Or: Creatures of the South
—
There are moa down there. New Zealand’s largest flightless bird, the moa, is reputed to be extinct since before the arrival of Captain Cook – but I choose to believe it’s not. Because the world would be a cooler place if there were still gigantic, curious birds stomping around its most mysterious recesses.
Besides, a moa was seen just a dozen years ago. By a guy who ran a pub in the area. The pub then becoming a well-patronised tourist destination. Hmm. His name was Paddy Freaney, and yes he’s Irish, and you can see the photo he took of the moa at Wikipedia. Unless it’s a photo of a sock puppet. Or perhaps a seagull.
So now that we have established beyond all doubt that the moa exists, it is with regret that I report Aaron and I failed in our quest to find one, despite making numerous moa-appropriate calls into the bush wilderness. Inexplicable.
—
And moose. The moose of the deep south were confirmed to exist in 2000, with the discovery of a verifiable clump of moose hair in the depths of Fiordland. The http://www.nzwt.co.nz/projects.htm New Zealand Wildlife Research Trust is working on finding out more about them, and perhaps snapping an elusive picture of the Fiordland moose in its natural Fiordland habitat.
As an aside, I love that a large chunk of New Zealand is called ‘Fiordland’ because it is entirely made up of fiords/fyords. That’s how they do it down south – no fancy dressing things up for them. They call a land of fiords a Fiordland and crack open a Speights mate, pride of the South.
And despite the drinking of Speights, and Monteiths, in abundance, and making numerous moose-appropriate calls into the bush wilderness, no moose came to disturb our campsite. Or if they did we were already asleep in our tent.
—
And the maeroero. The sasquatch of the Catlins, on the South Island’s southeast tip – as it says on http://www.catlins.org.nz/iwi.htm the Catlins site, “Maori legend has it that large hairy monsters inhabited these valleys of forest, their name was Maeroero, meaning wild man of the forest and were feared by all Maori.”
We did our best to lure a maeroero to our table by playing abundant cribbage and drinking bourbon and making numerous maeroero appropriate calls into the bush wilderness, but no maeroero emerged from the darkness. The only wild hairy men of the bush were Aaron and myself.
And perhaps that’s the truth in all of this – that you can go looking for the secrets of the wilderness, but all you find there is yourself. With a beard.
—
So, given our lack of luck with the moa, the moose and the maeroero, what creature did make an impact on our Southern Odyssey? It was the sandfly. New Zealanders, and travellers who’ve experienced them, will give a shiver of acknowledgement at the thought of these creatures. They are tiny, millimetre-long flying insects with a disturbing desire to drink your blood, and they leave behind swollen irritations which in their numbers can be atrociously uncomfortable. Tenacious and pernicious, the sandfly accompanied us all down the West Coast, out to Milford Sound, and turned up again in Piano Flat on our last night together. They came at us in great numbers, hundreds, even thousands of them, clustering against our tent and flying into the car and landing on us all over. They were constantly drawn to us. I do believe they worshipped us as Gods, whole sandfly civilisations rising and falling over different interpretations of our holy writ. They loved to get on to our exposed skin and bite.
We hated them. Strict biosecurity measures, learned at the NZ border crossing, maintained the integrity and safety of our tent. Outside of that, we relied on some very effective insect repellents, which had the effect of convincing a sandfly that has landed on you not to bite, but instead to fly to another part of you and see if it can bite there, and so on and so on.
The sandflies were fairly intense in tiny Haast, at the south end of the West Coast road. Haast, you will recall, is a tiny hamlet of a few hundred people – this total a huge advance on the population in 1990 – with a single small “supermarket”. It gave me no end of bewildered pleasure to note that sandfly-beset Haast’s only retail outlet had a sign out front saying that no-one wearing insect repellent was allowed within. The owner, it seems, is extremely allergic.
One supposes she married into the region.
Wayback Machine link to archive of original message