Fight for survival

Former scientist's exhaustive, if flawed, account of our nation's wildlife contains fascinating stories and asks thorny questions.

- ANDREA GRAVES

Call me late to the party, but I was 22 and had a biology degree before I was struck by what wasn't in front of me. I was standing on a Coromandel beach and realised in a flash how glorious our country must have been in centuries past. It felt like a Big Moment. Then I drove home flatly across the ditch-drained former wetlands of the Hauraki Plains.

There's much still to love. In A Land Before Humans, A Land After Humans, Mark Fisher contemplates how to retain what we still have of plants and animals that are unique on this planet. He travails the changes that created our oddly shaped islands, going back to the huge geological and climatic shifts of the past 80 million years. Plants and animals colonised, were flooded, died off - oh to see the freshwater crocodile and land turtle! - but some survived and new ones arrived. Evolution went rogue, as it tends to on islands, and particularly so here because the only predators to stay clear of were flesh-eating birds. The resulting peculiarities generally manifest as large, long-lived and flightless. The mind flutters to moa, kākāpō and kiwi, but Fisher is clear we should also care about less obvious creatures such as the giant land snail that lives for 20 years and the Robust grasshopper, an odorous insect of the South Island's gravelly riverbeds.