The Barber's

Getting a haircut in the 50s and 60s was a very masculine thing.  The Barber’s was an all male environment and you had to know, really know, how to behave there.  If your mother came in with you, she wouldn’t stay long (you’d hope).

The Barber was a wizened and enigmatic character, his thinning hair Brylcreemed back, or sidewards in a comb-over if it was thinning too much.  His face was haggard and he smoked; he looked a bit like a jockey.  You didn’t want to piss this guy off: he could kick you out of the shop, or probably something worse.

My first haircut in New Zealand was in 1955, in Whanganui.  I don’t remember getting it cut in England, but oh boy this was memorable.  The shop smelled of Bay Rum, Brylcreem, and cigarette smoke. I was five.  My Dad took me, and The Barber had this enormous wrought iron barber’schair. I was thinking, “how am I going to get up into that?”, when he produced a seat on a plank that sat across the arm-rests, and lifted me up onto it.  It had leather padding and its own little arm-rests, and I felt really special.  But the hand-operated clippers pulled at my hair and I squirmed.  Eventually The Barber got so grumpy he whacked me over the head with the handles of the scissors.  I didn’t dare cry, and Dad didn’t come to my rescue, such was the manly power of The Barber.

Later, in Tawa, The Barber’s became a regular ritual.  You’d be dropped off there to wait your turn and get your hair cut, usually on a Friday after school.  There was a long bench seat that ran around three sides of the shop, and you took your place at one end and shuffled along as each boy’s hair was done.  Sometimes there were too many waiting and you had to stand until a seat became free.  There were comics to read, and that was the best thing.  We were only allowed “Classics” comics at home, which told the stories of Dickens and the like in comic form, but here was the real thing: Phantom, all the Disney characters, and best of all, war comics.  Battler Britton, scrambled by an air raid during a cricket match on the village green, runs out of ammo over occupied France, and bowls the cricket ball he had stuffed into his battledress pocket to switch over the railway points and send the German ammunition train crashing into a horrendous explosion!  We always drew Spitfires and Hurricanes on the backs of our school books.

The Barber had a big poster behind the counter.  It was a kangaroo, leaping, with envelopes spilling out of its (her) pouch, and the caption “We post to Australia”.  I sat and stared at this, and I still don’t know what it meant.  I suspect it had to do with gambling; maybe the barber was an agent for Tattersall’s Lottery or something.  It was all exotic and dark.  Men, real men who smoked and swore, would come in, and the barber would leave off cutting hair and go behind the counter.  There would be a quiet conversation and money would change hands, but I never understood what was going on.  Later I learned that barbers sold condoms (we called them “Frenchies”), but I always suspected these clandestine transactions had something to do with the flying kangaroo.

After an hour or two of comics and shuffling along the bench, you’d finally get to have your hair cut.  It was always a bit off the top and short back and sides, even if you asked for something else.  When the cutting was done, he’d violently rub in some Brylcreem, slapping your head about in the process, comb and brush your hair into a bit of a style, flick the cut hairs off your collar, and finish off with a little spray of smelly stuff.  Everyone’s hairstyle was the same. 

By about 1964 we all wanted Beatles haircuts, long enough to be thought Fab, but short enough not to earn a detention.  The barber never understood this; we all walked out with short back and sides, then put off our next visit as long as we could and combed our hair, what was left of it, forward as much as we could; making the best of a bad job, a bit like The Barber’s comb-over.

After the barber’s, if you were lucky, was fish and chips for dinner, and you could buy a classic comic at the bookshop, or a 45 rpm record.  I remember buying “A Fool Such As I” by Elvis Presley.  I’ve still got it somewhere.  But no more barber’s for me; I don’t have enough hair any more.

45 years on—10th April 1968.

Forty-five years ago I was a first year student at Victoria University of Wellington, studying Botany, Zoology, and Chemistry.  On April 10th, I woke up early, before seven, to the howling of the wind and the house creaking and shaking.  It was a very strong single-story house – Dad designed it with earthquakes in mind and the builder claimed it was “overbuilt” – so it didn’t creak often.  I don’t recall if I was worried, but I was certainly surprised by the strength of the wind, the constant roar of noise, and the shaking.  In the hallway outside my bedroom I met Dad on his way back from the bathroom.  He told me the inter-island ferry Wahine was aground on Barrett’s reef, but that everyone was safe.  The wind is said to have peaked that day at 275 km/h.  NIWA has published a catalogue of weather extremes, damage, injury, and loss of life that day.  Our house in Linden was at a similar altitude and exposure to Kelburn, where they recorded just under 200 km/h.

At breakfast we debated about going in to work (Dad) and university (me).  It was probably after breakfast that the power went off, ruling out our usual transport, the electric trains.  Then a neighbor called to say her husband had tried to drive into town and had turned back because it was too windy on the motorway.  We decided to sit tight.

