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Takahē
The South Island takahē (''Porphyrio hochstetteri'') is a flightless swamphen indigenous to New Zealand and the largest living member of the rail family. It is often known by the abbreviated name takahē, which it shares with the recently extinct North Island takahē. The two takahē species are also known as notornis. Takahē were hunted extensively by Māori but was not named and described by Europeans until 1847, and then only from fossil bones. In 1850 a living bird was captured, and three more collected in the 19th century. After another bird was captured in 1898, and no more were to be found, the species was presumed extinct. Fifty years later, however, after a carefully planned search, South Island takahē were dramatically rediscovered in 1948 by Geoffrey Orbell in an isolated valley in the South Island's Murchison Mountains. The species is now managed by the New Zealand Department of Conservation, whose Takahē Recovery Programme maintains populations on several o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murchison Mountains
The Murchison Mountains are a group of mountains in Fiordland National Park in New Zealand. It is the location where the South Island takahē, a type of bird presumed extinct, was rediscovered in 1948. The highest mountain is Mount Lyall at . Flora and fauna Native birds recorded in the area include takahē, mohua, whio, kea, kaka, kakariki, New Zealand falcon, weka, rock wren, tomtit, tui, bellbird, fantail, rifleman, grey warbler, brown creeper, silver-eye, pipit and kiwi. The 1948 discovery of the takahe, the largest living member of the rail family, happened after unrecognized bird footprints were found, and Geoffrey Orbell, an Invercargill-based physician, led an expedition to find the unknown bird. After this, an area of was set aside for the conservation of the takahē. To this day it is the only place where wild takahē can be seen. It is the longest running conservation programme in New Zealand. With the aim of protecting the native bird populations ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
North Island Takahē
The North Island takahē ( mi, moho) (''Porphyrio mantelli'') is an extinct rail that was found in the North Island of New Zealand. This flightless species is known from subfossils from a number of archeological sites and from one possible 1894 record (Phillipps, 1959). It appeared to have been even larger than the South Island takahē and, if it did survive until the 1890s, would have been the largest rail in historic times. The decline of the species has generally been attributed to the increasing incursion of forest into the alpine grasslands through the Holocene, although hunting by the Māori also played a major role. Traditionally the North Island takahē was considered conspecific with the endangered South Island takahē ''P. hochstetteri''. Trewick (1996) presented evidence that the two taxa were independently derived from flying ancestors, so proved to be separate species. The binomial of this bird commemorates the naturalist and civil servant Walter Mantell Walt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Orbell
Geoffrey Buckland Orbell (7 October 1908 – 14 August 2007) was a New Zealand doctor and keen tramper (bush walker) who was responsible for the rediscovery of the takahē in 1948. Biography Orbell grew up on a farm at Pukeuri, near Oamaru, in New Zealand's South Island. His father, Lionel Orbell, was a farmer and his mother, Rachel Buckland, was a watercolour artist. Orbell attended Waitaki Boys High School, Oamaru and Christ's College, Christchurch, before graduating in medicine from the University of Otago, Dunedin. He completed further studies in Melbourne, Australia, and at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, and practised as an ear, eye, nose and throat specialist in Invercargill. The takahē had been last sighted in 1898 and was widely thought to be extinct but Orbell suspected it might have survived. He had been interested in the bird since childhood and had read widely about it. He was convinced that if it still existed, it might be found in the Murchison Moun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kahurangi National Park
Kahurangi National Park in the northwest of the South Island of New Zealand is the second largest of the thirteen national parks of New Zealand. It was gazetted in 1996 and covers , ranging to near Golden Bay in the north. Much of what was the North-west Nelson Forest Park formed the basis of the new park. Kahurangi Point, regarded as the boundary between the West Coast and Tasman Regions, is located in the park, as is Mount Owen. The main tramping tracks in the park are the Heaphy Track and the Wangapeka Track. The park is administered by the Department of Conservation. Tramping, rafting and caving are popular activities in the park. After being prohibited for several years, mountainbiking was allowed on the Heaphy Track on a trial basis for the winters of 2011, 2012 and 2013. The effect of the cyclists on trampers and the wildlife were to determine whether the trial continued or not. Endangered takahē were reintroduced to the park in 2018, which was 100 years after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fiordland
Fiordland is a geographical region of New Zealand in the south-western corner of the South Island, comprising the westernmost third of Southland. Most of Fiordland is dominated by the steep sides of the snow-capped Southern Alps, deep lakes, and its steep, glacier-carved and now ocean-flooded western valleys. The name "Fiordland" comes from a variant spelling of the Scandinavian word for this type of steep valley, "fjord". The area of Fiordland is dominated by, and very roughly coterminous with, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand's largest National Park. Due to the often steep terrain and high amount of rainfall supporting dense vegetation, the interior of the Fiordland region is largely inaccessible. As a result, Fiordland was never subjected to notable logging operations, and even attempts at whaling, seal hunting, and mining were on a small scale and short-lived, partly also because of the challenging weather. Today, Fiordland contains by far the greatest extent of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flightless Bird
Flightless birds are birds that through evolution lost the ability to fly. There are over 60 extant species, including the well known ratites (ostriches, emu, cassowaries, rheas, and kiwi) and penguins. The smallest flightless bird is the Inaccessible Island rail (length 12.5 cm, weight 34.7 g). The largest (both heaviest and tallest) flightless bird, which is also the largest living bird, is the ostrich (2.7 m, 156 kg). Many domesticated birds, such as the domestic chicken and domestic duck, have lost the ability to fly for extended periods, although their ancestral species, the red junglefowl and mallard, respectively, are capable of extended flight. A few particularly bred birds, such as the Broad Breasted White turkey, have become totally flightless as a result of selective breeding; the birds were bred to grow massive breast meat that weighs too much for the bird's wings to support in flight. Flightlessness has evolved in many different birds independe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Island
