Life built around interest in animals

Press, 3 September 1982, Page 13

Life built around interest in animals

By

TIM GRAFTON

He has ridden a camel over the Port Hills, taken a llama on the Cook Strait ferry and had a gull land its webbed feet among the pavlova and wine glasses of an intimate dinner. Michael Willis would have excused his uninvited guest if the title of his first book is anything to go by. He calls it “Some of My Best Friends are Animals." and it tells the story of the animals in his life from when he was a boy in Christchurch to his present creation, Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. “Eve had the dream all my life." he says of the reserve, which opened in 1975. Tall and wiry, he looks up to Gerald Durrell, the writer and naturalist, as one of the people he most admires. But quite where his interest in

animals first started is hard to tell. A knee-high ebony elephant in the home he has built for his family at the reserve gives a clue. It is the same one he used to ride as a toddler and stands proudly by the fireplace quite oblivious to the sneezes coming from the other side of the slidingdoors into the lounge. The sneezes come from Edith, an old monkey from the Amazon basin. . “My , grandfather used to import tea from Ceylon and he used to get these elephants sent to him which would be displayed in the shop window,” he explains. Today, children ride donkeys past the strutting peacocks and scampering guinea-fowls that run freely

within the reserve. Michael sees it as important that children should come, not to look at a display, but to. touch the animals. “That’s why we handle them ourselves,” he says. He does too. He takes Louis, a mountain lion, for a walk every day. Exotic animals are only some of his friends. More important are the individuals that have probably been saved from extinction. Two of these are among New Zealand’s rarest introduced animals, the Kunae Kunae pig and the Old English goat from Arapawa Island. Most people would never have heard of the Kunae Kunae. It took Michael two trips round the North Island talking to local Maoris before he found one. No-one knows how they arrived in New Zealand, but Michael has been told that they most resemble a breed from China. “Part of my aim is to draw attention-to New Zealand animals that just aren’t appreciated here,” he says. “By the time it is officially

recognised that some groups are rare and worth preserving it’s often too late. The Old English goats in Marlborough (Arapawa Island) were the only herd in the world and now we have the only viable breeding group." Bureaucracy has always been an obstacle. Some penguins were confiscated by the Internal Affairs department because the Willises did not have the necessary papers to keep them. Kathy, Michael’s wife, describes him as a constant surprise when it comes to knowing what he is going to do next. Last October he rode a horse from Cape Reinga to Bluff, which he plans to write about in his next book. Most of the time he travelled off the road, and between Blenheim and Tekapo he passed through no towns.

The next venture could surprise us all. In March he plans a trip down to Fiordland in search of the fabled New Zealand otter, and for the moose believed to have been introduced last century. ■ Michael Willis has read of otter sightings by such

people as Captain Cook and Julius Von Haast. The Maoris had a name for the otter too, he claims. As for the moose, hair found on the bark of trees in the area has been sent to Canada and proved to be moose hair, he says. “Well, the Japanese went down there looking for the moa, and it would have been a pity if someone outside New Zealand found it first.” he says putting his case to rest as simply as that. His simple and open approach to life has taken him from being a debt-collector to a gardener for an English aristocrat, and finally to bulldozing a track through to “a bit of second-hand Waimak river bed” to start his wildlife reserve. All this is told in his book with a liberal sprinkling of anecdotes. Now, at 37, Michael Willis has achieved his dream, but he is not content to leave it at that. There is much more to be done at Willowbank, and he hopes to do more writing to promote wildlife interests in New Zealand well beyond the bounds of a reserve.