 he labyrinth of islands and peninsulas that make up the Marlborough Sounds is the first sight travellers have of the South Island when arriving by ferry from Wellington. The sounds are the northernmost extension of the Richmond Range, an alternating series of many-branched narrow valleys and sharp-topped ridges drowned since the end of the last Ice Age. The shelter offered by this maze of sounds and islands attracted early navigators and much of the South Island’s first scientific research was done here.
Cook was probably the first European to sail into the Sounds. Arriving on 15 January 1770, he needed to careen and clear his boat of marine growths and found the ideal place at what is now called Ship Cove, off Queen Charlotte Sound.
Queen Charlotte Sound was known as Totaranui by the Maori for its large stands of this fine canoe-building timber. It was here on the first morning at anchor that the ship’s company was awakened by the singing of birds ashore'. Such magnificent dawn choruses are no longer and, ironically, it was probably rats which went ashore from the Endeavour while it was being careened that started the demise of the birdlife here.
While here, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander spent their time ashore collecting specimens of both plants and animals, although both noted that the vegetation was a little disappointing. Among the birds collected were 'three birds having wattles,' and it has been suggested that these were a saddleback, kokako and huia. However, as the huia was confined to the North Island, the third bird was probably an immature saddleback (in the South Island the juvenile differs so much from the adult that some early Pakeha regarded it as a distinct species).
On 18 May 1773, during his second voyage to the Pacific, Cook returned to Ship Cove. With him on this voyage he had a new ship scientist, the German Johann Rheinhold Forster, who was accompanied by his son Johann George Adam Forster as his artist. The Forster party collected the morepork, the falcon and two species of shag. They also took the first recorded native land mammal - the long-tailed bat.
It was in Queen Charlotte Sound that, with the best possible intentions and among the worst possible results, Cook made the first deliberate release of land mammals in this country (geese were liberated earlier at Goose Cove, in Fiordland). Near Ship Cove, Cook set free pigs, sheep and goats. The sheep quickly died, causing Cook to report sadly: 'Last Night the Ewe and Ram I had with so much trouble brought to this place, died, we did suppose that they were poisoned by eating some poisonous plant, thus all my fine hopes of stocking this Country with a breed of Sheep were blasted in a moment.'
The liberation of pigs and goats also had its setbacks. He released a boar and two sows, and a few days later a pair of goats, with the comment: 'There was no great danger that the Natives will destroy them as they are exceedingly afraid of both ... The Goats will undoubtedly take to the Mountains and the Hoggs to the Woods where there is plenty of food.' Any fear the locals had of these animals was quickly allayed - when Cook returned six months later all but one sow had been eaten. Only slightly deterred, Cook released more animals (some distance from the nearest pa) and from these most of the wild goats and pigs noted by the early Pakeha settlers in the South Island were descended.
In late May 1820, the Imperial Russian ships the Vostok and the Mirnyi under Captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, arrived. The Russians did some collecting here, taking tui, pigeons, parakeets and falcons as well as a number of ducks, seabirds and shags. They also took two examples of the Maori dog (kuri).
The next scientific party to come to this area was French, in 1826 on L'Astrolabe, under the command of Dumont D’Urville who was on his second voyage to New Zealand, having visited the Bay of Islands some years earlier. The French concentrated on the large island to the west now named for D’Urville. Unlike Banks and von Bellingshausen, D’Urville found the bush strangely quiet:
No birds, no insects, no reptiles even, this complete absence of any living creature and the unbroken silence create a solemn almost sinister atmosphere. Going through these gloomy, solitary places, one felt as if one were transposed to the point in time when nature, having produced the members of the vegetable kingdom, still waited for the decree of the Eternal to bring forth the living creatures.
Despite these observations, the expedition scientists, Jean-Renee Constat Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard, collected numerous birds here, including kaka, kokako, tui and two previously unknown species, the South Island fernbird and the grey warbler.
D'Urville Island was once mooted as an island sanctuary, similar to Kapiti and Little Barrier islands. It was here one of two populations of little spotted kiwi had survived after vanishing from the mainland. In the 1970s it was found that because of predation by cats and stoats only three birds remained on D’Urville and these were taken off the island. A pair was sent to Maud Island, but by 1982 stoats had followed them even there, so the surviving female was moved yet again to Long Island. Kakapo have also been released on Maud and these should establish themselves if the stoat population can be kept down by trapping.
Due north of D’Urville Island is Stephen’s Island, notable among other things for the dubious fame achieved by the lighthouse-keeper's cat. In 1894 this animal brought in 11 specimens of an unknown wren, which was quickly recognised as a new species. Not quickly enough, however, as within a very short time the cat had destroyed the entire population. Recent fossil finds indicate that this bird had relatives on the mainland before the Pakeha arrived which were probably wiped out by the Polynesian rat (kiore).
Stephen's Island is also home to the country's largest population of tuatara. This animal is not a lizard, as most people think, but the survivor of an ancient reptile order called the Rhynchocephalia, or beakheads, which died out elsewhere 60 million years ago. About 50,000 tuatara - at least half the known population - are found here, and these were looked after by the lighthouse-keepers (who no longer have cats). With the automation of lighthouses it was feared that the tuatara population would be ulnerable to poaching by reptile collectors, so the Department of Conservation has stationed a ranger on the island. Stephen’s Island also boasts the native Stephen’s Island frog, giant weta and a healthy population of lizards - one unique.
A number of seabirds that are scarce elsewhere nest on Stephen’s Island. The island is riddled with the burrows of fairy prion, which they share with the tuatara.
At the entrance to Queen Charlotte Sound are colonies of about 500 of our rarest shag, the king shag. Being related to shags which frequent sub-Antarctic waters, the king shag beats its wings to dry them rather than impersonating a kipper like most other . Probably they would have been waiting a long time in the sub-Antarctic for the sun to dry them out.
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Click on this map for a more detailed map of Nelson, Marlborough
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