And so another year begins, and as I write this on New Year's Day 2014 there is the opportunity, as with every new year, to reflect on past years and consider the prospects for the future. 2014 will no doubt be an especially busy year for recollections and commemorations, marking as it does the centenary of the start of World War I. Few could have had any idea, on that New Year's Day of a century ago, of what the next few years would bring.
It's always fun at this time to look back at what predictions the psychics have made for the previous year. RelativelyInteresting.com has a good summary of their efforts for 2013. Among the more entertaining were that Prince William and Kate would have a daughter "whom many will believe is the reincarnation of Princess Diana", experimental monkeys would escape from a lab and cause a pandemic, and meditation would be proved to be the gateway to contact loved ones on the other side. As the Danish proverb says, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
Looking a bit further back, 10 years ago (2 January 2004) I took part in a successful hunt for the supposedly extinct New Zealand storm petrel, not reported for more than a century but reliably sighted a couple of months previously less than 100 km from downtown Auckland - a truly unexpected development. In the intervening decade live birds have been captured, their DNA analysed, and just last year their breeding grounds were discovered on Little Barrier Island.
The Summer 2004 NZ Skeptic editorial (by Annette Taylor, also on the trip) commented that the storm petrel's story was very different from those of other elusive creatures such as moa, lake monsters, or Bigfoot - or, for that matter, the supposed 'panthers' in the South Island. The NZ Herald website had another article about this mystery beast on 22 October 2013, photographed walking across the ice of Lake Clearwater in August. The photo looks quite dramatic, with a distant feline silhouette sharply defined against the icy landscape and no obvious visual cues to help assess size, but when the animal is magnified and examined in isolation it's clearly a feral domestic cat.
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It's a fairly safe prediction that 2014 will see more sightings of South Island panthers, but no actual specimens. What else the year may hold is anyone's guess.