I guess it was mid-morning when the roof blew off the house next door but one.  For some reason, Dad and I were in the laundry watching the storm from there, so we saw the iron sheets lift off one by one and fly tumbling through the air towards us.  Dad had the presence of mind to get me out of the room and close the door; however no iron hit the house, but it did demolish our fence where some sheets embedded end-on 5mm into the wood.  Dad and I dashed across the intervening section to help our neighbors evacuate the house.  I foolishly sprinted through the swirling iron; he sensibly ducked around the back out of its flight path. 

Minor damage at home, 10 April 1968

At some stage during the morning our 5m Norfolk pine (Araucaria excelsa: Dad used to call it the Alka-Seltzer) tipped over at about 30˚ off the vertical.  We watched a tree across the road thrash itself out of the ground and then roll end-over-end down the street like a giant tumbleweed, never to be seen again.

Some time in the early afternoon everything went calm.  We thought it was the eye of the storm, and expected the wind to pick up again from the north, but it was all over.  I don’t recall hearing more about the Wahine until the TV news that night.  My memories of that are all mixed up with what I’ve heard since.  Fifty-four people died in that storm, 51 on the Wahine.  The display at Wellington's Museum of City & Sea captures it all; it still makes me tear up.

Students who did turn up for lectures had an exciting morning, they told me later.  Prof Gordon had valiantly tried to give the Botany I lecture, but abandoned it when slates from the roof of the Hunter Building started crashing through the lecture room windows.

Smashed pine trees, Colonial Knob, Wellington, 1968

 The following weekend was Easter, and I went tramping in the Tararuas with two friends.  Another friend couldn’t come because his cross country running club had volunteered to search the south coast for bodies.  On Cone Saddle we encountered a whole beech forest tipped over.  We ended up having to climb among the fallen trees to get through, sometimes walking along logs that were 5m above the ground. 

At home, we fixed the fence and pulled the Norfolk pine upright again.  For me, the day had been pretty benign really, but I still think about it every time 10 April comes around.  For many people, I guess life took a sudden and unexpected turn that day.  People survive a lot worse—Christchurch earthquakes, the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, let alone the blitz, Dresden, or Hiroshima—but these things all leave their mark.

Going through the motions: what did moa eat?

Moa were giant flightless birds found in New Zealand (the plural of moa is moa, because the Māori language doesn’t distinguish singular from plural nouns, with one exception).  There were 6 genera and 9 species of moa; the largest, Dinornis, stood well over 2m tall.  They’ve been extinct since shortly after Māori arrived here.  It’s thought they were an easily harvested source of protein and were quickly driven to extinction.  Although everywhere on earth where humans live has extinct megafauna (e.g., aurochs in Europe, giant sloths in South America, giant lizards and kangaroos in Australia), in most places the extinctions happened so long ago that they're very hard to study.  But in New Zealand, the extinction of moa is quite recent, dating from around the 13th century, and there are still traces to be found and studied.  Deposits of regurgitated gizzard stones are sometimes found, and subfossil birds can be recovered from caves.  It's thought that some large trees still alive today might have been dispersed as seeds by moa.  

About 35 years ago, Michael Greenwood and Ian Atkinson (Greenwood & Atkinson 1977) proposed that moa could have been a major influence on growth forms of New Zealand plants.  In particular, they suggested the twiggy wiry tangled small-leaved growth forms that we call divaricating shrubs could have evolved as a defense against moa browsing.  That’s been a very popular and appealing idea, but one that’s had its critics.  While New Zealand botanists have been happy to attribute our unusual flowers to pollination by our depauperate and unspecialised pollinator fauna and our prevalence of small fleshy fruits to dispersal by frugivorous birds, many have been wary of accepting the moa browse hypothesis.

A divaricating shrub, Coprosma cuneata, Campbell Island.

Partly their objections have arisen from concern that these ideas can’t directly be tested, because moa are no longer with us.  Nevertheless, many other purely historical ideas in biology can be tested, by indirect methods at least.  Greenwood & Atkinson’s seminal paper has spawned an industry in New Zealand ecology largely driven by questions about the likely selection pressures of moa on New Zealand plants.  One recent test of moa browsing was a cafeteria experiment (Bond et al. 2004), where two other large ratite birds—emus and ostriches—were offered related pairs of divaricating and non-divaricating plants.  The birds stripped the non-divaricating plants in short order, but had trouble pulling the springy and wiry stems of the divaricates and manipulating the twigs and small leaves in their beaks. 

Another very successful research strategy is coproecology, the gleaning of evidence from fossil droppings, coprolites.  The most recent paper (Wood et al. 2012) by the moa coproecologists has received a lot of press attention because it showed for the first time that moa fed on flowers, as well as on fruits, leaves, and twigs.

The scientists found a pile of poo just inside the entrance of a cave in the Garibaldi Range, South Island mountains.  Dried in sunshine and breezes, but protected from rain, these droppings had lain undisturbed for hundreds to thousands of years.  Taking great pains to avoid contamination, the scientists sampled 35 of the coprolites, collecting DNA to identify the species of moa as well as plant species eaten, macrofossils (seeds, leaves, etc.), microfossils (pollen grains), and measuring organic content of the dung.  They also used radiocarbon dating to estimate when the droppings were dropped.

