Forest & Bird Magazine 338 Nov 2010

ISSUE 338 • NOVEMBER 2010 www.forestandbird.org.nz

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At home with lizards

On the trail of nature

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Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Inc. General Manager: Mike Britton Advocacy Manager: Kevin Hackwell Services Manager: Julie Watson North Island Conservation Manager: Mark Bellingham South Island Conservation Manager: Chris Todd Communications Manager: Marina Skinner Central Office: Level 1, 90 Ghuznee St, Wellington.

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ISSUE 338

www.forestandbird.org.nz

Contents 2 Editorial 5 Soapbox 6 Letters 8 Conservation news

BirdLife funding, Land and Water Forum, Tasmania win, Mackenzie gears up, Save the Mokihinui, Vanuatu breakthrough, Canterbury weevil, Fish farming, Wetlands win, Trade Me, Down to Earth dolphins, Honda prize

16

Home away from home

A Hawke’s Bay sanctuary welcomes petrels

DEPUTY EDITOR: David Brooks

T (04) 801-2763 E d.brooks@forestandbird.org.nz

PREPRESS/PRINTING: Kalamazoo

Wyatt & Wilson (NZ) Ltd ADVERTISING:

Vanessa Clegg T 0275 420 337 E vanclegg@xtra.co.nz Karen Condon T 0275 420 338 E mack.cons@xtra.co.nz Membership & Circulation T 0800 200 064 F (04) 385 7373 E membership@forestandbird.org.nz

46

Hope for island survivors

49

Awesome Aotearoa

52

New front in war on possums

Endangered seabirds in French Polynesia get a chance

Part 2 of a celebration of our biodiversity

The resetting trap

54

Two of us

55

Rangatahi

56

Community conservation

The membership team

24

Cover story:

Southern comfort for kaka – Pest control is saving Waitutu Forest’s kaka

Hutton’s shearwaters, Places for Penguins, Bushy Park, Ladder for fish, Olive Davis House, Whangarei weedbusters

28

Backyard conservation

60

Book reviews

Karen Baird sets sail for the Pacific

Pupils for penguins

32

Tussock hugger

34

Nature of tomorrow

David Young looks at where conservation is heading

Kakapo: Rescued from the Brink of Extinction, Kakapo Rescue: Saving the world’s strangest parrot, Maori and the Environment: Kaitiaki, Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border, Classic Tramping in New Zealand, The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme

38

In nature’s footsteps

66

Biodiversity the winner

41

Amazing facts about…

Peripatus

68

Year index

42

Going places

A Forest & Bird walking group enjoys the great outdoors

DESIGNER: Rob Dileva, Dileva Design

E rob@dileva.co.nz

Facts about flax

Kermadec log

A Mackenzie Country carbon farmer

PO Box 631, Wellington.

T (04) 801-2761 F (04) 385-7373 E m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz

44 In the field

20

A Central Otago skink haven

EDITOR: Marina Skinner

• November 2010

Photo competition awards

Forest & Bird’s new Ruapehu lodge

Kakariki 2010 Bird of the Year COVER SHOT Survival chances for kaka in Southland’s Waitutu Forest are rising, thanks to aerial pest control there this summer. Photo: Rod Morris

Forest & Bird

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editorial

Biodiversity in our backyards C

arry this magazine outside. Step on to the lawn, the front porch or the garden seat and look around. What do you see? I guess that depends a lot on where you are. If you live by the beach, you might look down and see some strange tracks made in the sand. These could be made by the sand scarab beetle, a large chunky beetle built like a small tank. The biggest ones are about 3cm long and are shiny black or dark brown. A hot sandy beach is a hard place for an insect to live and so the adult beetles come out at night. Take a torch and head into the dunes after dark.

If you happen to live by a braided river, you might hear a “weet, weet”, indicating the only species of bird in the world with a beak bent sideways (almost always to the right) – a wrybill. These dumpy little birds will be nesting at the moment, scraping out an inconspicuous little nest among the clean shingle and large stones close to the water.

If you’re really lucky, you might spot the pale greyish-green, minutely speckled eggs beautifully blended into the surroundings.

