National News & Information > Features July 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

A bitter wind blew from the south, and its sleet tasted of salt blown from great combers in the southern ocean. On the beach the surf rolled rocks and boulders over finer gravel, and their clatter added a harsh undertone to the wind’s roar.

Past the surf, there was movement in the air, of smoothly gliding mollymawk and darting petrels, riding pressured air with graceful ease. The storm had washed strands of bull kelp high on the shore among the drifts of iceplant and taupata. For a while the grey murk lifted and blue sky showed. The Seaward Kaikouras, snowcapped and sunlit, seemed to hang on the horizon, but then the grey closed over once more and the wind blew more fiercely, a vengeful blast in payment for the sight of the sun.

To the north and to shelter from the wind, lichens covered boulders, cracked and moulded by wind, heat and cold. Salty-sapped glassworts clung to soil-filled crevices and iceplants hugged the ground. Where the beach ended and cliffs sloped into the sea, a clump of spiny Spaniard held its wind-driven victim, a plover, wings splayed, dead.

There was more death inland, past the estuarine lake, the ribbons of water flowing from the main lake, to northern shores where piled up detritus mingled water weed and shredded willow into tangled heaps.

On the lake deserted mai mais defied the wind, held together with galvanised wire and hundreds of staples. The foliage that camouflaged the hunters who shot from them is disintegrating, no longer useful now that the season is closed. The ducks and swans and Canada geese, a month ago targets of hunters, have pitted their strength against the storm and many have lost.

The weather here is fierce as any predator. There is no need of fang and claw to keep populations in check, cold will claim the weak – cold and incessant wind. Yet the birds breed and prosper here. The shallow waters of the lake produce tonnes of flora and fauna to be sieved and strained and digested through the summer and autumn months, producing protein converted to feathers, down and fat that protects a warmly beating heart when the cold comes.

It is a robust ecosystem that has survived for many thousands of years. There are times, though, when adverse conditions at crucial times can interfere with its success. Even at these times the birds can take a fallback position. They produce more eggs.
Conditions need to be truly catastrophic to endanger their existence. The Wahine Storm of 1968 took a heavy toll and it took quite a few years to re-establish the wetland plant communities the birds rely on. On Lake Ellesmere the black swan population has never really recovered and the deterioration of the lake’s water quality since then will kill life in the lake and affect all the creatures that rely on it.

Here, though, healthy birds are staking their claim on the future. Healthy mallard drakes are already pursuing potential mates, even while their weaker neighbours are succumbing to the weather. Pairs of paradise shelducks are rejecting intruders on the surrounding paddocks, leaving mobs of juveniles to sort themselves into some sort of order.

Early nesting in these wild conditions must lead to many fatalities, but still the mallards persist, and the worth of that persistence will be felt in spring when the first successful hatchings take place. These birds will be the most successful. They will have all spring and summer to gain condition for the winter. Late hatchlings face something of a lottery. If they have to compete too much for food, they will not have the strength to survive. If, by some stroke of good fortune, they happen to mature where food is plentiful, parasites scarce and competition weak, the cold will present no problem.

For the observing hunter it is the remorseless inevitability of natural progression that is most striking. We have insulated ourselves so much from what goes on out of doors, that we tend to relate to it with emotional reactions tied to our own sense of mortality. We sometimes forget that in 80-odd years in the future, every human at present on this planet will be dead. The lifespan for a duck is just shorter, in respect of nature, not more nor less tragic or trying than our own. There is a grim tenacity in the will to survive, where the quality of mercy is non-existent.

Daylight slid into dusk as we were about to leave the lake, and red-billed gulls gathered for a flight upriver. They circled, gaining height and suddenly straightened on an invisible signal and disappeared in the gloom. From the lake we could hear ducks calling and arguing and we realised the wind had stopped. In darkness we drove the riverside road to town.

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