Thread: new Science investigations about Moa diet and their influence on the NZ Forests

I reckon the reason Moa went extinct so quickly, is that they'd never seen a human and thereto were easy to walk up to, and knock on the head. The Moa didn't really have time to evolve into "running away" birds...

I guess the early inhabitants only had their own conservation in mind in those times. Moa were a food trade commodity too.

kentucky hungied moa for dinner AGAIN..... something that big couldve been hunted hard and numbers collapse....maybe they nested in vunerable areas and early maori had a good pavalova recipe.....
maybe the population of moas....well actually lets be realistic about it and say....the population of moas had had enough time to go through the whole boom n bust thing many many times and had sort of reached a happy medium with the vegetation...it was as they say "nature in balance"..then some hori fellas arrived in their flashasmichaeljacson waka1600s and had a fine ol time scoffing kentucky hungied moa till the easy ones were but a aftertaste in the mouth and some odorous flatulance....then our fine brown fellas were getting low on easy to get moas and again reached a happy medium........then the big flash wakas arrived with even more hungrier fellas and things got hammered a bit harder...then the sailing ships dropped of pigs,sheep n goats....who knows those first pigs may have had absolute field day scoffing moa eggs,like stoats do now with anything on the ground or in reach...again making moas life hard....who knows for sure but maybe the early goats n sheep had worms in pukus that moads couldnt handle,or selminella....
the bush got a repreive then the deer arrived and the whole boom n bust cycle started again....its never got a chance to sort itself out on the mainland cause we keep interfering on major scale.
the bit of south canterbury you saw the other day Phil.....got hammered by merinos before the wobblies....and farmers soon learnt what stock numbers worked...its a bit hard for the wallabies to do that as they have little to do in life except,bounce,eat and make little wallabies....when they run out of food I guess they die off.....they sure as hell will be doing it hard at the moment...but they will still be there next summer,and the next and the next. umpteen dozen tons of green rain wont even get the last one,and if the population dropped by 99% the remaining 1% would have perfect breeding conditions nd ample food supply so would soon breed up again.
there is a technical term for trees like lancewood..bi something or other...means they change once reach above browsing height....this has been studied many times over the years...its not new science....

Originally Posted by Woody

"Probably" ! ?
Thats just another vague red herring worthless hypothesis

No worthless hypothesis, maybe read my post again. The "probably" is referring to numbers hunters would prefer, and going by human nature id say most want the easiest hunting possible which means high numbers.

nah too high of numbers means shit body condition and shit antler growth......

@kbrebs One of the main aspects to keep in mind is that all our native birds had no predators so there breeding cycle is crap , a good question to ask is how many eggs did a Moa lay and how often ? , perhaps look at the kiwi for some form of comparison . lets say there were as many Moa about as Deer now and that browsing was similar BUT could they breed fast enough to keep up once they started ending up in the hungi pit or gently roasted over the hot coals on a weekly biases , habitat disappearing from the fires , my guess is no however that dosent change the fact that it is possible that the two species did at one point in time have a similar impact on the bush and that could have been the way for thousands of years , deer have been here for little over 100 and what species of plants have become extinct because of the deer or Tahr for that matter ? .

Back to my original post , the lancewood evolved around being browsed by the Moa this is not something that happens overnight .

Originally Posted by Boaraxa

... a good question to ask is how many eggs did a Moa lay and how often ? , perhaps look at the kiwi for some form of comparison . lets say there were as many Moa about as Deer now and that browsing was similar BUT could they breed fast enough to keep up once they started ending up in the hungi pit or gently roasted over the hot coals on a weekly biases , habitat disappearing from the fires , my guess is no....

Very good point. Never considered that. Mmmm.

Originally Posted by Boaraxa

@kbrebs One of the main aspects to keep in mind is that all our native birds had no predators so there breeding cycle is crap , a good question to ask is how many eggs did a Moa lay and how often ? , perhaps look at the kiwi for some form of comparison . lets say there were as many Moa about as Deer now and that browsing was similar BUT could they breed fast enough to keep up once they started ending up in the hungi pit or gently roasted over the hot coals on a weekly biases , habitat disappearing from the fires , my guess is no however that dosent change the fact that it is possible that the two species did at one point in time have a similar impact on the bush and that could have been the way for thousands of years , deer have been here for little over 100 and what species of plants have become extinct because of the deer or Tahr for that matter ? .