If you spend a night on Maud Island, in the Marlborough Sounds, you might see a tiny brown “splodge” that turns out to be a Hamilton’s frog – among the world’s most ancient frog species. Unlike most frogs, this one has no eardrums, doesn’t croak, paddles like a dog and, though it has no tail, has tail-wagging muscles. To confuse us even more, their tadpoles grow inside the egg and hatch as tailed froglets.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in the forests of the Central Plateau, look down. Notice that brownish rose-shaped flower on the forest floor? This is the wood rose – Dactylanthus, known by Mäori as pua o te reinga, or flower of the underworld. What a weird one. At night you might also see the squat forms of another strange creature, the short-tailed bat, scrambling its way towards dinner – the Dactylanthus flower – attracted by its heavy perfume and eager to gorge itself on the rich nectar. The bat will bring pollen from another wood rose, the only plant to be pollinated in this way.

If, like me, you’ve stepped out into your suburban backyard, you’ll be confronted with all manner of biodiversity. Maybe a praying mantis egg case neatly affixed to the wooden fence. Or a native hoverfly soaking the sun up on a Brachyglottis flower. Perhaps one of New Zealand’s coolest creatures – a leaf-veined slug with its prominent breathing hole and distinctive dorsal veining, happily gobbling up algae and fungi and leaving my vegetables alone. Possibly aphids being “harvested” by ants running up and down the stems of bushes, or spit bugs nestled in their homes of spit on spring plants.

Or you might even find one of the estimated 5½ million species we haven’t discovered yet. Last month, the first Census of Marine Life upped the estimate of known marine species from about 230,000 to nearly 250,000. In this, the International Year of Biodiversity, we should be staggered by the diversity and wonder of nature, in my backyard and yours. Reading this magazine in the midst of nature will hopefully make the voice for nature more real and relevant.

Barry Wards Forest & Bird President

Forest & Bird is published quarterly by the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society. Forest & Bird is a member of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and is the New Zealand Partner of BirdLife International.

Opinions expressed by contributors in the magazine are not necessarily those of Forest & Bird.

Forest & Bird is printed on chlorine-free paper made from wood fibre sourced from sustainably managed forests.

The magazine is bulk mailed in Reverte oxo-biodegradable plastic made from oil by-products. It is waterproof but will break down into CO2, H20 and biomass, and does not leave petro-polymer fragments in the soil. *Registered at PO Headquarters, Wellington, as a magazine. ISSN 0015-7384. Copyright. All rights reserved.

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| Forest & Bird

50 years ago

Junior along the track Wellington – Where I live there was a valley which was covered with manuka.

There were fantails, waxeyes and kingfishers. Now only 25 per cent of it is left, for there is a tip there. I am now transplanting the native plants from there to our property. I am finding more birds come round our house.

On our one-acre piece of land we have about 950 trees.

While climbing the Tararuas I saw a great amount of damage done by deer and pigs. While there I saw a very large wood pigeon.

We heard a tui, a bellbird, a bush canary [whitehead] and pigeon. M Huxford, 10 years Forest & Bird, Nov 1960

Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Inc. (Founded 1923) Registered Office at Level One, 90 Ghuznee Street, Wellington.

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soapbox

Selling ourselves down the river If we think ahead, we don’t dam the Mokihinui River, Debs Martin argues.

T

he choice to us seems obvious. Dam the Mokihinui River and flood 330 hectares of lush West Coast forest abundant in diverse plants and birdlife, 14 kilometres of river gorge heaving with longfin eels and koaro fish, with whio (blue ducks) paddling its rapids.

Or divert acid drainage water from Stockton Plateau coal mines away from the Ngakawau River, and pipe it through reservoirs on already modified land. Both would generate electricity. Combined with other schemes, both would power the West Coast. But one sets out to destroy the environment, and the other seeks to remedy past damage.

It’s all about the way we view the world. If we see it as our right to plunder, to produce, alter, remove and forever change our natural places to meet our ongoing demand for growth, then we will allow Meridian Energy to dam the Mokihinui. Even more insidiously, if we put on our reasonable, “balancing” hats and weigh up the issues – thinking that we need to sacrifice some areas for growth and on balance perhaps that is the price to pay – then we may still choose to dam the Mokihinui.

What happens after the Mokihinui is dammed? In six months, a year, perhaps two, another river will need to be dammed to meet our demand for energy, and we still won’t have addressed our destructive tendencies.

But if we recognise we have been given a privileged opportunity on Earth with the mental capacity to consider our relationship with the soil, water, and plants upon which our lives depend and to consider our responsibilities to these ecosystems, we may chose the Stockton option.

Conservation Director-General Al Morrison, in a rousing and spirited speech in October, challenged us to make

the leap. Perhaps he had the Mokihinui in mind – after all, the Department of Conservation has been strong in its ecological analysis and evidence to show that the Mokihinui is a river worth protecting.

