natural history

Earth’s Last Great Wilderness

November 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Neville Peat

Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica by Rebecca Priestley (Victoria University Press, 2019), 384pp., $40

Despite an inhospitable nature, or maybe simply because it’s a frozen desert, Antarctica attracts an array of superlatives – coldest, windiest, highest, driest, remotest and last-discovered of the planet’s seven continents. Yet another set of descriptors derives from the human activity of recent decades – most pristine, most peaceful, most collaborative.

Yes, collaboration, internationally. As New Zealand’s most famous Antarctic explorer, Sir Edmund Hillary, once said, Antarctica’s extreme environment ‘drives people together’. [Read more…]

An Empty Tent Flapping in the Wind

August 1, 2014 Leave a Comment

Kathryn Mitchell
45 South: A journey across southern New Zealand, by Laurence Fearnley with photographs by Arno Gasteiger, (Penguin, 2013), 191 pp., $65.00

Our journey in this book begins at Hilderthorpe, where a large boulder marks an invisible line laid down by map-makers: 45 degrees south, halfway between the equator and the south pole. 45 South documents a strong sense of place and time as author Laurence Fearnley, avid kayaker and lover of solitude, takes to the road. Through a dry blustery nor-wester that stirs dust and stings the eyes, past barren hills and valleys punctuated by fresh, green spring growth, and alongside the author, we make camp to gaze at the Orion constellation. Before long we tour on to marvel at the jagged peaks of the Remarkables; kayak down the Eglinton River; and eventually arrive in Fiordland, where we are told a tale of two Te Anau locals who made an unexpected discovery in the caves of Lee Island. The invisibility and yet navigational dependability of the line of the 45th parallel is echoed in Fearnley’s travels as she recounts stories and histories that have left their own ineradicable traces. [Read more…]

Happiest When Specimen Hunting

September 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Anne Else

The Owl that Fell from the Sky: Stories of a Museum Curator, by Brian Gill

(Awa Press, 2012), 152pp. $35; Flashback: Tales and Treasures of Taranaki, by Andrew Moffat, (Huia Publishers, 2012), 321 pp., NZ$55.

In 2013, a museum looks like an increasingly strange idea. Get together various collections of still, silent objects. These may not be rare or even attractive. Some were once living creatures but are now dead; others were once useful but no longer have a purpose. Put them into a special building where they can be set up in large rooms on mostly still, silent display to the general public. Doesn’t sound much like the twenty-first century, does it?

Today, up-to-date museums may offer plenty of all-singing, all-dancing computer-generated illusions, but Hollywood always does it better. The museum’s real claim to our attention is simple: what its staff so carefully store, study, catalogue and present to us is not a simulacrum or a hologram, but the real thing. This real thing has unique and remarkable connections to the otherwise unreachable foreign country of the past, or the seemingly familiar but still barely known country we now live in — and off. Faced with our uncomprehending, tech-fed, impatient gaze, the curator’s game is to make these objects and their connections spring to life. And it’s a game still played mostly with words.

[Read more…]

Nature Study Man

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Seabird Genius: the Story of L.E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross and the Yellow-eyed Penguin, by Neville Peat (Otago University Press, 2011), 288 pp. $45

The establishment of the albatross colony at Tairoa Head on Otago Peninsula is iconic, but not so the individual largely responsible. Lance Richdale, born just days into the beginning of the twentieth century, saw his first albatross egg in November 1936 and was later devastated when he learned that vandals had stolen it. In fact, because of predators, no chick had successfully fledged in many years. He lobbied for the building of a protective fence, and the following season camped in his spare time near the nest of a single surviving chick. When after eight months it flew out to sea, local and foreign newspapers reported this exceptional event.

Prior to his contact with albatross, Richdale had begun intensive observations of yellow-eyed penguins on Otago Peninsula. After five seasons encompassing 800 visits to the colonies, he produced a two-volume manuscript, which unfortunately was not published because of the Second World War. He also began a twenty-year study of petrels on tiny Whero Island off the coast of Stewart Island.

Richdale was the first person in New Zealand to band seabirds systematically over time, and the second in the world to band penguins. His close observations of seabirds enabled him to debunk various fallacies, and to make many discoveries. He disproved the widely held notion that albatross deliberately starved their chicks in the later stages of rearing; and in regard to penguins he identified ‘14 types of behavior when pairs interacted’. Long-term studies of seabirds are still a rarity.
[Read more…]