The dung was all from one moa species, the upland moa (Megalapteryx didinus), a stout bird that stood about 1m tall at the rump.  The oldest droppings were dated from about 6,300 years ago, and the youngest from a bit less than 700 years ago, so they span a good proportion of the time from the last ice retreat to the final extinction of moa.  Interestingly, several of the droppings had identical ages and plant contents and are thought to have been deposited in the same "defecation event". 

The three methods of sampling plant remains (the authors refer to these as proxies) in the droppings—pollen, macrofossils, and DNA— were complimentary.  Of these, pollen could be contamination from outside, especially when it comes from wind-pollinated trees that flower largely out of reach of moa, like Nothofagus (southern beech) or from plants that are highly poisonous, like wind-pollinated Coriaria.  The plot below, from the paper, relates pollen abundance in the coprolites to abundance in the environment; plants above the null distribution line are the ones likely to have been part of the moas' diet.

A range of montane and subalpine plants were found, some (southern beech, buttercups, sedges, grasses and Fuchsia) in all three proxies.  The results show moa were generalists, eating pretty much everything, and they ranged across all the available habitats, as the figure below demonstrates.  

But only a few of the eaten plants might be divaricating shrubs.  These include Myrsine and Coprosma, for which the DNA and pollen evidence can't distinguish if the plants eaten were divaricating or not, and Neomyrtus, which is divaricating.

A divaricating Myrsine, M. divaricata.

A non-divaricating Coprosma, C. foetidissima.

The finding of pollen from bird-pollinated flowers—Phormium and Fuchsia—is especially interesting.  These produce quite large amounts of sweet nectar and are pollinated by birds that are much smaller than moa, such as bellbirds and tūī.  Yet their pollen is not likely to have got into coprolites other than by passing through the gut of the moa.  The authors aren't suggesting moa were pollinating the flowers, rather that they were eating them.  The large fleshy flower stalks of Phormium are probably quite nutritious and the nectar from a single flower is a small but sweet treat for a human.  On the other hand, Fuchsia flowers are produced singly or in small clusters on the twigs or bare trunks of the trees, and it must be quite finicky work to pick these one at a time; they hardly look worth the effort for a large hungry bird.  If moa had a taste for sweet nectar such that they were a threat to flowers, could their grazing have driven the evolution of tall scapes in Phormium and the tree habit in Fuchsia excorticata?  The controversy lives on.

Flowers of tree fuchsia, Fuchsia excorticata.

Flowers and young fruits of mountain flax, Phormium cookianum.

I was surprised to find in this paper evidence that moa ate so many small alpine herbs and small fruits too.  They might have been significant seed dispersers.  This, like the Fuchsia flowers, suggests they might have been capable of choosing tasty morsels.

A previous study by some of the same scientists (Wood et al. 2008) showed the presence of a small buttercup, Ceratocephala pungens, in moa coprolites from Otago.  Ceratocephala is tiny and seasonal.  The plants are ground-hugging rosettes at most a couple of centimetres across, and they grow in bare ground, yet their seeds were found in coprolites from two species of moa.  The genus is otherwise known only from Europe and W. Asia, so when this new species was described from New Zealand, I entertained the possibility that it might not be a native (Garnock-Jones 1984).  Yet here it is, in coprolites produced before humans arrived in New Zealand.

In the past, the deer-hunting lobby in New Zealand has argued that introduced mammals were good for the environment because they replace these extinct giant herbivorous birds.  This study suggests otherwise.  Two very palatable plants that were common in moa diet—Fuchsia and wineberry—are no longer found on the Garibaldi Range, and many others are now confined to inaccessible cliffs and edges of sink-holes.

References.

Bond WJ, Lee WG, Craine JM (2004). Plant structural defences against browsing birds: a legacy of New Zealand's extinct moas. Oikos 104: 500–508.

Garnock-Jones PJ (1984). Ceratocephalus pungens (Ranunculaceae): a new species from New Zealand.  New Zealand Journal of Botany 22: 135–137 (Note the different spelling in this paper; the original spelling Ceratocephala is now preferred)

Greenwood RM, Atkinson IAE (1977). Evolution of divaricating plants in New Zealand in relation to moa browsing. Proceedings of the New Zealand Ecological Society 24: 21–33.

Wood JR, Rawlence NJ, Rogers GM, Austin JJ, Worthy TH, Cooper A (2008). Coprolite deposits reveal the diet and ecology of the extinct New Zealand megaherbivore moa (Aves, Dinornithiformes).  Quaternary Science Reviews 27: 2593–2602.

Wood JR, Wilmshurst JM, Wagstaff SJ, Worthy TH, Rawlence NJ, & Cooper A (2012). High-Resolution Coproecology: Using Coprolites to Reconstruct the Habits and Habitats of New Zealand's Extinct Upland Moa (Megalapteryx didinus). PloS one, 7 (6) PMID: 22768206