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Roger Rabbits with |
It has special historic significance. Category one stuff. Important. But godforsaken. A barren, exposed, windswept, rocky plateau. Difficult, isolated.
Crazily dramatic views of the plains and rugged coastline 600m below.
I get vomit-inducing vertigo just writing about it. And it would shatter the rose-tinted spectacles of any real estate agent harbouring thoughts of a cheeky quick sale. It’s pretty much a ghost town I hear.
There’s 6000mm of rain a year. Yup, 6m. Tauranga gets about 1200mm. And most of the time the South Island’s Denniston Plateau is consumed by cloud, and is “mercilessly” windy. “Life on the edge”, they call it. Only for the hardy.
Denniston is along State Highway 67, turn off at Waimangaroa, 15km east of Westport. Pause to put on your crampons and oxygen mask, advise Search & Rescue where you are and how long you will be, and take the steep, winding road to the plateau in the sky.
The Denniston mine, for many decades until the 1960s, was New Zealand’s biggest coal mine, producing vast quantities of what Donald Trump would get excited about – that “beautiful, black, clean” stuff – high-quality, hard, bituminous coal excellent for creating coke for steelmaking. And that stuff could be the undoing of the hero of our story.
Flutter by
Denniston, I concede, is just outside the circulation area of The Weekend Sun, being 14.5 hours and 929km away. So why the geography lesson?
Well, because it begs the question – why did the Avatar moth choose Denniston to be home?
The Avatar moth, Supreme Winner of the Forest & Bird 2026 Bug of the Year title. Tiny in stature, big by reputation now.
Called Avatar because the moth shares the same fate as Pandora, the planet from the movie Avatar, it’s home under serious threat from a mining company. Did the moth just flutter by one day, nosey around, and decide Denniston offered all the lovely dark, undisturbed places they like to build their silk-lined, weblike nests? Where had they come from to make Denniston look and feel homely? Why did it not just flutter on to some more mild and merciful climate, somewhere nice? Like Tauranga?
The Avatar is tiny, with a 2cm grey-brownish wingspan, darker spots and what the entomologists describe as a “glorious blush of gold” on the hindwings. I am getting excited for the Arctesthes avatar. Now, if one ever does a low pass down Cameron Rd I might just look out for that “glorious blush of gold”.
Ominous rumblings
Its body clock is all to hell. It flaps around during daylight, which among moths is generally frowned upon. And why would you go flapping at any time in Denniston? Where an antenna would get lost in the mist, and a howling gale straight off the Tasman would rip at your undercarriage, a moth’s personal bits. Lovely.
Now your numbers are down, you’re on the brink. To the point that a bunch of entomologists did a bioblitz – I suspect a bioblitz is a weekend away with butterfly nets – and only a dozen or so moths answered at roll call. Thin on the ground, thin in the air.
There’s another reason the Denniston Plateau was probably a bad life decision by the Avatar moth. Didn’t it hear all the ominous rumblings from Wellington? Rumblings of heavy excavation gear, rumblings of a major mining push? That might mean mining returning to Denniston – the Avatar’s moth’s only home. Oh dear!
Where’s the love
And there’s not too much sympathy and understanding for little creatures and those champions of their cause. “We’re not going to sit around and read poetry to rare lizards [I suspect that includes rare moths] while the current account deficit goes down the gurgler,” a Government official was quoted. “Mining not whining.”
But poetry has scientifically backed benefits for mental health. It helps manage stress, anxiety and depression. All of which could be hurting the Avatar moth right now.
So in the interests of entomology, in the interests of a rare moth, I will recite. I will read poetry.
“A moth is a butterfly’s dark twin.
Dressed in drab wings.
She isn’t scary.
Think of her as a different thing –
A plain-clothes fairy.”
Can you sense the wellbeing now? Will it be enough to calm the rumblings, to silence the mining trucks, bring peace to the pits? Don’t think so. That’s why Forest & Bird is seeking to have Denniston’s conservation stewardship land reclassified as a scientific reserve.
Be wary of the worm
The moth was only discovered in 2012 during another bioblitz. I wonder how many answered the call? We’re going to Denniston, to ferret around in the driven rain, mist and gales to look for bugs. Anyone up for it? I’m glad we have people like that. The Arctesthes avatar could have been lost forever to fossil fuels had the entomologists not stepped in. At least the moths stand a chance now.
This year’s Bug of the Year also serves as a reminder not to go wandering barefoot in the deep undergrowth of north Auckland. We might not have anacondas and reticulated pythons but we have Arachnocampa luminous – the native giant worm. Creepy – 1.4m long and 2cm in diameter, bioluminescent – they glow orange and yellow in the dark and feel hairy or unshaven. Cute!