Back to my original post , the lancewood evolved around being browsed by the Moa this is not something that happens overnight .

+1 to planenutz, never even crossed my mind, suppose thats the problem with being an armchair expert

The most damaging greenhouse gas produced by livestock is not carbon dioxide, it is methane. The whole "cows farting" problem you hear about is related to methane. Ruminant animals (sheep, deer, cows, goats, etc) has a specific way to digest grass, which produces a lot of methane which is let out by farting.

I had a quick look and have not seen any articles saying birds goes through the same digestive process and produces the same amount of methane as ruminants. I am reasonably confident that only ruminants produce (at least a bad level of) methane.

So even if NZ had as many moas as we do now game runimant, there would not have been as much methane produced and not as much green house effect.

Another big methane producer, surprisingly, is rice paddy. In other words, consuming rice, sadly, encourages methane producing agricultural activity.

Originally Posted by Boaraxa

.. One of the main aspects to keep in mind is that all our native birds had no predators so there breeding cycle is crap

To clarify. Haast's Eagle would have existed on bigger prey items, like the larger Moa. The NZ Falcon would eat smaller birds. Weka will eat anything, like native duck eggs and ducklings. And of the nine or so species of Moa, we don't know if any were carnivorous.

So "all our native birds had no predators " is more correctly, "no introduced mammalian predators" and even then, Seals and Sea Lions and Leopard Seals will eat penguins.

Kea and Kaka will prolly eat eggs and chicks if they come across them too.

Not forgetting Moreporks. Also the occasional Barn Owls and Sea Eagles from OZ

How much methane farting did the dinosuars let off. They were big bastards and yet we are here! Maybe a bloody great fart explosion wiped them all out and not actually a meteor or somesuch. I can recall around the time of the fart tax proposals that dopey DoC was expounding that deer farts were adding to "greenhouse gasses" and this justified their extrmunation from the wild. That was undet a labour govt too.F ing bs.

Originally Posted by Ultimitsu

The most damaging greenhouse gas produced by livestock is not carbon dioxide, it is methane. The whole "cows farting" problem you hear about is related to methane. Ruminant animals (sheep, deer, cows, goats, etc) has a specific way to digest grass, which produces a lot of methane which is let out by farting.

I had a quick look and have not seen any articles saying birds goes through the same digestive process and produces the same amount of methane as ruminants. I am reasonably confident that only ruminants produce (at least a bad level of) methane.

So even if NZ had as many moas as we do now game runimant, there would not have been as much methane produced and not as much green house effect.

Another big methane producer, surprisingly, is rice paddy. In other words, consuming rice, sadly, encourages methane producing agricultural activity.

Have a look at how much Methane is released by forests. That fact has turned fart taxes upside down - plant a forest and release more methane than grazing animals on the land ! Ruminant methane is produced by bacteria. Bacteria will break down and release Methane from the dead plant material wether or not it is eaten by an animal.

there were a lot of moas around . At one stage there huge buried bone piles were mined for fertilizer .
have a read of this.
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...istory&f=false

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...20site&f=false

I heard there was so much of it that they built train tracks to the middens to ship it.

I see they are cloning cats and dogs now in america for around 40k for a cat and 80k for a dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am4-wFnj_E4

surely there would be a bit of DNA floating NZ in a museam somewhere that was still viable, I mean im no DNAoligist and should probably stay in my lane but there will be a point when we can bring back anything we want, the question is do we really want moa back? or do we let the dead be dead
what good is a big dumb chicken really

Originally Posted by Bill999

I see they are cloning cats and dogs now in america for around 40k for a cat and 80k for a dog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am4-wFnj_E4

surely there would be a bit of DNA floating NZ in a museam somewhere that was still viable, I mean im no DNAoligist and should probably stay in my lane but there will be a point when we can bring back anything we want, the question is do we really want moa back? or do we let the dead be dead
what good is a big dumb chicken really

I have always been interested in Falconry, a pet Haasts Eagle would carry some bragging rights.