Student: "What does indigenous mean?" Pompous TA: "Autochthanous."

I feel a little like a fourth grader writing a report on The Animals of New Zealand, but I spent an hour looking this stuff up last night just out of curiosity, so I may as well pass along what I learned.



The only native land mammals are bats:  the long-tailed and the lesser short-tailed.  They are small, insectivorous, and live in trees.

Without large mammals, NZ became a ecosystem of birds.   The most famous is the kiwi, a bumbling flightless bird that scrabbles about in the underbrush, searching for grubs with nostrils at the end of its beak.  They are rather slow and stupid and were decimated once humans arrived.  Exceedingly rare in the wild.






Some other cool NZ birds are the tui, the kea parrot, the morepork owl, the takahe, and the weka.  NZ has the highest proportion of flightless birds of any nation.

Speaking of birds, NZ was a much more exciting place 500 years ago.

 

And then there are the creepy crawlies...  like the tuatara lizard.

And the weta.  Like a cricket with mutant superpowers acquired in the galloping weirdness of island evolution.  I get the heebiejeebies just thinking about this thing. 

4 inches long.  Weighs over an ounce.  "The weta’s place in the ecosystem is comparable to that held by mice and other rodents elsewhere in the world."  Genus Deinacrida, which is Greek for terrible grasshopper.  The Maori word weta means something like 'God of Ugly Things'.  They live all over the islands, on trees and in grasslands.  They bite and scratch with large spines on their legs.

Wetas have already taken up residence in my nightmare closet.  I will have to be talked down from the rafters should I ever encounter one in real life.