Animal Kingdom
As I said, I want to talk about the fauna of New Zealand today.
Due to New Zealands isolation there are two particular characteristics to it’s fauna: First, it is unique and many species only live there, and second- there are nearly no native mammal species on New Zealand except the sea mammals that could reach the island by swimming and some small bats.
To make up for this, nature developed a huge array of different birds, insects, fish, lizards and other creatures that took all the evolutionary spaces mammals filled in the rest of the world
I already showed you the Kakapo, world’s only non flying bird.
But of course there is also the famous Kiwi, perhaps New Zealand’s best known animal:
Lesser known is the fact that the Kiwi, though it reaches only the size of a chicken, is related to birds like the Austrich or the Emu and, like it’s relatives, lays enormous eggs, in relation to it’s size.
How the Kiwi became synonymous with New Zealand and it’s citizens is a funny story: New Zealand Soldiers at the end of World War 1, stationed in England and waiting to return home, carved a giant picture of a Kiwi bird into a hill near their military camp. The carving became famous and New Zealanders were associated with it from then on.
Here it is, you can still visit it in Bulford, Wiltshire, in England
But New Zealand doesn’t only have birds, it also preserved some of the very last dinosaurs. I’m not kidding.
The Tuatra are a species of reptiles only found in New Zealand and they are even closer related to the dinosaurs than nowaday’s birds. While all their cousins and family members died out, the Tuatra were able to survive on New Zealand, mainly because for millenias there were no rodents and other mammal predators that could have threatened them. As you can imagine, european settlers didn’t quite help those little guys when they brought all kinds of previously unknown rodents to the islands, and the Tuatra became endangered really quickly. Fortunately, big efforts over the last years achieved that some smaller islands where the little dinosaurs had become extinct could be freed from rodents and it was possible to establish new colonies of Tuatra.
There are many more interesting (mostly small) animals that define New Zealand’s biosphere, so I will link you to the official homepage about this issue.
There you can also read about the many dangers modern civilisation might pose to the Islands’ flora and fauna and wich organizations try to protect it
