and also the trees born into the waves zippyshare

And also the trees born into the waves zippyshare free#

My guides on the Bottle Rock Peninsula, Cook and Aitken, are agents of a bold nationwide plan announced by the federal government in July 2016 that aims to save the country’s native species by eradicating its worst offending mammalian invaders-rats, possums and stoats-by 2050. in the mid-1900s, the killer here is invasive mammals. But instead of pesticides, the silencer of the birds in the U.S. The Great Predator Invasion is New Zealand’s Silent Spring: a quieting of the cacophony that, in no small part, makes New Zealand New Zealand.

The tourism industry has reason to worry, too: Tourists drawn by the country’s spectacular wildlife and ecosystems, from the Fiordland peaks featured in Lord of the Rings in the south to kiwi reserves in the north, contribute about NZ$35 billion (US$24 billion) to the economy-about 10 percent of the country’s GDP. Possums, which can spread a form of tuberculosis to cows, are of special concern to the dairy industry-New Zealand’s largest export. Invasive predators cost New Zealand more than NZ$3.3 billion (US$2.3 billion) in lost agricultural productivity every year. The loss of so many species threatens not only the country’s ecological riches, but also its economy. With more than 26 million native birds and other creatures killed by invasive predators across the country every year, others are headed in that direction. The stakes are almost unfathomably high in New Zealand’s predator wars. In the centuries since, more than 70 native bird species have gone extinct. When the toothed aliens arrived-first the rats, then Australian brush tail possums ( Trichosurus vulpecula) in the 1830s, and finally European stoats ( Mustela erminea) 40 years later-the birds didn’t stand a chance. With nothing on the ground to fear, many birds evolved to be flightless. The only creatures eating other creatures were a few aerial predators-harriers, the giant Haast eagle, and bats.

And also the trees born into the waves zippyshare free#

Until the arrival of humans and their invasive hitchhikers in the 14th century, the flora and fauna here had lived in a kind of biological Eden, relatively free from tooth and claw. Later, joined by even more voracious ship rats ( Rattus rattus) that stowed away with waves of European colonists, the rats made short work of New Zealand’s naive native birds. While these were not the first rats to colonize the islands-kiore, or Pacific rats ( Rattus exulans) arrived with the Polynesians 400 years earlier-they were particularly adaptable. Unbeknownst to Banks, the ships that brought him and other European explorers to New Zealand’s bird paradise also brought key agents in its destruction: Norway rats ( Rattus norvegicus). Aside from the occasional fluting arpeggio of a bellbird ( Anthornis melanura) or the chatter of a fantail ( Rhipidura fuliginosa) bouncing behind us as we kick up delectable insects, all we hear are the hiss of palm leaves in the wind and the incessant surrender of waves to the shore below. When Captain James Cook, the first European to trace the contours of New Zealand, arrived here in 1770, the expedition found itself enveloped by what his naturalist, Joseph Banks, described as “the most melodious wild music I have ever heard”-a riot of native birds among the trees. A ridge runs down the center of the peninsula, one side sloping toward Resolution Bay and the other toward Ship Cove. We bob and weave our way through the dense, temperate forest of manuka, tree ferns, beech, and rimu, rewarded with glimpses of the crystalline Marlborough Sounds beyond the shoreline.

I take her advice, sliding down the dark soil like a kid on a toboggan, wishing I had a toboggan.

“Scooch down on your bum,” offers Cook, whose field team has traversed this route hundreds of times before, setting and checking traps.

I follow, grasping at branches and roots, trying to stay upright. Briar Cook and Susannah Aitken crab-walk down a steep slope on the Bottle Rock Peninsula, a 400-hectare (1,000-acre) finger of forest pointing off the top of New Zealand’s South Island.