Unfortunately we've lost a bit of content on the way, mumble mumble mumble. Hopefully we can recover what we need over time.

They eat most parts of plants including fruit, seeds, flowers, shoots, leaves, roots, and tubers. Maori used to take special precautions with their food stores to prevent kiore eating them.

Bird rescue centres in Auckland have had a number of the young birds, which are fledging and leaving their burrows, handed in over the past week.

They discovered negative effects in eleven out of seventeen species of coastal trees.

Nearly all Polynesians on the South Pacific island, who built hundreds of 10-ton stone statues, inexplicably vanished. Conjecture has included the natives deforested the island to transport the statues, triggering catastrophic erosion, USA Today reported. According to the theory, the remaining inhabitants then were decimated during a cannibalistic civil war in about 1650.

Contributors include Dr Lisa Matisoo-Smith and Hori Parata

"Here, written in the rats DNA, was the untold story of the Maori's last migration.

"It began on a small island in Indonesia. From there, rats were carried by the Polynesians ancestors into the Pacific.

"But then; a huge surprise. There wasn't one launching point to New Zealand, there were two; the Cook Islands and the society islands."

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