NATURE NOTES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 17889, 17 September 1921, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATURE NOTES.

BY 7. BBTJMMOND, F.L.S., F.S.B. I

One of the most valuable parts of Mr. H. Guthrie-Smith's delightful history of his sheep station, Tutira,, is a record of the plants and animals that lived there when he bought it forty years ago, and of those that arrived later, invited or uninvited, welcome or unwelcome. The station is in Hawke's Bay, between Napier and Wairoa. It has lakes, crags, impenetrable gorges, swamps, rivers, forests, and woodlands, which supply pleasant places for birds that belong to widely-separated groups. When Mr. Guthrie-Smith took up the station, in the early eighties, he was told by Maoris who owned it previously that the North Island crow had been com- j mon there, and that the saddle-back and the North Island robin had been present. These three species disappeared from the station long before civilisation reached that part of New Zealand, but during Mr. Guthrie-Smith's time 43 species of native birds have' been seen on Tutira. On the list are the tui, the bellbird, the whiteeye, the tom-tit, the pukeko, the native lark, the pied fantail, the kaka, a parrakeet, the cuckoos, the wood pigeon, the North Island kiwi, the weka, the herons, ducks and teal. The difference between now and then, Mr. Guthrie-Smith states, is not in a reduction in the number of species, but in a reduction in the number of individuals. In other words, apparently, no native bird has become extinct on Tutira during the past 40 years in spite of marked ■ changes brought about by the use of the land, and by the transformation of bracken and bush into grass.

The aggregate number, as might be expected, has greatly. " There are, probably, not ten birds now for every thousand there used to be immediately prior to settlement," Mr. Guthrie-Smith writes. " Not very many species will fail to survive; but only in a country so broken by cliff and bog could so pleasant a prophecy be risked. The station has been so planned by Providence that lie utmost industry of man cannot completely mar it. No fanning, happily, can plane away cliffs or fill up gorges. So broken and rugged must the surface of the station always remain that 26 or 28 out of 30 breeding species will continue to propagate their kind there. Nor will species that disappear do so for reasons often assigned; they are not less vigorous than their acclimatised rivals; they will neither be ousted by imported species of birds nor annihilated by vermin. Much has been written about the inability of New Zealand birdt to withstand the competition of the newcomers and their disappearance has been predicted on account of defective morphology. If this is the case, other qualities more than atone «for such, structural deficiency. I have seen the irail-looking fantail hawking nonchalantly for insects in a deluge that was killing the homestead i sparrows, quail, pheasants, and other i aliens wholesale."

The reasons for the reduction in. the numbers of native birds on Tutira are given in tie following words :— No creature can live without food, or breed without cover. Woodland species cannot live without woodland, jungle and swamphaunting species cannot live without jungle and swamp; they cannot feed on clover and breed on turf. At one time there were on Tutira many hundreds of acres aHve with forest birds; not a single individual now exists on many of those localities, because not a single tree remains. That is the simple explanation of the great decrease of native birds. On the coastal part of Tutira, where the country is grassed, comparatively few survive. On the ranges of the interior, where the forest is untouched, native birds far outnumber the aliens." The changed conditions have attracted to Tutira the banded dotterel, the pied stilt, and the paradise duck. The first dotterels were induced to settle when, in a windy spring, several hundred acres of ploughed ground were laid bare. Since that event they have come regularly every spring, nesting sometimes on the tilled ground, sometimes in short grass. A great drain cut through a swamp in the nineties first attracted pied stilts. • Paradise ducks first bred on the station after a great flood in 1917.

The native lark, or ground lark— is known by both names, but is a pipit, not a lark — the greatest gainer .by the changes made on the station in 40 years. It has gained much, and has lost nothing. "Its increase has been commensurate _ with the extension of open ground. It is no longer limited to such oases in a desert of fern as landslips, wind-blows, bases of sun-dried cliffs, sand and shingle spits of open riverbed, pig-rootings, bare rocks, and the scanty cultivation grounds of old-time Maoris. It is a frequenter of neither the forest nor the marsh, and operations that have almost annihilated certain species have but enlarged its domain. The area of land open to grasshoppers, daddy-longlegs, and caterpillars is a thousand times greater than before. Plough and spade are to this amenable species godsends. Although truly a bird of the wilderness, it will haunt the garden on occasions, watching a worker almost like an English robin does, and accepting titbits from the hand of a Mend."

Two highly-interesting flightless birds perhaps, in different ways, the most interesting birds in the worldare safe on Tutira, whatever may happen to them in other parts of New Zealand. They are the kiwi and the weka. " They live in the innumerable gorges which never will be trodden by man. Into a few I have from time to time attempted invasion, wading the shallows, climbing the banners of piled flood debris, working hand over hand along the cliff scrub, swimming the cold, clear, unsunned pools, but always, after a few hundred yards, finding myself blocked by smooth-sided inaccessible cliffs and waterfalls. On the beds of these canyons there are shreds and patches of habitable slope. In these rifts, Tdwis and wekas are plentiful. There they will remain undisturbed until the day of judgment."

The earliest rabbit known near Tutira travelled in the early "nineties" about Tangoio, north of Napier, in the company of a flock of wild turkeys. It is generally believed that the rabbit first failed in Hawke's Bay because the early individuals belonged to a less prolific strain than that of the southern rabbit. Mr. GuthrieSmith states that the real reason for the rabbit's failure at first is the same as the reason for the failure at first of the blackbird and the song-thrush. The numbers liberated were insufficient. The first rabbit killed on Tutira was obtained by the late Sir Norman Campbell, who then -was rabbiter for the Mohaka district. It was taken near the centre of the run. The threatened invasion did not begin until the beginning of the twentieth century. In a few weeks, rabbits were found to have established themselves on many parts of the station. The duration of the weasel trek through the station' was briefer than the trek of any other alien. Un-, bridged rivers proved no check to weasels ; they rushed through good and bad alike. They, however, had no base, and perished . from insufficient numbers. For a short; time they over-ran like fire the coast between Tutira and Poverty Bay, and then,' like fire, died out. Shepherds or fencers on Tutira do not report a weasel once in six years, and Mr. Guthrie-Smith has not Been one for twenty years.