Meridian Energy – our very own state enterprise – has taken the old approach. Despite being a major sponsor of Project Crimson, which promotes our beautiful pohutukawa and rata trees, Meridian Energy plans to dam the Mokihinui, drowning the very rata forests it pledges to protect. Meridian argues the power is needed for the Coast and damming the Mokihinui is the only option. Now the Stockton hydro scheme has been consented, Meridian argues a Mokihinui dam is needed for Nelson and Marlborough – ultimately anywhere it can feed the grid demand.

Meridian’s approach is faulty. As a country with finite resources that are being “trashed” (to quote Mr Morrison) at previously unknown rates, the dam ’em and drown ’em mentality will only add to the ecological disaster bearing down upon us. If we were truly to put the requirements of our ecosystems ahead of an outdated anthropocentric approach, we would recognise our place in the system, and the opportunity we have to make wise, sustainable and remedial decisions.

We need to look at how our finite resources can provide for us into the future – not just a three-year election cycle. Some indigenous nations look to a future seven generations ahead. Can we say a decision to dam the Mokihinui will be good for New Zealanders in, say, 200 years? Let’s make the right choice and protect one of our few remaining truly wild rivers.

Debs Martin is Forest & Bird’s Top of the South Field Officer.

This stretch of the Mokihinui River would be flooded if the 85-metre-high dam goes ahead. Photo: Billy Lobban

To donate to Forest & Bird’s Save the Mokihinui campaign, please see www.forestandbird.org.nz

Forest & Bird

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letters Forest & Bird welcomes readers’ letters on conservation topics. Letters should be no longer than 200 words and must include the writer’s full name, home address and daytime phone number. We don’t always have space to publish all letters or publish them in full.

The best contribution to the Letters page of the February 2011 issue will win a copy of Out There South by Chris Morton and Tony Bridge. Please send letters to Editor, Forest & Bird magazine, PO Box 631, Wellington 6140 or e-mail m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz by December 10.

Balancing values Seeing the letters by John Rhodes and Geoff Sherwood (August Forest & Bird) highlighted for me the challenges an organisation like Forest & Bird faces. On the one hand, Forest & Bird needs to be clear about its mandate to give nature a voice and, on the other hand, positions perceived as being unbalanced can put off potential supporters.

As individuals we need to decide every day how we balance environmental, social, cultural and economic values. Amelia Geary’s letter reminds us of the often poor choices we make as consumers. As a society, we need to find the best possible balance between often competing values. Economic considerations, unfortunately often shortsighted, are given powerful voices by government, industry and consumers.

Forest & Bird should continue to give nature a voice, albeit acknowledging that there are also other legitimate voices to be listened to. The task of balancing the values rests largely with us as consumers and as voters in local and central government elections.

Roland Stenger, Hamilton This letter is the winner of Classic Walks of New Zealand

Directions for Aotearoa One could argue that Aotearoa is, as the August Forest & Bird magazine states, moving west towards South America, but I feel obliged to point out that such a route is the long way round and involves the rather daunting task of getting past Africa.

Second, I would like to agree emphatically with John Rhodes’ letter that New Zealand and the rest of the world need urgently to adopt a new approach to economics that involves and embraces a steady-state, no-growth economy.

Third, I must disagree emphatically with Geoff Sherwood’s letter. In my view, Forest & Bird is not nearly assertive enough in protecting New Zealand’s environment.

Far from being “hysterical”, the Society seems inclined to accept compromises that lead to unacceptable losses of biodiversity, habitat and environmental health in general.

As that magnificent thinker and essayist Norman Solomon wrote: “Giving ground does just that. It gives ground.”

Finally, I want to thank you all again for what you do on behalf of Aotearoa’s environment and those of us who work to conserve it.

Colonel Bob Jones, Bay of Islands

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| Forest & Bird

Thank you to all readers with a better sense of direction than the editor’s who pointed out that Aotearoa is moving east towards South America.

Editor

Price of conservation It worries me when advocacy groups like Forest & Bird use economic arguments to try and protect the environment.

Of course it is tempting to use economic arguments against potential miners or developers but as soon as we put a price on some part of the environment, we give the opportunity for it to be bought.

If we say that part of a certain national park should be protected because it can be said to contribute $X million to New Zealand’s economy through tourism and increased prices for our exports, it will only require the value of its exploitation to be greater than that price for it to be “worth” destroying it.

