Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine

Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine

Author:Rebecca Loncraine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK


I think he meant that the South Island landscape looks empty at first, until you start to see its details. I am learning to look at the sky, to adjust to the wildly swinging audio vario and the powerful, tight thermals, but I’m having to learn to look at this new landscape too.

In coming to the other side of the world, I’ve broken the cycle of the seasons, leapfrogging winter to arrive in late spring. And I don’t recognize the signs of seasonal change here. Back in Wales, I notice the smallest shifts in the turning year: the first snowdrops, first hedgerow celandines, wood anemones, when the blackbirds start to get restless and crows fly past with sticks in their beaks. Here, I don’t know what to look for and I misread the landscape, at first. Noticing patches of bare rock and jumbled stone, I immediately think, Oh, there’s some kind of ancient ruin, an abandoned human settlement. I have a European aerial archaeological eye that expects to see evidence of human habitation everywhere, remnants of ancient sites rearing up out of the ground, revealing the past that’s buried deep in the soil, layer upon layer, as it is in Wales. But then I remember that, no, there have hardly been humans here at all. The Maoris arrived some 800 years ago, the Europeans even more recently, and only a few will have travelled into this remote and inhospitable landscape.

And beyond this is the wider knowledge that New Zealand has very few native mammal inhabitants at all. This is the land of the birds. In fact, the only mammals indigenous to New Zealand are three kinds of bat, seals on the coast and the whales in New Zealand’s waters. The islands that make up New Zealand broke away from the larger continent, Gondwanaland, eighty million years ago. Unreachable except by air, they were, until the Maoris’ arrival, islands of birds – some of the most extraordinary ever to have evolved.

The coast of New Zealand is home to the most diverse collection of seabirds in the world, and some of the most remarkable, including the sooty shearwater, which flies a 64,000-kilometre round trip each year, the longest animal migration ever recorded, and the wandering albatross, the largest flying bird now in existence and the greatest soaring bird in the world.

Because the only indigenous mammals to live in the interior of the two islands of New Zealand could fly, many of the country’s unique birds evolved to become ground-dwellers, losing their power of flight. New Zealand is home to the world’s largest population of flightless birds – their remnant wings stumps, their feathers almost returned to fur. About 800 years ago, New Zealand was a final outpost of purely avian life, where birds were free to waddle along the forest floor, scratching around for food and carving out spaces on the ground for eggs and young, unthreatened by ground-dwelling predators.

But returning to the ground, of course, left these birds extremely vulnerable in



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.