https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-...=4703187891001
WOW what an interesting article they must be struggling for news... big tall birds eat things high little birds eat things low yep the latest science at its best .one of the more interesting things I learnt recently about the moa is the lance wood seemly the reason lance wood is shaped like it is is because of the moa..it grows straight up until it gets above browsing height before it branches out into a tree ;)
I see that emus have been turned down as total replacements for all species of moa (I have noticed that every report focuses on the fact they can't replace all of them, but mostly avoid whether they can replace some of them), but if I were suddenly flush and had a large lifestyle block of native bush, I'd probably deer fence it and stick some emus in there just to see what happened.
Rocket science it certainly is not.
A friend who is a vet spent many months during her university years studying the possible effects of Moa in the NZ bush, specifically around Fiordland. Back in the 1980's she explained how this concept we have about "pristine native bush" is quite wrong and that with Moa capable of browsing at least as high as a deer (if not higher) the bush would have been similar to what it is today. Clearly deer have simply taken taken the place of Moa and if kept in balance should be no more or less detrimental to the New Zealand bush.... despite what the tree-huggers will try and tell you. For all we know this might also hold true for alpine animals like the Chamois and Tahr as well because there must have been some Moa capable of living in that environment. I bet the greenies would have kittens if somebody pointed out that we need the Chamois and Tahr to help with the propagation of alpine plants.
Maybe we need to pay more attention to these topics and research the possibilities. That would make Ms Sage cough.
I always wondered about Moa and the carbon foot print stuff. Let's say we have x number of sheep and cattle etc. So our country's carbon calculations, are based in part on that number and their farting etc.
Now I'm not saying that pre-human, there are as many Moa, as there are now sheep and cattle etc, but let's be generous and say half as many, so half x.
Surely that would change our carbon calculations? Getting us back to pre industrial levels of CO2 emissions? When Moa are taken into account, maybe we should lower the goals the government types are setting?
But I guess the argument is academic, as we'll never know if Moa farted a lot, or at all.
Do Emus fart?
The last bonafide Moa sighting was in the 1930's by Railway workers in the lower Buller Gorge. A smallish model around 36 inches or so from memory
Well I know that when I eat lots of coleslaw and lettuce I fart more so given Moa only ate their "greens" they probably farted like troupers. If you're pondering that line of thinking, consider the collective emissions from those millions of buffalo that used to roam the plains of central 'Merica. No wonder they hunted them to near extinction... the locals were probably high on NOX by-products. Tip-toeing through the spring wildflowers would have been fraught with danger too I expect... although it would keep your feet warm.
Of course the tree-huggers tend to forget about these things in their calculations... easier to use emotional arguments than look at historical facts.
Seems like a pretty long bow to draw, to compare Moa and deer and come to the conclusion they had a similar impact on the bush.
They might have a similar browse height but the crucial thing when comparing the two is population density and range. Just because they may have browsed similar things and to a similar height doesn't mean the impact they have is the same.
Im no expert but id say comparing the impact that todays extremely high deer numbers have on the bush, with a species that was hunted to EXTINCTION using primitive weapons and skills is comparing apples with oranges. For Moa as a species to be hunted to extinction there is just no way they could have been as widespread and established as deer are today.
I hear what you say and agree with you in the most part... deer definitely would seem to be in larger numbers these days than Moa were otherwise why would they be extinct... but do we know for sure that this was always the case? What if, 600 years ago, there were millions of Moa and the different species ranged from the coast to the tops? Maybe they all got a corona virus and were decimated by that instead, with the last few killed off by maori? Certainly nature looks after herself in that regard and balance is achieved without human intervention by disease and famine or abundance and a lack of predators. Who knows. Not me anyhow.
The point I was making is that to some extent there has always been something to eat the forest greenery. This idea that deer are new to the country and are bad because they browse trees to a couple of metres is BS... they have just replaced a species that are now extinct.
Yup and thats the big hole in my argument, there could have been plenty of other factors that led to Moa's extinction, Ill never know the whole story thats for sure.
I just think it discredits hunters when they choose to jump on claims like this to try and justify the damage that deer do to the bush in NZ when left unchecked. There is definitely an equilibrium where both deer and the bush can be healthy and thrive but its probably far lower densities than the modern hunter who is used to high numbers would prefer.
"Probably" ! ?
Thats just another vague red herring worthless hypothesis
Imagine Moas in a swede paddock :thumbsup:
If they hadnt been hunted to extinction we could have farmed them.
I reckon the reason Moa went extinct so quickly, is that they'd never seen a human and thereto were easy to walk up to, and knock on the head. The Moa didn't really have time to evolve into "running away" birds...
