Creature record / 1861
1861. The high country of Canterbury, New Zealand. On the upper Ashburton River, 3,500 feet above the sea, geologist Julius Haast kept finding tracks. They resembled the tracks of a European otter. Only a little smaller. Not far away, at Lake Heron, two gentlemen who ran a sheep station saw the animal itself. Dark-brown. The size of a stout cony. Struck at with a whip, it uttered a shrill yelping sound. Then it quickly disappeared in the water. Haast described it all in a letter to Ferdinand von Hochstetter. That letter became the founding report of the waitoreke, the New Zealand otter. No specimen has ever been collected.
February 1861. Julius Haast became Provincial Geologist of Canterbury, on New Zealand's South Island. That year his work took him into the high country of the Ashburton River, the Hakatere. On 6 June 1861 he wrote to Ferdinand von Hochstetter. The letter described an animal that left tracks, and very little else.