A giant reminder of extinction

Skull of a Mantell's Moa, pachyornis geranoides; one of the three moa species once found around Whanganui. Mantell's Moa stood only a metre tall and weighed 20-30kg. PHOTO/TE PAPA TONGAREWA

The just-opened display of the Whanganui Regional Museum's moa collection should make us all sit up and think.

Majestic skeletons stand as stark evidence of a mass extinction event triggered by humans. Their demise was entwined with our history but it also cries a warning for our future.

Moa were proven survivors. They had endured millions of years of disruption on these ever-changing islands - from enormous volcanic cataclysms to the increasingly severe ice ages of the recent Pleistocene era, moa weathered it all.

Their resilience was unshakeable ... until homosapiens arrived. These weren't weak birds. They weren't tottering toward extinction, they were thriving.

Nowhere else on the planet had giant flightless birds evolved into such a magnificent diversity of types. They filled our forests from the coast to the mountains with their deep and resonating calls.

And then, within a couple of centuries of our arrival, all nine species were gone. Systematically hunted, half their habitat burnt to ashes and the rest infested with new predators.

They went the way of their ecological equivalents around the world - mammoths in Europe and Asia, mastodons and giant sloths in the Americas and giant koalas and kangaroos in Australia.

Every continent that humans spread to and every island in the Pacific has paid a price for our presence. Moa are not the only losses from this land but they are the most spectacular so they have the greatest potential to convey the most sombre of warnings to us all. Extinction is forever and, if anything, the pace of extinction has been quickening since these birds were annihilated. Scientists are now talking of a global mass extinction event that could rival the end of the Mesozoic when it wasn't just the dinosaurs that disappeared; smaller species followed.

So how many more species will go? And are we immune from the effects of degrading our environment until it can no longer provide the support it once did?

Stand for a minute in the presence of these giants and take time to reflect.

Don't let these amazing creatures' loss be just the start of a tragedy; let it be the start of a change in our thinking and our behaviour.

Keith Beautrais is on a Royal Society of New Zealand teacher fellowship at Whanganui Regional Museum.