I doubt whether anyone from Forest & Bird actually opposed mining our national parks because the economic benefits did not stack up – we opposed it because we wanted our parks protected. We should argue for their protection based upon the intrinsic value of our unspoiled places.

Andrew Roxburgh, Wellington

All the facts It was great to see Forest & Bird’s new conservation advocate, Nicola Vallance, profiled on TV One’s Close Up on 15 September. Nicola obviously has great passion for New Zealand’s natural heritage and great knowledge of our ecosystems. However, I was very concerned to hear her say (in approximately these words): “I sometimes get told by scientists that what I’m saying is not technically correct. But it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get the message out there.”

I hope that neither Nicola nor Forest & Bird believe this. Everyone standing for a cause believes their cause is a worthy one, whether they are advocating for environmental protection or for growth of New Zealand’s mining or dairy farming industries. To be sure one is advocating for the right cause, it is essential to let solid facts determine what one advocates for and what one says. Only in this way will Forest & Bird maintain integrity among all the stakeholders in our natural heritage. Otherwise, it will simply be engaging in a fight of the strongest. Not surprisingly,

the temptation to compromise on truth gets greater the stronger the organisation.

Richard Storey, Hamilton Nicola Vallance replies: I have always prided myself on dealing with facts. In the Close Up interview, I was asked how I was able to engage the New Zealand public on sometimes very complex ecological issues and processes in the media, which people otherwise might not grasp or care about. I explained that while I might not take a strict technical or scientific approach, my main aim was to get the message out there. I believe it is crucial that all New Zealanders have an understanding of the conservation issues affecting our natural heritage.

If there is a way to chew down complex information into more palatable bites for the general public, as an advocate for conservation, I will find ways to do so. However, I would never compromise on the facts. Most of what I do around advocating for pest control tools such as 1080 is about advocating for the scientific facts over emotive rhetoric.

I have a first class honours degree in zoology and a background in environmental law, so I’m familiar with facts and technical processes. But if we “experts” can’t provide the information in a way that engages people with their natural heritage, we do them and our native wildlife and wild places a grave disservice. I’m sorry that the interview gave the impression that the facts did not matter to me. In the course of my job they are the most important thing. The trick is providing those facts in a way people can understand.

Easier butterfly food I was delighted to read about Graeme Hill championing our native admiral butterflies (August Forest & Bird). Both red and yellow admiral butterflies are uncommon in my home town of Tauranga but I noticed that yellow admirals are numerous in inner Wellington suburbs so I prowled the streets and parks looking for their nettle host plants. I couldn’t find any nettles but I did find lots of an introduced weed called pellitory-of-the-wall, a species of Parietaria, which is in the nettle family.

Last November I examined a patch of pellitory and found several very tiny dark caterpillars hiding in folded leaves. I took them indoors with a big bunch of the weed and, four to five weeks later, yellow admiral butterflies appeared.

Pellitory does not seem to grow in Tauranga and I do not know how widespread it is, but it is an inoffensive weed, liking damp, shady places. Where it grows, butterfly lovers might like to tolerate or even encourage it.

Ann Graeme, Tauranga

Photo: Graeme Hill

Mining In Raukumara Just as many conservationists, trampers and tour companies were rejoicing because national parks have been saved from mining, further possible destruction is now apparently planned in lesser-known areas of the conservation estate.

It was with growing apprehension that I read that mineral exploration is being permitted in the Raukumara Forest Park. The Te Kumi area is a wonderful pristine wilderness occasionally visited by hunters and touring and trekking groups. The threat of open-cast mining hangs over it.

It is possible that some minerals are in the Raukumara Range. The southern edge of the range has already been put into forestry by the former state forest service, and is now mainly owned by overseas companies and is often uneconomic to mill. Surely mining exploration could be confined to these areas.

Tom Bayliss QSM, Whakatane

Manuka and kanuka I found Dean Baigent-Mercer’s article (August Forest & Bird) on manuka and kanuka interesting. One very slight point, though, is that he says “ ‘tea-tree scrub’ was flattened by roller crushers, poisoned by Governmentsubsidised DDT and 2,4,5-T”.

DDT kills insects, not plants. DDT was extensively used for many years as a control for grass grub and, to a lesser Photo: Dean Baigent-Mercer extent, porina until grass grub was thought to have developed resistance to the insecticide.

At the same time there was growing public concern, spurred by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about the ongoing use of DDT, and its use was restricted here from the 1970s on and it was banned altogether in1989.