The South Island, also officially named , is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand in surface area, the other being the smaller but more populous North Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman Sea, and to the south and east by the Pacific Ocean. The South Island covers , making it the world's 12th-largest island. At low altitude, it has an oceanic climate. The South Island is shaped by the Southern Alps which run along it from north to south. They include New Zealand's highest peak, Aoraki / Mount Cook at . The high Kaikōura Ranges lie to the northeast. The east side of the island is home to the Canterbury Plains while the West Coast is famous for its rough coastlines such as Fiordland, a very high proportion of native bush and national parks, and the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers. The main centres are Christchurch and Dunedin. The economy relies on agriculture and fishing, tourism, and general manufacturing and serv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swamphen
''Porphyrio'' is the swamphen or swamp hen bird genus in the rail family. It includes some smaller species which are usually called "purple gallinules", and which are sometimes separated as genus ''Porphyrula'' or united with the gallinules proper (or "moorhens") in '' Gallinula''. The ''Porphyrio'' gallinules are distributed in the warmer regions of the world. The group probably originated in Africa in the Middle Miocene, before spreading across the world in waves from the Late Miocene to Pleistocene. The genus ''Porphyrio'' was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760 with the western swamphen (''Porphyrio porphyrio'') as the type species. The genus name ''Porphyrio'' is the Latin name for "swamphen", meaning "purple". Species The genus contains ten extant species and two that have become extinct in historical times: Extant species * Purple swamphen complex ** Western swamphen, ''Porphyrio porphyrio'' ** African swamphen, ''Porphyrio madagascarie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adolf Bernard Meyer
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (11 October 1840, Hamburg – 22 August 1911, Dresden) was a German anthropologist, ornithologist, entomologist, and herpetologist. He served for nearly thirty years as director of the Königlich Zoologisches und Anthropologisch-Ethnographisches Museum (now the natural history museum or Museum für Tierkunde Dresden) in Dresden. He worked on comparative anatomy and appreciated the ideas of evolution, and influenced many German scientists by translating into German the 1858 papers by Darwin and Wallace which first proposed evolution by natural selection. Influenced by the writings of Wallace with whom he interacted, he travelled to Southeast Asia, and collected specimens and recorded his observations from the region. Biography Meyer was born in a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg as Aron Baruch Meyer, and was educated at the universities of Göttingen, Vienna, Zürich and Berlin. He became director of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum in Dresden in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secretary Island
Secretary Island () is an island in southwestern New Zealand, lying entirely within Fiordland National Park. Roughly triangular in shape, it lies between Doubtful Sound / Patea in the south and Te Awa-o-Tū / Thompson Sound in the north, with its west coast facing the Tasman Sea. To the east of the island, Pendulo Reach connects Te Awa-o-Tū / Thompson Sound with Doubtful Sound / Patea. Steeply sloped, the entirely bush-clad island rises to a chain of several peaks higher than 1000 metres. The highest of these is the Mount Grono, the highest peak in the main New Zealand chain not located in the North or South Island. The island also contains three lakes. The largest, Secretary Lake, over long, is located beneath Mount Grono at an altitude of . The island is uninhabited, and covers of predominantly steep terrain almost entirely covered in dense native beech-podocarp forest, including plants such as mistletoes and mountain lancewood, which have been decimated elsewhere by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake Te Anau
Lake Te Anau is in the southwestern corner of the South Island of New Zealand. The lake covers an area of , making it the second-largest lake by surface area in New Zealand (after Lake Taupō) and the largest in the South Island. It is the largest lake in Australasia by fresh water volume. The main body of the lake runs north-south, and is 65 km in length. Three large fiords form arms to the lake on its western flank: North Fiord, Middle Fiord and South Fiord. These are the only inland fiords that New Zealand has, the other 14 are out on the coast. Several small islands lie in the entrance to Middle Fiord, which forks partway along its length into northwest and southwest arms. The surface of the lake is at an altitude of 210 m. It has a maximum depth of 417 m, so much of its bed lies below sea level, with the deepest part of the lake being 226 metres below sea level. Several rivers feed the lake, of which the most important is the Eglinton River, which joins the lake from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Mantell
Walter Baldock Durrant Mantell (11 March 1820 – 7 September 1895) was a 19th-century New Zealand naturalist, politician, and land purchase commissioner. He was a founder and first secretary of the New Zealand Institute, and a collector of moa remains. Early life Mantell was born in Lewes, Sussex, England, the son of geologists Gideon Mantell and Mary Ann Mantell (née Woodhouse). He arrived in Wellington on the ''Oriental'' in 1840. In 1848, Mantell was appointed to the office of commissioner for extinguishing native titles in the South Island. After his father committed suicide in 1852, much of his collection of fossils was inherited by Walter and consequently transported to New Zealand. Mantell left New Zealand as he did not feel right about trying to convince the indigenous Māori people to undersell their land and returned to England in 1856, where he met Geraldine Jewsbury, a woman eight years his senior. When in New Zealand, the Maori people called Mantell "Matara ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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