A Plague of Grey Ducks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 952, 8 November 1957, Page 22

A Plague of Grey Ducks

by

SUNDOWNER

OCTOBER 15

strange story from Blenheim -that farmers are fighting a losing battle there against wild ducks and have sent out an urgent call for help. It is some years since I last saw Blenheim, and I have never been there often enough to be familiar with its problems; but I find it as A READER has sent me this

easy to imagine a plague of locusts in New Zealand as

a plague of grey ducks. There probably was a time when ducks were as numerous in New Zealand as, say, wekas and wood-pigeons once were; but it was before I was born. Though I have once or twice seen ducks in hundreds, away from_ sanctuaries, and once or twice heard what sounded like hundreds at night, but was probably three or four dozen, my usual encounters have been with a single pair disturbed suddenly in a creek, with half a dozen pairs flying high, or with 20 or 30 individuals some distance from the shore on-a lake and rapidly’ increasing the distance as they watched me. That is*partly because I have never lived and not often lingered near swamps, but it is chiefly, I am sure, because the duck population of New Zealand has been small throughout most of my life. But it is easy to’ be wrong about birds, big and little. I have had a letter this week from a Murchison correspondent who, after recalling my excitement when fourteen Wwood-pigeons were reported from Opoho, Dunedin, continues with this: At this very moment as I sit on my verandah on this golden October afternoon I can count not fourteen but twenty-five pigeons within a hundred yards of me: fifteen in the plum tree, seven in the silver birch, and three flying overhead. Half an_ hour ago there were thirty-two. All this in the heart of the township, the plum tree being immediately behind the post office. O to be in Murchison now October's there! But Murchison is not all plum trees and pigeons. A brother who stopped there for a cup of tea last week, on his way home from Nelson, asked the young girl who served him if she had seen the satellite. This was her answer:

"How the hell can I see anything at night with those damn boys making all that noise?"

OCTOBER 17

ae N general I don’t like whiteness in animals: white dogs, white cows, white horses, or even very white men. Like very white sheep, they seem to lack something; something in addition to pigment. But when Colin told me today that his cat had five white kittens

I had to resist the temptation to ask for one. White kit-

tens, I feel, are in the same class as white herons and white lilies: their lack of colour is their glory. But it is, of course, sheer nonsense to think that colour in men or animals is more than skin deep. A white horse will travel as fast, and as far, as a bay or chestnut or a black. A white cow will give as much milk as a red cow, as rich milk as a black cow. A white dog is neither harder nor softer than a black dog, neither more intelligent nor less intelligent, neither more nor less faithful. There is, of course, a sick whiteness, most marked in men and sheep, as well as an accidental whiteness that is dangerous to survival in most environments: white rabbits, white starlings, white deer, white trout. But most of the objections to whiteness are ignorance and superstition. I was one of the first fools of my generation to bake themselves first into lobsters and then into half-blacks; but all we gained was an increase in vanity, excessive already and perverted, and the foundation of skin cancers. Napoleon’s white charger was neither safer nor less safe than Lee’s brown one, except in so far as it was a better mark. Donkeys run to whiteness, mules to darknesswith many exceptions in both groupsbut everything in mules except their size and speed comes from their donkey and not from their equine ancestors. A white man is as tough as a black man, and neither of them is tougher or less tough, smarter or less smart, wiser or less wise than red and yellow men and intermediates, given the same environment and the same years of cultivation. ss ge se

ae | HAD no sooner put my last hedgehog into a non-hibernating sleep, brushing aside the objections and ex(continued on next page)

OCTOBER 19

ceptions sent by lay readers, most of them amateurs like myself and as dependent on their. récollection of two or threé cases-no sooner done‘ that than a scientific lion rose up in my

path whom I can’t so easily side-step. A very polite, very

respectful, but very insistent member of the Animal Ecology Section of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research has written to say that from evidence accumulated by the Department "it seems likely that most hedgehogs round Wellington hibernate from late May till early September," and that all hedgehogs throughout New Zealand probably take the same course for at least three months every year, the time depending on local conditions. That is precisely what I had said hedgehogs in New Zealand do not do, and before I read any more I began to think of all the stray animals I had encountered in broad daylight at times when, if they had been hibernators, they would have been in a death-like sleep. But the letter continued: The difference between your claim and mine is, I think, one of definition. In current zoological parlance a hibernating hedgehog is one which is either very inactive or rolled tightly in a ball, with a low body temperature, slow heart beat and breathing rate, and with a number of physiological changes in the composition of the blood. When the surrounding temperature is raised the hedgehog returns to normal, the change taking at least an hour and a half and bei accompanied by violent rocking of hoy from side to side. Hedgehog hibernation is often a fitful business. The few to be seen abroad on winter nights (sometimes even when frost or snow lies on the ground) are either those which have broken their torpid state or those which have not laid up enough fat to set the hibernating mechanisms in motion. When the blanket is spread as wide as that I can, I think, creep under and lie down with science. I don’t suppose I have. ever seen a hedgehog at large on a frosty night, and although I have met them on a winter’s day following such a night I would probably find, if I had kept careful notes, that it has been on a warm slope some hours after the arrival of the sun. I have neither the knowledge nor the facilities for testing temperatures, breathing rates, or heart beats, and would therefore not know, if I found a hedgehog asleep in a nest of leaves, whether it had been sleeping for hours or for days. If I could not wake it up I would conclude that it was hibernating. If it was clearly aware of me I would conclude that it was not hibernating even though it refused to uncoil. My reason for deciding that hedgehogs do not hibernate in New Zealand was that I had never found one in the first condition and often found them in the second-or moving about and feeding-in the middle of winter. In the meantime, I scent some danger nearer home. Canterbury University is advertising for hedgehogs for research, but as the price offered per animal is one shilling, I am not alarmed. To disprove my observations it will be necessafy to examine some hundreds of animals alive and dead, and if there are hundreds of boys still left in Canterbury who can be hired at "a bob a job," I don’t know where they live. (To be continued)