And 2,4,5-T was never subsidised, though the Government did subsidise its use for the control of gorse and blackberry and a short list of other exotic weedy species. Of course, since gorse and manuka can grow together, manuka was often treated with 2,4,5-T, along with the accompanying gorse. In the Muldoon era, Land Development Encouragement Loans, introduced in 1978, aimed at clearing “unproductive land” again encouraged the use of herbicides and other means of clearing scrub.

2,4,5-T production and sale eventually ended in 1987.

Ian Popay, Hamilton We stand corrected. The herbicide 2,4-D use was subsidised, not DDT. Traces of dioxin from the historic use of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T are still found in the New Zealand food chain.

Editor The article on manuka and kanuka was most informative.

A friend told me a way to remember the difference is that kanuka feels kind but manuka feels mean, and it seems to work.

Andrew John, Marlborough Sounds

Forest & Bird

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conservation

news

Fish farming threats S

weeping law changes are in the works later this year to pave the way for large-scale aquaculture development that would threaten coastal marine environments, Forest & Bird Marine Conservation Advocate Kirstie Knowles says.

The Aquaculture Law Reform Bill – signed off by the Cabinet and due to go before Parliament towards the end of this year – will do away with management areas and effectively override Resource Management Act procedures that help manage areas used by the industry.

Aquaculture management areas have been formally recognised in regional plans as a way of controlling the industry alongside other coastal users. “The Government’s goal of generating a $1 billion aquaculture industry seems to have blinkered their vision and re-opened the battle over coastal space,” Knowles says. “Forest & Bird is not antiaquaculture – in the right place we are all for it.”

North Island Conservation Manager Mark Bellingham has previously worked with Northland and Coromandel aquaculture developers to build their businesses in environmentally sensitive ways. But aquaculture has not been as well planned in other areas. Forest & Bird branches have spent many years fighting inappropriate aquaculture developments in the Marlborough Sounds, Tasman Bay and Golden Bay.

Plans for finfish farming are creating new concerns.

Rarely has finfish farming proved environmentally sustainable because most of the farmed fish are carnivores. It usually takes 4-6 tonnes of wild fish to produce one tonne of farmed fish, and uneaten feed and faeces pollute the surrounding area, drastically altering the seafloor and leaving it devoid of oxygen. Toxic chemicals are sometimes used to treat parasites and disease, and can alter the health and genetic make-up of wild fish populations when farmed fish escape.

Forest & Bird’s national and regional staff are keeping a close eye on this important issue and will be working closely with coastal branches affected by these changes.

Win for wetlands

F

orest & Bird has paved the way for greater protection of West Coast wetlands, with recent success in the Environment Court. Forest & Bird succeeded in its appeal against the wetlands provisions of the West Coast Regional Land and Riverbed Plan. Forest & Bird, along with DOC and local conservation group Friends of Shearer Swamp, argued that the plan did not give appropriate protection to West Coast wetlands, particularly significant wetlands.

A key threat to wetlands on the Coast is land drainage for farming, against which the plan offered little protection.

Forest & Bird argued that the criteria used in the plan to identify significant wetlands were ecologically inadequate,

which meant many significant West Coast wetlands were not identified and were not protected under the plan.

The court, in its recent interim decision, agreed that improved criteria should be used in the plan, which means that many more wetlands will go through a robust ecological assessment as part of the resource consent process. There is a much greater likelihood that they will be protected.

The court’s decision was only on the issue of significance criteria; the rest of the planning provisions for wetlands still need to be finalised. The case will continue this year, through mediation between the parties or at a court hearing. n Erika Toleman

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| Forest & Bird

BirdLife funds community projects T

he BirdLife International Community Conservation Fund has distributed $105,285 to community projects to protect native birds in New Zealand and the Pacific this year.

British-based conservationists David and Sarah Gordon in 2007 set up the fund, which is administered by Forest & Bird, the Birdlife International partner for New Zealand.

Grants approved in 2010 were: n $17,500 to Forest & Bird Kaikoura branch to determine the feeding grounds of little blue penguins in Kaikoura. n $8,500 to Friends of Cobb for establishing an intensive pest control area in the Cobb Valley, near Nelson. n $6,000 to the Mohua Charitable Trust to translocate mohua from Chalky Island to the Eglington Valley, in Fiordland. n $1,285 to the South Island Kokako Trust to protect a possible remnant South Island kokako population by reducing predators to a level low enough to allow successful breeding. n $20,000 to Karen Baird and Stefanie Ismar of the University of Auckland to look at Mangawhai Harbour

Tasmania forest victory A

significant conservation victory was marked in Tasmania last month with the beginning of the end of native forest logging. After three decades of hard-fought campaigning from the conservation movement, Australia’s largest native-forest logging company, Gunns Ltd, said it was giving up.

