Few happy feet in our forests

DAVE HANSFORD

OPINION: Showing in a forest near you: the tragic sequel to Happy Feet. Every year, thousands of creatures, for reasons unknown, leave their rightful habitat and never re-turn. A very few eventually reach another suitable environment, and claim a toehold in a new land. The spur-winged plovers that plague Wellington Airport are just such an example. But the vast majority of these migrants die, and there's no doubt that Happy Feet would have been just another transient corpse, had humans not intervened.

Conservation Department ecologists understand all of this very well, but Happy Feet captured the collective public heart. DOC also rightly understood that if it stepped back and let nature take its inevitable course, it would have been pilloried. Happy Feet has now developed a $10,000 salmon habit, but money pours in.

That the disoriented bird was promptly named after a schmaltzy, fluffy cartoon character tells us a lot about where that compulsion to foster came from. Psychologists - and advertising agents are the world's highest paid psychologists - know that we're pathologically susceptible to fluffy coats and big, round, appealing eyes. In Hollywood's Antarctica, penguins - freed from the drudgery of survival - sing and dance in perpetual sunshine, employing the arts to persuade humans to stop fishing in the Antarctic.

In the real world, an emperor penguin is born into the most hostile environment on Earth - a gelid hell of darkness and shrieking winds. Should parent and chick be separated, the little bird will desperately try to seek warmth and shelter under the brood flap of any adult that will take it. None will. They will stand impassive as the little orphan freezes to death.

When surviving chicks finally reach the coast, they may be seized by a leopard seal, which will toss them about, torn but alive, out of play or to teach its own young how to catch penguins for themselves. This is the real Antarctica, and it follows nature's script, not Disney's. It's an OSH nightmare. There are few happy endings.

Even penguin researchers will tell you that, God help them, penguins just aren't that bright. Happy Feet would seem to be a particularly maladapted individual that is highly unlikely to have cut it in his native world.

It's debatable, that, even if he eventually returns there - and that's a very long shot - we've granted the emperor penguin species an evolutionary favour. Indeed, this species survives that vicious world precisely because the like of Happy Feet don't get to pass on their genes.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to live in a society without compassion for other living things. It's what separates us from, well . . . penguins for a start.

But we have lost our understanding of the true nature of nature. Very few of us even go there any more: for millions, nature now abides in our TV, where we're shown anthropomorphic drivel crafted to tear, not tug, at our nurturing instincts - and, of course, make a profit: Happy Feet 1 grossed US$384 million (NZ$444m).

We've lost touch with what's real, and what's important.

Each night, as people followed Happy Feet's fortunes on blanket TV coverage, hundreds of our own native birds were slaughtered.

Across the country, introduced stoats, rats, cats, weasels, ferrets, pigs and possums are daily devouring our taonga, our collective heritage. A kiwi chick - every bit as cute, if you ask me, as a penguin - born outside of pest- controlled areas has a 5 per cent chance of survival. New Zealand has already lost half its native bird species, and if present trends continue, we stand to lose many more.

Yet we stand by - impassive as an emperor penguin before a pleading chick - while the Conservation Department starves in the cold. The Government has slashed $54m from DOC's budget, and though the cuts are putatively aimed at faceless head-office staff, they will seriously hobble efforts to save our fauna. Thousands of birds - not just a single penguin - will die, but the silence from the public has been deafening.

Happy Feet's most generous sponsor, Gareth Morgan, said: "When the first penguin turned up in 67, there was hardly any brouhaha . . . this time around everyone is so dedicated to seeing the bird recover - it really shows how much more people understand about this kind of thing."

I suggest the reverse is true. We are now so estranged from nature - and the Darwinian tough-love sustaining it - that we have completely lost any sense of priority.

Imagine the sound of the New Zealand bush if we defended our own wildlife with the compassion we bestowed on Happy Feet.

Dave Hansford is a freelance science and environment writer.

- © Fairfax NZ News