COPPERMINE ISLAND

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 300, 18 December 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

COPPERMINE ISLAND

Home of the Tuataro, the Titi, and the Puka Tree

JU ST before daybreak one morning our little steamer anchored under the lee of a high i.-'.and that suddenly shut oif from us 'lie fre-li northerly breeze and lively run of pea. We eoiihl dimly make out the black bulk of steep cliff- that seemed thousands of feet high. Daylight redueo.l their height to a few hundred feet, but the place seemed I*> r - niidribie enough. No .sandy bay. no snug harbour, but an o[>en bight Ftudded with black rock-. and then the cliffs, sloping back into rid2e.~ en ered with dark c]osply-wo\ en bu.-n. We were lying under the smallest of the Marotiri group of islands, otherwise The <"hi--ken«. 1miles eact of Whangarei Heads. Astern of ih, southward. tiie lofty ma.-s of The Hen. or Taranga. rested

on tiie o<--ean. sitting apart from the rocky brood of seven, which were separated only by narrow channels full of sharp reef? and half-tid" patches, where mosses and bull-kelp swayed like the tangled hair of occur monsters.

The inland close on our port hand was Whakahau, the middle Chicken. Beyond wa« Marotiri. largest of the group —a far-travelled Polynesian name distributed over the Pacific from New Zealand to Easter Island. Our island of exploration is Coppermine Island. Lonely places, these islet«. now all sanctuaries for native bird life and vegetation. The Seabird Life. Thousands of gulls and petrels swarm about us, wrangling over their breakfasts; penguins are scrambling down the rocks and striking out for likely fishing places; black shags fly overhead; gannets dot the water about us, diving in search of their meals that last all day. This island Is a mountain of minerals, with a deep top-dressing of guano deposited by seabirds and a green garment of trees, chiefly pohutukawas, over all. Our mining experts attack the mineralised cliff* with their hammers, chipping off specimens, while the rest of us climb the leas precipitous faces, hanging on by the flax bushes, to see What lie* over the range. The great rock, some 500 feet high, contains copper ore in great quantities.- Specimens broken off almost anywhere show the glisten of native copper. There are other minerals, but the copper mining has been confined to a bit of prospecting by one party after another. The Pengnln Slide. Penguin* (korora) aro my numerous. On the aonth «ide of the island we saw a peculiar narrow chute or tlide leading steeply down-

By JAMES COWAN.

ward through the soft earth, and the tbix b'lr-iiet; to the shingly l>eaoh. 1 hi-. »e disrovered. was the tobog-

■.■an slide u-ed by the penguins when thi'V set out for th<*ir se« business in

the early morning. It in their ,-hort cut to the ucean firh sliop. Th<-y fit down at the top of the slide, in a long and solemn row, hold u {> their feet in front and fro gravely >1"" n l>y the run to the water. That i~ the reason the penguin's tail is worn so «hort. The daily sliding habit, practised from time immemorial. has simply worn it off.

Von will ii <>t find that valuable fart mentioned by the author? of our bird book*. But they ha\> not seen that penguin elide.

'Hie fishers' return at night to the cliff dwellings must be laborious, for the penguin has no wings to speak of. and must therefore scramble up, hanging on to the flax bushes ae we did; but the swift descent in the early day must appeal to him as the luxury of motion. We were almost tempted to use that well-worn slide ourselves when we came down the mountain that evening.

A? we climbed the island the first thing we noticed was the curious pitting of the soft, dark ground with countless holes and burrows. There was a strong smell of ammonia from the soil, that wa« mostly guano, the accumulation of untold centuries, continually turned up by the digging of sea birds and the burrowing of the great lizards. Everywhere the soil w undermined with these "rua," the homes of the mutton birds, and in many places the homes of the tuatara also.