Tasmania is home to the tallest hardwood forests in the world and Australia’s largest area of temperate rainforest. For decades conservationists have fought to end the logging of old-growth forests – much like the battle for the West Coast forests in New Zealand. New Zealand’s battle came to an end in 2002 with the last transfer into conservation land by the Labour-Alliance Government but Tasmania’s battle has continued. The forestry industry, Liberal and Labor parties and the unions have employed dirty tactics, such as punitive law suits, against conservationists. Led by the Wilderness Society, and supported by the Greens, the opposition has grown to the point where an end is in sight.

Conservationists and the industry in October signed an agreement for the forestry industry in Tasmania that does not involve industrial native forest logging. In the recent state and federal elections the Greens secured the balance of power and have a new, co-operative relationship with Labor.

as a feeding ground for breeding fairy terns and the prey taken from there. The project will also look at nonbreeding fairy terns. n $25,000 to the BirdLife Pacific Secretariat towards developing tools to monitor threatened seabird species in Micronesia. The project aims to build local capacity and raise awareness of species in Nauru and the Marshall Islands. n $27,000 to Société d’Ornithologie de Polynésie (Manu) to conserve the endangered monarch bird in French Polynesia.

The fund is open to Forest & Bird branches, BirdLife International partners, partners designate and affiliates and associated community groups. To apply for next year’s funding, contact Samantha Partridge at s.partridge@ forestandbird.org.nz or phone 04 801 2762.

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conservation

news

Save the Mokihinui A

call to action is going out to join the fight to save the Mokihinui, one of our few remaining wild rivers. Forest & Bird and other organisations are preparing an appeal to the Environment Court following the granting of consents to state-owned power generator Meridian Energy to build an 85-metre-high dam on the Mokihinui, the West Coast’s third-largest river.

The dam will result in the largest ever inundation of conservation land in New Zealand’s history. The Environment Court case is expected to be heard in 2012 and Forest & Bird needs to raise money to engage witnesses and ensure our case is as strong as possible.

The river winds its way through granite and limestone gorges and river flats surrounded by pristine forest before emptying into the Tasman Sea about 40 kilometres north of Westport.

The Mokihinui and its surrounding forests are home to at least 16 threatened native species, including the blue duck (whio), longfin eel (tuna), and giant and short-jawed kokopu. The forests also contain long-tailed bats, western weka, kereru, and powelliphanta giant land snails.

This environment will be ravaged by the dam, which will create a 14-kilometre-long lake along the river gorge and drown 330 hectares of forest.

Forest & Bird members can support stronger protection for the Mokihinui and its surrounding forests and help fund the

expert witnesses we will need to strengthen our Environment Court case. Some Forest & Bird branches are holding fundraising screenings of the Mokihinui episode of the Craig Potton-presented five-part television series Rivers. Another film, Whitewater NZ’s A Tale of Two Rivers, which outlines more environmentally friendly hydro-power alternatives on the West Coast, is also available for screening.

The beauty of our wild rivers, including the Mokihinui, was highlighted at an exhibition of photos and watercolours at Parliament in late September and early October. The exhibition in the Beehive was opened by Potton, who told guests that “it’s great to bring rivers to town, to Parliament, to our consciousness”.

Years of environmental neglect were having a serious impact on our rivers, he said at the opening, hosted by Revenue Minister Peter Dunne. “Many of our rivers that you and I used to swim in ... we can no longer swim in. I used to be able to drink the water out of every river that I went tramping in as a 17-year-old and now I’m a 58-year-old I can’t. That’s an indictment on a civilised country that it can do in one generation so much damage.” n David Brooks

Win a Rivers DVD Craig Potton’s wonderful Rivers TV series, screened on Prime in October, profiled five New Zealand rivers – the Mokihinui, Rangitata, Clutha, Clarence and Waikato.

Potton, who is a well-known photographer and Forest & Bird Executive member, charted the special features of each waterway and the threats to them. If you missed the series on TV, a DVD is available for $29.99 at bookshops and CD shops.

We have five copies of the DVD to give away to readers.