I guess the early inhabitants only had their own conservation in mind in those times. Moa were a food trade commodity too.
kentucky hungied moa for dinner AGAIN..... something that big couldve been hunted hard and numbers collapse....maybe they nested in vunerable areas and early maori had a good pavalova recipe.....
maybe the population of moas....well actually lets be realistic about it and say....the population of moas had had enough time to go through the whole boom n bust thing many many times and had sort of reached a happy medium with the vegetation...it was as they say "nature in balance"..then some hori fellas arrived in their flashasmichaeljacson waka1600s and had a fine ol time scoffing kentucky hungied moa till the easy ones were but a aftertaste in the mouth and some odorous flatulance....then our fine brown fellas were getting low on easy to get moas and again reached a happy medium........then the big flash wakas arrived with even more hungrier fellas and things got hammered a bit harder...then the sailing ships dropped of pigs,sheep n goats....who knows those first pigs may have had absolute field day scoffing moa eggs,like stoats do now with anything on the ground or in reach...again making moas life hard....who knows for sure but maybe the early goats n sheep had worms in pukus that moads couldnt handle,or selminella....
the bush got a repreive then the deer arrived and the whole boom n bust cycle started again....its never got a chance to sort itself out on the mainland cause we keep interfering on major scale.
the bit of south canterbury you saw the other day Phil.....got hammered by merinos before the wobblies....and farmers soon learnt what stock numbers worked...its a bit hard for the wallabies to do that as they have little to do in life except,bounce,eat and make little wallabies....when they run out of food I guess they die off.....they sure as hell will be doing it hard at the moment...but they will still be there next summer,and the next and the next. umpteen dozen tons of green rain wont even get the last one,and if the population dropped by 99% the remaining 1% would have perfect breeding conditions nd ample food supply so would soon breed up again.
there is a technical term for trees like lancewood..bi something or other...means they change once reach above browsing height....this has been studied many times over the years...its not new science....
nah too high of numbers means shit body condition and shit antler growth......
@kbrebs One of the main aspects to keep in mind is that all our native birds had no predators so there breeding cycle is crap , a good question to ask is how many eggs did a Moa lay and how often ? , perhaps look at the kiwi for some form of comparison . lets say there were as many Moa about as Deer now and that browsing was similar BUT could they breed fast enough to keep up once they started ending up in the hungi pit or gently roasted over the hot coals on a weekly biases , habitat disappearing from the fires , my guess is no however that dosent change the fact that it is possible that the two species did at one point in time have a similar impact on the bush and that could have been the way for thousands of years , deer have been here for little over 100 and what species of plants have become extinct because of the deer or Tahr for that matter ? .
Back to my original post , the lancewood evolved around being browsed by the Moa this is not something that happens overnight .
The most damaging greenhouse gas produced by livestock is not carbon dioxide, it is methane. The whole "cows farting" problem you hear about is related to methane. Ruminant animals (sheep, deer, cows, goats, etc) has a specific way to digest grass, which produces a lot of methane which is let out by farting.
I had a quick look and have not seen any articles saying birds goes through the same digestive process and produces the same amount of methane as ruminants. I am reasonably confident that only ruminants produce (at least a bad level of) methane.
So even if NZ had as many moas as we do now game runimant, there would not have been as much methane produced and not as much green house effect.
Another big methane producer, surprisingly, is rice paddy. In other words, consuming rice, sadly, encourages methane producing agricultural activity.
To clarify. Haast's Eagle would have existed on bigger prey items, like the larger Moa. The NZ Falcon would eat smaller birds. Weka will eat anything, like native duck eggs and ducklings. And of the nine or so species of Moa, we don't know if any were carnivorous.
So "all our native birds had no predators " is more correctly, "no introduced mammalian predators" and even then, Seals and Sea Lions and Leopard Seals will eat penguins.
Kea and Kaka will prolly eat eggs and chicks if they come across them too.
Not forgetting Moreporks. Also the occasional Barn Owls and Sea Eagles from OZ
How much methane farting did the dinosuars let off. They were big bastards and yet we are here! Maybe a bloody great fart explosion wiped them all out and not actually a meteor or somesuch. I can recall around the time of the fart tax proposals that dopey DoC was expounding that deer farts were adding to "greenhouse gasses" and this justified their extrmunation from the wild. That was undet a labour govt too.F ing bs.
Have a look at how much Methane is released by forests. That fact has turned fart taxes upside down - plant a forest and release more methane than grazing animals on the land ! Ruminant methane is produced by bacteria. Bacteria will break down and release Methane from the dead plant material wether or not it is eaten by an animal.
there were a lot of moas around . At one stage there huge buried bone piles were mined for fertilizer .
have a read of this.
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...istory&f=false
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...20site&f=false
I heard there was so much of it that they built train tracks to the middens to ship it.
I see they are cloning cats and dogs now in america for around 40k for a cat and 80k for a dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am4-wFnj_E4
surely there would be a bit of DNA floating NZ in a museam somewhere that was still viable, I mean im no DNAoligist and should probably stay in my lane but there will be a point when we can bring back anything we want, the question is do we really want moa back? or do we let the dead be dead
what good is a big dumb chicken really
I had the honour of flying a Russian Steppe eagle one time. It was something I wont forget in a hurry.
The owner/trainer told me after the event, that I was the only person to ever handle her (Gypsy), other than himself, and he was impressed with how she behaved.....:wtfsmilie:
A good storm like "Bola" does more bush damage than deer do in 100 years. Forgot, this has only happened since "climate change"
Pretty sure "climate change" wasnt invented when "bola" went through.
Guess thats your point.