High Country
Oh Deer!
At the start of the 1970s the Wildlife Service (now the Department of Conservation) noticed there had been a rapid decline in takahe in the Murchison Mountains.
What was the problem? Why weren’t the takahe chicks surviving?
• Was it the tussock grass?
• Was it stoats?
• What about the weka?
• Or was it the red deer?
The Wildlife Service staff, lead by Jim Mills, spent a lot of time in the Murchison Mountains. Jim discovered that some of the tussock grass had a depleted amount of nutrients. This meant that the mother and chicks may not have been getting enough goodness from the plants.
This problem lead to another question - why was some tussock grass not nutritious? They found out that red deer had been eating all the good bits.
Red deer became established in the Murchison Mountain area during the 1940s and 50s.
They eat tussock grass – so they were eating away the takahe’s food source and nesting sites. Deer eat the top away from the tussock, leaving the plant unhealthy and damaged. If deer eat too much of the plant, it will not be able to recover and the plant will die.
From 1948 deer were seen as a threat to the survival of takahe, so Dr Orbell and others hunted deer in the Murchison Mountains. Since then deer control has taken place to protect takahe.
Our high country is the alpine area that lies at the foothills of our mountain ranges.
Some people call it an alpine desert. They think there’s nothing there but they’re wrong!
The tussock that dresses these hills and foothills are covered with unique plants and animals that have adapted to living in this cold climate.
If you look close enough you can find dainty daisies, frozen weta and even moths that fly during the day!
In the summer, high country animals feast on the flowers, plants and roots, but as it gets colder they all have special tricks to survive the winter.
- Our alpine weta freezes in the winter
- Our takahe leaves the tussock grassland, and walks to the beech forest to eat fern roots.
- Our kea flies down to the valleys.
- Our scree skink has a long, long sleep (that’s called hibernation)
Our high country also contains some interesting plants that are able to withstand cold, cold weather.
One such plant is our vegetable sheep.
.jpg)
They’re not actually sheep but they look like them. They can live till they are 300 years old.
Likewise, tussock is specially designed to live in dry, cold conditions.
They have narrow, rolled leaves that acts like a straw. When mist, or dew settles on their leaves it forms droplets and rolls down to their roots.
If you want to find out more about our amazing alpine plants, click here.
Don't turn our high country green
Our beautiful high country is under threat from farmers. They want to turn it into a big bright green paddock, and fill it with cows and sheep.
We think the high country is beautiful, and that it should not be disturbed.
If cows and sheep take over, there will be no place for our wonderful alpine creatures & plants, such as our takahe, our alpine weta or our mountain daisies.