To enter the draw, please put your name and address on the back of an envelope and post to Rivers Draw Forest & Bird PO Box 631 Wellington 6140 Or email your entry to draw@forestandbird.org.nz Please put Rivers in the subject line and include your name and address in the email. Entries close on December 15.

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Mackenzie action gears up F

orest & Bird’s Save the Mackenzie Country campaign has moved into a higher gear in an attempt to halt the spread of intensive agriculture and other inappropriate developments in one of our iconic landscapes.

Christchurch-based Conservation Advocate Nicola Vallance has been travelling around the country speaking about the region she loves and grew up in, and the developments that are encroaching on the tawny tussocklands.

With the Environmental Defence Society, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), Forest & Bird is holding a symposium on options for the management of the Mackenzie Basin in Twizel on November 26 and 27.

Forest & Bird is calling on the Government to set up a forum of local, regional and national partners to develop a plan to manage the Mackenzie Basin’s natural resources and cultural heritage. We want this plan to include a Mackenzie drylands park. Until the forum agrees on a plan, the Government needs to suspend all pastoral lease tenure reviews and any ecologically destructive resource consents.

The opening of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts’ Artists as Activists exhibition in Wellington on August 20 provided an ideal platform for Forest & Bird to highlight the growing threats to the Mackenzie region. Irrigation developments are replacing the tussocklands with bright green pastures and crops that further imperil the 68 threatened plants and eight endangered birds in the Mackenzie Basin.

Renowned South Island artists Grahame Sydney and Sam Mahon were among the artists who stepped up to defend the Mackenzie at the exhibition opening at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.

Artist Sam Mahon at the Artists as Activists exhibition with his mechanical bust of Environment Minister Nick Smith made from cow dung. Photo: David Brooks

In brief $3500 for Henderson: Wellington vet Andy Maloney raised more than $3500 by cycling and walking from sea level to the highest part of the North Island. The money will go towards the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) project to get rid of kiore (Pacific rats) from Henderson Island, near Pitcairn Island, to protect threatened birds.

A highlight of the journey from Wellington to the top of Mt Ruapehu (2797 metres) was cycling with Kiwi Conservation Club children in Paekakariki, near Wellington. The children had raised $100.

The toughest part of the four-day trip was cycling from Ohakune to the Turoa ski field car park, then walking to the summit through snow and ice.

The Long Pathway: Englishman Steve Cleverdon is raising funds for Forest & Bird during his Guinness World Record attempt to walk the length of New Zealand this summer. He expects to take 103 days to walk the 3000 kilometres from Cape Reinga to Bluff, mainly along the Te Araroa (The Long Pathway), the new national walkway. To sponsor Cleverdon, see www.stevewalknz.com Cheers to Kea: Enjoying a glass of Kea Point wine will support the Threatened Species Trust Programme.

Twenty cents from every bottle from the range, which includes pinot gris, pinot noir and sauvignon blanc, goes to the programme, a partnership between Forest & Bird, the Department of Conservation, New Zealand Conservation Authority and corporate sponsors.

The Kea Point range is only available through online wine merchant Winesale.co.nz. Money raised by the scheme so far has been earmarked for kea research and conservation.

The Kea Point range was launched 18 months ago, and during the first year wine lovers snapped up 30,000 bottles, providing $6000 for the trust.

Lingering aftershocks: Our thoughts go to Canterbury residents who suffered during the 4 September earthquake and the ongoing aftershocks.

Forest & Bird’s Christchurch office in Hereford Street was damaged and staff were unable to return for several weeks.

Forest & Bird

| 11

conservation

news

A beetle in a needle stack W

hen entomologists discovered in 2004 a Canterbury knobbled weevil in Burkes Pass it was as exciting as finding the takahe. The large beetle had not been seen since 1922 in Waimate, and was thought to be extinct.

It may be surviving in other isolated pockets of its host plant, Spaniard, or speargrass (Aciphylla subflabellata and Aciphylla aurea), and Lincoln University entomologist Mike Bowie, summer scholar Sam Rowland and PhD student Emily Fountain and Department of Conservation staff have been searching for others. They have found more weevils at Burkes Pass in South Canterbury but no other populations around the Canterbury foothills where the weevil was once common.

The 16-millimetre-long weevil is not easy to find since it’s semi-nocturnal and, with little disturbance, will drop instantly into the safety of its prickly host plant.

Fountain’s research has used DNA as a tool to determine population size by analysing the degree of genetic variation.

Her initial results show a good degree of variation, which indicates the Burkes Pass weevil population may be larger than first thought. Conservation efforts must continue because the weevil is vulnerable to introduced predators, fire, weed invasion and destruction of its host plant.

