Hauturu – Hauturu and science

In 1769 Captain Cook saw Aotea and Te Hauturu o Toi as guardians of the Hauraki Gulf /Tikapa Moana, so named them the Great Barrier and Little Barrier Islands. Hauturu is the highest island in the gulf and is often seen with the peaks of the island wreathed in cloud, providing moisture for the forest-covered slopes below. Early naturalists, enticed to New Zealand by stories of strange birds and plants, recognised the island’s uniqueness, virtually untouched by man.

Thomas Kirk, a botanist, visited the island several times from 1867 onwards. Plant samples Kirk gathered still remain in a collection at the Auckland Museum.  Captain Hutton, about the same time, recorded a list of 19 bird species that he observed on the east coast of the island, among them saddleback, laughing owl and falcon, which had disappeared from the island by 1900. Andreas Reisheck, an Austrian naturalist and collector of birds, visited Hauturu several times in the 1880s and1890s. His particular interest was hihi, which by then had disappeared from mainland NZ.

Several of these collectors, while writing records and exhorting for the preservation of places like Hauturu to save NZ’s unique wildlife, were also decimating those same populations by collecting skins to sell to collectors and museums, particularly in Europe.

The story goes that one of the last pair of huia were being kept to transfer to Hauturu to “save” the species, only to be killed and the skins sold overseas!

Later scientists and naturalists were of a different ilk, recording and learning about the island and sharing that knowledge to extend our understanding of New Zealand’s natural world. In the early 1900s, Frances, a daughter of the then caretaker, Mr R. Shakespear, made a substantial plant collection, which is also still housed at the Auckland Museum. In the 1930s, W.M. Hamilton visited the island several times, producing the first comprehensive treatise on the island’s vegetation, history and geology. This was reproduced by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research as Bulletin 54. From 1947 on, there was an increase in visitor numbers to the island, especially botanists, ornithologists, Auckland University students, the Wildlife Service and many others recording observations and findings for future reference.

Some interesting scientific work of recent times has been Victoria University research with the island’s tuatara. Other researchers have studied the recently rediscovered NZ storm petrel; plant pollinators (there are bats and lizards present on Haururu, but very few introduced insects); and environmental or eDNA, where soil samples can be studied to indicate any species that interacted with that piece of soil – generating a wealth of information in a test tube.

As part of my science degree back in 2014, I researched stream invertebrates and native fish present in some of the island’s many streams. Google Scholar shows well over 400 scholarly papers relating to research done on Hauturu and its cargo. Much of this is covered in the book Hauturu, published in 2019, which the Little Barrier Island/Hauturu Supporters Trust was responsible for. It is still available through the trust website.

Lyn Wade, Little Barrier Island Supporters Trust
www.littlebarrierisland.org.nz