Zealandia

Zealandia.

This was an eye opener.

New Zealand is famous for being beautiful. It’s fabled land is filled to the brim with jagged mountains, pristine forests, crystal clear lakes. Every evening the sunset is unbelievably beautiful and everywhere you look there is a sight to take your breath away.

At least, that’s what I thought it was. And I think that’s how most Americans think it is: Beautiful, pristine, untouched.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Until 800 years ago, when humans first arrived, New Zealand did not have any native land mammals except a some bats. They only had native plants, birds, and insects.

Tuatatara.
Often referred to as a "living dinosaur."
It's not an actual dinosaur, but was around at the time

Enter the humans and things start going downhill really fast. New animals are introduced. Land is cleared and burned and used for agriculture or livestock. Animals are hunted to extinction. The land starts to become irrecoverably changed.

It’s been a hard 800 years. Things have been lost and destroyed. Some things broken that can never be fixed. And you can see it. There are vast tracks of land that just disappoint, all paddock, dotted with sheep or cows, and yes that’s cute, but when you think about what used to be there…there’s no compare.

Green gecko. One of the most beautiful little creatures I've ever laid eyes on. 

Livestock and industry have polluted waterways. Marine animals are only just starting to recover from the massacre caused by whaling and sealing. All a manner of introduced mammals reek havoc on vegetation and bird populations.

Zealandia is trying to right some of those wrongs. It’s just one of several sanctuaries around NZ. And there are a lot of reserves, but Zealandia is wonderful because it’s so accessible and really allows people to get involved and educated about why and what it’s trying to do.

The valley where Zealandia is located

Built in a valley where Wellington used to get their main source of water before growing too big for the little river to support all those people, Zealandia has a pretty large block of land that it is trying to completely restore. It hopes that eventually this land will resemble the land that used to be there 800 years ago, filled with the birdlife and buglife that used to be there as well.

How long will that take? A long, long time. Zealandia has a 500 year plan.

Five hundred years.

Can you imagine starting out a project like this, and looking into the future, not knowing if it will ever go as far as you wish?

Can you imagine starting off in year 1 of 500?

I can’t. Not really.

Conservation and restoration is hard. It’s grueling and unforgiving and it takes years to see any progress. And there’s always the worry that the project might not be able to continue. Funding might get lost, volunteers scarce…

Walking through the reserve, looking at the bird Zealandia had re-introduced and learning about Zealandia’s success stories of the last few years and hopes and dreams for the future, I was reminded why I’ve been so interested in conservation and restoration, why I spent a summer chasing threatened birds and counting trees. I’d spent a year telling people what I wanted to study—some combination of English and Science. And when people gave me that, “Those are really different fields of study” look, I responded by rote, telling them that I wanted to write about science. Which was true, but not everything. But I’d almost forgotten the other things, having given out my answer habitually for so long. I want to be in the fields, collecting data, setting up feeding stations, watching animals. I want to write about science, but I also want to be active in science.

Takahe. One member of the only pair Zealandia has.

I’d known that statistic say that gap year students come back home with a surer sense of what they want to study. They come back more focused and determined and prepared.

I expected that that would not apply to my. I thought I’d come back with all sorts of things I wanted to pursue, unable to choose. I mean, yes, there are so many things I’d love to learn about.

But New Zealand has done a great job of reminding me why I love the things I love, why I want to do the things I’ve been telling people. Why I want to pursue what many people consider two drastically different things.