NZ Wild Life -Part 1

Discover the sounds of the natural NZ living landscapes. Listen to the birds, insects, mammals found in NZ and match the sound or call and the Maori name for each and the common name for each.

NZ Wild Life is a 4-Part Series.

NZ is an island nation with a history of long isolation. There were no land mammals apart from bats. The birds of New Zealand have evolved to include a large number of unique species. Isolated from any other land mass for 65 million years, New Zealand became a land of birds.

When Captain James Cook arrived in the 1770s he noted that the bird song was deafening. Māori and European settlement has been the cause of a huge decline in the numbers of birds and the extinction of about one third of the original bird species.

Until the arrival of the first humans, NZ had an extraordinarily diverse range of specialised birds. In New Zealand, the ecological niches normally occupied by mammals as different as rodents, kangaroos and moles, were filled by reptiles, insects, or birds. The only terrestrial mammals were three species of bat.