The Chicken Islands, like several other islands on the coast, where there are no destroying animals, are remarkable for the amicable partnerships in the burrows between the petrels and tbe tnatara, that strange, spiny-backed link between the saurians of to-day and the monster reptiles of a bygone aga. The

tuetara lives in the game burrows as those inhabited by the oii, the titi and the toanui. All three of these [tetrels are included in the term mutton birds. Titi is the word most frequently used. There is also the taiko, sooty and fat. The strangely aborted fellowlodgers, the feathered ones and the spiny-backs. live on the friendliest of terms; indeed the luatara is said by the Maoris to live partly on the. fit-h brought home by the petrels. The Maori and the Mutton Bird. The old Maori sailor, Tenetalii. the scow owner who lived at Little Omaha (and on the Little Barrier Island when I first knew him) was wise in all manner of bird life lore. He and his ]>eople made annual excursions to the mutton bird islands to take the young birds. He told me of rotation of residence that was observed by the petrels of Marotiri and its neighbour islands. The oii, and titi, he said, inhabited the same burrows as the tuatara for part of the year and then vacated the burrows, which were entered by the toanui. This petrel was very large and fat and agreeable to the Maori palate. Then there was the taiko, black of plumage and strong of odour. The flesh of all is, of course, very fishy; there is nothing of our mutton about it, but its appearance when cooked, and even that can only be likened to mutton with the help of a strong imagination. Fairchild's Lizard Pits. Captain John Fairchild, who commanded Government steamers on the coast for many years, was sometimes called upon to capture specimens of the tuatara tribe for mueeums and zoo collections. His method was to visit these Chicken Islands and other islets he frequently visited (there wae one that came to be called "Sairohild's Garden"), and dig large pits near the titi-tuatara burrows. Next time he called round there were sure to be a tuatara or two in the pit which had tumbled in and could not get o<rt again, not being possessed of sufficient initiative to dig a way through the crumbly soil for themselves.

Captain Fairchild used to say when discussing coastwise navigation that he could smell his war 'round Xew Zealand; a fog never baffled him. I believe he could, if put to it. He told me, at any rate, that he often knew when he va« passing a mutton bird island such as this at night by the peculiar musty tang in the air. But the old "Bluenose" sailors had a preternaturally developed sense of smell. The Puka Tree. Clambering tip the south-western face of the island, we passed the ruined whare of some lone prospector. or some mutton-birding party. It was built in a very beautiful spot, over-arched bv great twisted pohutukawa trees and commanding a view of steep islands, green forest and sparkling blue sea. Pushing through the light hush, mostly kohekohe, manuka and pohutukawa, we made for the top of the island. All at once we came upon a noble grove of the great broadleaf tree, the puka (or puka-nui). known to botanical science as Meryta Sinclairii. The clump stood by itself, as befitted its dignity and rarity. The trees.some of them nearly 30ft high—much higher than they grow on the mainland —were hung with gTeat clusters of sweet-smelling, oval berries, the shape of karaka drupes. The leaves, smooth and shining, were the largest I had ever seen; some of them were quite 2ft in length and up to lOin in width. The tree was named after Dr. Sinclair, friend of Sir Julius von Haast and Samuel Butler. He lost his life by drowning in a Canterbury snow river, near Butler's famous sheep station Mesopotamia. But Sinclair did not see it in its real home, the Chickens. The specimen he and the Rev. W. Colenso saw and described grew at V> hangaruru. on the mainland, where it had been grown by the Maoris from this ancient Marotiri grove. Kow the puka is seen In every park and in a great many gardens all over New Zealand. From this beautiful clump of broadleafs. the crowning adornment of the wild island park, we climbed a short distance through the tall manuka and mountain flax to the top of Coppermine. We saw the bold north head of Whangarci Harbour; in the other direction was the gunsiglit-notched grey crag of Taranga; further soirth still the serrated range tops of the Barriers, the great and the lcs.«er; and all around us the summer sea of glorious blue alive with those ceaselessly screaming hordes of sea fowl.