Greytown, Te Hupenui, is my turangawaewae, the place where I stand, the place where I was born. Wellington and the Wairarapa are where my family settled in the nineteenth century. My ancestors walked the streets of Wellington, Pahiatua, Masterton and the shores of Lake Wairarapa, as I do now.
Scientists report, from the evidence of pollen grains, that before humans arrived here, 85-90% of New Zealand, including the Wairarapa, was covered with forest. Grassland or shrubland occurred, as it does now, on river terraces subject to regular flooding, frost-prone valley floors, steep cliffs, and active sand dunes. Outside these limited areas the forest cover was unbroken.
In this forested country, the moa roamed, its only predator the great
Haast eagle. Evidence suggests that moa nested in the dunes around the Wairarapa coast and under high rock ledges. On my sister’s farm, near the Mangatainoka river, when digging out drains, they would regularly recover moa bones, some of which I have now, including the claws of the little bush moa. Researchers estimate that there were probably near a million roaming through the New Zealand bush, hunted to extinction by Maori, the great eagle following its prey into extinction. So many bones left that my pakeha farming ancestors crushed them for fertiliser.
Moa being browsers of the forest trees and shrubs, made tracks through the bush. After the moa had been hunted to extinction, the bush closed in to become virtually impenetrable, as attested by early European explorers and settlers. Evidence has been put forward suggesting that moa used regular tracks, and that these tracks are still visible in various parts of New Zealand. Tracks at Poukawa, Hawke's Bay, have been illustrated. Maori kept some of the moa ara, the moa tracks, open which in turn were utilised and reformed by Pakeha, so in a sense moa are still with us.
In hunting the moa, Maori used fire as an agent. Fire transformed the landscape. By the time Europeans came, burn off by Māori and natural fires had left large areas of grass, fern, and scrubland in the south and east of the Wairarapa. The Tararua Ranges and the north were still heavily forested. As farming began, most of the lowlands and eastern uplands were cleared of native grasses and re-sown in exotic varieties or given over to horticulture.
Seventy Mile Bush, Tapere-nui-a-Whātonga, stretched from the Wairarapa to Hawke’s Bay. Pukaha Mount Bruce is the last substantial remnant of the great forest. It was a conifer–broadleaf forest where the largest trees were tōtara, rimu, rātā and mataī, growing through an understorey of tawa, hīnau, makomako, kōnini, poroporo, kōwhai and lancewood. From the early 1870s the forest was cleared by government-assisted Scandinavian immigrants (and others), who then settled the land. The bush was cleared in a two-step process. The undergrowth was felled in winter and left to dry. The next winter it was set ablaze, engulfing the whole forest. The smoke could be a kilometre across, billowing up to 6,000 metres high. My ancestors were among “the others” who conspired to fell the bush. My father, who was born in Pahiatua in 1892, said in his old age he could still smell the stumps smouldering. His uncle married a Peterson, one of the Danish immigrants.
If Maori saw the extinction of the moa, it was left to Pakeha to see out the huia, its ivory like beaks turned into brooches and its body stuffed for overseas museums. The utter obscenity of it all.
Extinction is an ongoing thing, and local. How long will Greytown hear pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo, or Ruru, the morepork? Kereru are few and could disappear very soon. “We no longer see them around here,” the cry goes up and very soon they have gone from everywhere.
An Unknown Legacy of an Extinct Bird https://newzealandecology.org/nzje/1860.pdf
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