NATURE AND MAN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 28 January 1939, Page 15

NATURE AND MAN

LUCKY AKAROA WEALTH OF TUIS AND BELL-BIRDS (Edited by Leo Fanning) Perhaps, if fickle fancy had lured me to New Plymouth, Wanganui, Nelson, Greymouth, Dunedin, or another town famed for wealth of tuis, I should have been chanting praise of its wealth of tui song, but chance wafted me to Akaroa at the beginning of the New Year. So again I am wondering about the tui and bell-bird premiership. Let any city or town or township or village make its claim; Akaroa will be in the running. Soon after the quick and comfortable railway bus had brought me into Akaroa a professor of efficiency, an apostle of hustle and bustle, said to me: “What this place wants is an army of carpenters and painters.” To which I replied: “No member of the S.P.C.A. wishes to be kinder to the human race than I; but, if such an army came, I should like to salute it with a few machineguns.” Hands off Akaroa Let it stay as it is, a place of peace, free from the noisy touch of modern progress, which always tends to lose its way in mazes of problems. Glaring paint might frighten the tuis which flutter and chuckle in the trees flanking Lavaud street, the main highway by the waterfront. During Easter of 1937 I was in Akaroa. From early morn until dewy eve I heard tuis every day. It was the same in high summer this year. No other bird in the wide world has a better sense of joy of living. Sunshine —food —a waft of wind —a glimpse of colour —a sight of a mate —anything serves the tui as an excuse for song. He is one of the world’s most inspiring optimists. Man is a very poor kind of biped in contrast with the tui. Bell-birds, too. One afternoon I heard their chiming for hours —not the chorus which everybody yearns to hear at dawn but the peals of single birds. In the Domain, which stretches down to the waterfront, I saw a pair of bellbirds feasting on the nectar of a tree, Kaikomako, on the edge of a shaded path. What a surprise The creamy flowers, in clusters, are not larger than the bloom of lilac or forget-me-not; yet those graceful birds, with their brushtipped tongues, were managing to get a breakfast. One would imagine that a bee or a fly would have to work hard among such small flowers for a meal, but the bell-birds did the trick, which old-time Maoris observed, for their name of the tree means “food of bellbirds.” A native pigeon flashed his rainbow collar above me, and a friendly fantail followed me closely along the path for a furlong or so. Sometimes the chummy little chap nearly perched on an outstretched finger. Yes, the European dictators seemed to be infinitely remote from Akaroa. One delightful memory of the visit is that thrushes and blackbirds apparently admitted that they could not hope to compete with the tuis and bellbirds. The natives had no challengers except a goldfinch whose twittering notes were more like an apology than a song. “Off season for thrushes and blackbirds,” a critical reader may say. Well, why was it that I heard plenty of blackbirds and thrushes in Picton a few days later? During trips to many little bays in Queen Charlotte Sound I saw only one tui and did not hear one sing. However, I believe that tuis are not scarce in the remnants of the native forests which covered all the hills long ago. I shall comment on that matter in a later article. CARELESS SMOKERS Possibly a careless smoker’s cigarettebutt or pipedottle or the embers of a picnicker’s fire started the disastrous flaming in forests of Victoria. How long will ft take some smokers to realise that butts and dottles smoulder on long after they have been thrown away? The Hon. W. E. Parry, Minister of Internal Affairs, has properly indicated a prospect of drastic action against careless smokers or picnickers, but in the case of smokers —particularly the persons who cast glowing butts from motor cars —detection would be usually very difficult. Again one has to appeal to them to refrain from a stupid practice which may cause enormous loss of woodlands. REAL CONSERVATION E. L. Scovell has some good comment on conversation in the magazine “Recreation.” “Conservation is vital to man’s interests, comfort, pleasure and very existence,” he writes. “Conservation is helping nature to help us. It is protecting our properties, and making this a better, more beautiful and hap-

pier place for ourselves and the coming generations to live in. It is the making of a wise truce with all nature to the end that we and nature will work together for the common good. It is an alliance with nature so that we and the generations yet to come can continually enjoy our great natural resources. “Such an interpretation of conservation is all-inclusive. It means the full development of our soils by preventing erosion, building up and maintaining their fertility, and having each soil type used for the purposes for which it is best qualified. It means maintaining on each area a balance between plant life and all other forms of life. “To make such a programme in conservation effective, we canot overlook any species of living thing from grass to trees, from the smallest insect to the largest bird, from the smallest mouse to the largest animal, from the tiny minnow to the whale, from light rainfall to the largest body of water.” MAN’S WAR WITH NATURE The Golden Age—or the millennium —will be here when man becomes intelligent enough to regard nature as a friend and decides to live in peace with her instead of war with her. This subject is brightly treated by Edward Meeman in the American “Rotarian.” “It was said formerly that man was but a puny thing against the great relentless power of Nature,” he remarks. “To-day man is not puny in his power over Nature. In the country, he has laid low the forests and left gaunt gullies in their place and the good soil washes to the sea; in the cities, hard brick and concrete cover the gentle earth; between the cities, vast junk heaps are piled up from the misuse which man has made of the wealth and beauty which were his legacy from Nature. “No, man is not puny in power. He is puny only in wisdom. His growth in power has outrun his growth in wisdom. He has befouled his own nest. A befouled nest drops to earth and by the beneficient processes of Nature, soon becomes clean, soft earth again. But foul sores and the giant scars made by man on the face of the earth can never be entirely healed. Man is destroying his eternal home. s “Let’s have a road here.’ The shoulder of a mountain is dynamited. Concrete is laid down. That mountain can never be the same again. It is forever scarred, and must remain so through all the millions or billions of years that man wili dwell here. Was the road needed? Perhaps. But what if it were not needed? Then what a crime!”