Meridian wanted to replace older wind turbines with a smaller number of more efficient ones at the Tararua Range near Palmerston North.

The consenting authority first required Meridian to spend three months searching for a lamprey.

But lamprey tend not to prefer the high country.

Lewis Carroll explained the problem to us.

The Hunting of the Lamprey

(an Agony, in eleven Fits)

"Just the place for a lamprey!" the Council declared,
  As it landed its clipboard with care,
Though the ecologists, frankly, had long since despaired
  And insisted: "There's nothing up there."

Now the lamprey's a fish —primeval and eel-ish,
  Blood-sucking, and ancient, and rare;
So threatened, so precious, the law gets quite squeamish,
  And demands that you prove it's not there.

For the site was a ridge where the southerly roared,
  Inland, and ferociously high;
But the lamprey keeps low, by the coast and the ford —
  Here it sooner would swim through the sky.

Now ninety-one turbines they hoped to retire
  For thirty-nine, taller and true,
From forty-six megawatts, something far higher —
  One-seventy, humming and new.

"But first seek the lamprey – and seek it with zeal;
  You may hunt it with surveys and stress;
You may threaten its life with a Resource Consent seal,
  You may charm it with forms to assess!"

So Meridian sighed, and Meridian sought,
  With waders, and torches, and net,
For the lamprey that science had said was just not —
  And, reader, they've not found one yet.

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
  They pursued it with rigour and hope;
They searched in each trickle, they sampled the air,
  They surveyed each rivulet's slope.

Three months they did tarry, three months they did wade,
  While emissions kept mounting, unchecked,
And the megawatts idled, the savings unmade,
  For a fish that no one could detect.

The firm wept, "We have proved it!", with a quaver of pride,
  "Unequivocally — none can be found!
There is no shape of lamprey on this mountainside,
  As we said, ere we started, all round."

And the moral, dear hunter, is plain as the air
  On the ridge where no lamprey can be:
You may sample, may search, and may search yet elsewhere
  For a thing that was never to be —

For the Boojum of Process, the Snark of Delay,
  Softly and suddenly looms,
And the wind that might light all our homes, day by day,
  Just vanishes. Into the glooms.