish’, ‘dark grey’, ‘dark blue’, ‘slate grey’, ‘blue-grey’, ‘lilac-grey’ and so on.

  I take several photographs. They come out pretty much the same. I am left thinking that under the fluorescent lights in the windowless storage area the birds appear a different colour compared to what they look like under flash, and perhaps under sunlight. Tūī, too, are chameleons, reflecting a rich shiny black in dim settings, and metallic blue-green in brighter conditions.

  Artist Paul Martinson, who illustrated Extinct Birds of New Zealand with water-colour portraits, says he has to wrestle with changing light and variations in reflected colour. Colour, he says, is affected by the quality of the light at any one time. Wavelengths vary in different environments. A leaf is not intrinsically green — and South Island kōkako not always lilac-grey.

  Despite the rediscoveries, the history of New Zealand bird extinctions has a calamitous look about it. Some forty per cent of the birds unique to the New Zealand ornithological region have become extinct since the first people arrived. Of every ten indigenous species, four have gone forever. American evolutionary biologist and biogeographer Jared Diamond describes New Zealand’s extinction history as ‘the worst tragedy to befall the world’s island biotas’. We have lost a lot.

  Are humans entirely to blame? Yes, emphatically. But there is a smaller voice arguing circumstances beyond human control. In the early 1990s I travelled from Dunedin to the Dart Bridge moa-hunter camp site with Otago University archaeologist/anthropologist Atholl Anderson and artist Chris Gaskin. Atholl had studied the site and Chris was reconnoitring it so he could paint a scene from 400 years ago — people preparing food, weaving, interacting — for a new book I was writing about Mount Aspiring National Park. The umu pits were awesome and moving to behold. But what I remember most about that day was something Atholl said as we talked about the large number of moa killed and eaten at this and other moa-hunter settlements and how the hunting impacted on the moa’s fate. Atholl has written extensively on moa and excavated numerous moa-bone sites, both natural (notably old swamps) and cultural. He said: ‘There are things we don’t understand about the process of extinction.’ He wasn’t denying the moa-hunters’ devastating impact. But perhaps there were other factors at work?

  Environments change over time. Weather patterns vary. Ice ages come along. Rocks move around, get worn down. Plant life adapts, reinvents itself. The fauna adapts, too, through natural selection. The ancient past saw many more species of animal life than exist today. Extinction happens. It is a natural process. Change is nothing to be scared of. But accelerated change, of the kind predicted for the twenty-first century through global climate change, is another matter altogether, potentially a time of mass extinction.

  Moa inhabited New Zealand for a very long time — the only birds in the world to exhibit no trace of wing bones. Long-lived and slow to reproduce, they occupied a wide range of habitats across the country. Their only natural enemy was a giant eagle, also now extinct. Moa were knocked down by a blitzkrieg of hunting within a few generations. But in far-flung parts of the land, including the wilds of Fiordland that probably had never seen people, some moa would ha
ve survived. In the end, what killed them off?

  Reproductive failure is one notion. Isolated and widely-dispersed species that live a long time but breed slowly are at risk of not achieving rates of replacement. Sometimes the gender balance in the remnant population gets out of kilter (too few females, for example, as has happened to kākāpō). The species declines steadily then dies out. Food supply is another factor. Fire is also implicated. Fires caused by lightning, Polynesian overlanders and nineteenth-century European runholders would have reduced the habitat of some moa species. What else? In his statement about a lack of understanding of extinction processes, Atholl Anderson was also suggesting, I think, that some species become unsuited to their environments. Did the first people to settle New Zealand, bold, efficient and wide-ranging hunters in search of protein, arrive at a time when moa were teetering anyway, and highly vulnerable to hunting?

  As for other bird species lost forever, the vast majority have fallen prey to humans and their camp-followers — the introduced mammals that relied as much on scenting prey as seeing and hearing it, a concept alarmingly new to the birds of New Zealand. Rats, cats, dogs, stoats, ferrets, possums, pigs … the list goes on. Then there is the issue of birds introduced to New Zealand from Europe and other regions. Did any of them bring diseases fatal to the local birds? How serious was the competition for food and breeding habitat?

  Most extinctions are forever, of course. Christchurch ornithologist Ron Nilsson, who has been chasing reports of South Island kōkako for decades, says he would never expect to come across a bush wren or a laughing owl in his fieldwork. Both these birds became extinct in the twentieth century. South Island kōkako, he says, are a different story. He first searched for them in May 1972, following up a gold miner’s report from Boulder Lake, a high and distant corner of the Aorere River catchment in Northwest Nelson. He has been looking ever since, and is not put off by the no-shows.