DOC and Environment Canterbury have been predator trapping the reserve and nearby properties. Hedgehogs are the most common predator trapped, but no evidence of the rare weevil has been found in their gut samples. Feral

pigs and intensive stock grazing are a huge threat to the Aciphylla plant.

DOC entomologist Warren Chinn has come up with a species recovery plan for the weevil, including continuing population surveys combined with molecular genetic analysis, researching the weevil’s ecology, limiting threats, restoring the Burkes Pass habitat, developing a captive breeding programme to establish insurance populations elsewhere in Canterbury, and promoting community support.

The big hope is that a healthy population of this rare weevil is found elsewhere so that if a catastrophic fire does occur, the species will not become extinct – as it was thought to be only six years ago.

Honda wins efficiency prize T

he new hatch from Forest & Bird’s partner, Honda, is New Zealand’s most cost-effective car to run. The hybrid Honda Insight won the supreme award in the 2010 AA Energywise Rally.

With a total fuel cost of $147.83 to cover the rally’s 1763-kilometre route, the Honda Insight S cost 40 per cent less to run than the average hatchback.

The 49 vehicles in the rally competed over four days for the title of the most cost-effective car, and the most fuel-efficient driving team. Honda entered 17 vehicles – more cars than any other manufacturer – in an effort to

12

| Forest & Bird

benchmark its entire fleet. The Honda Jazz 1.3 won the award for the small class.

The rally takes place every two years and is organised by the AA, the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), and Gull Petroleum New Zealand.

Honda has provided Forest & Bird field officers with hybrid Civic sedans since 2008, and this year replaced them with five new cars.

The field officers in the North Island and South Island enjoy the hybrid Civics for their easy handling, reliability and miserly fuel consumption.

Vanuatu jungle vine beaten T

here are promising signs that a vine infestation choking a lowland forest conservation area in Vanuatu can be fought using a combination of cutting and an ingenious herbicide injector developed by Forest & Bird member John Dodgson.

The Vatthe lowland forest conservation area on the Island of Espiritu Santo in the Pacific Island nation is under threat from big leaf (Merremia peltata), a fast-growing vine smothering large numbers of canopy trees.

Forest & Bird volunteers led by Otago/Southland Field Officer Sue Maturin have been working with the local landowners around Vatthe to find ways of controlling the vine infestation in 800 hectares of the forest. They have teamed up with Vanuatu NGO partner – Eco-Livelihood Development Associates (EDA) – which will take over management of the project.

So far the results have been very encouraging with vine cutting and Dodgson’s home-made jabberwocky walking stick herbicide injector holding back the previously relentless advance of the big leaf vine. Maturin and Dodgson returned to Vanuatu in July with a party of Forest & Bird volunteers for further testing of a range of tools he developed in his shed, including the jabberwocky.

Fifty landowners and people from surrounding villages report the tools are fantastic and are now injecting Weedmaster herbicide in to the vines’ large stems, and cutting all the smaller climbing stems. Last year the landowners also cut all the vine stems in some 50 hectares of forest and the results have surpassed everyone’s expectations. The forest canopy has recovered, with many previously unhealthy trees regenerating their crowns.

The focus for the rest of this year will be on applying herbicide. Over the next two years the cut-only areas will be re-cut to see if this is enough to create unfavourable growing conditions for the vine. This year’s Forest & Bird tour party helped establish five more trials to find out if lesser amounts of herbicide 2 are effective to try to cut costs and speed up control.

“We hope these promising developments will be a major breakthrough because previously people believed the vine was uncontrollable in forest conservation areas,” Maturin says.

“Merremia is a weed throughout many Pacific islands, and many people are watching and waiting to see if we can be successful at Vatthe.”

Forest & Bird’s next conservation tour to Vatthe will be in July 2011. Watch for more details next year.

1 1 Donna Kalfatak of Vanuatu’s Department of Environment and Conservation and Rosina from Matantas village survey understorey regrowth after vines were cut.

2 Forest & Bird’s Sue Maturin.

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Forest & Bird

| 13

conservation

news

Cleaning up our water N

ew Zealanders have a chance this summer to contribute to feedback on a landmark report aiming to find ways of reversing the declining quality of our water.

Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell was a trustee of the Land and Water Forum, which in September issued a report recommending ways of improving management of our precious water resources.

Hackwell says Forest & Bird members should try to get to one of 15 meetings to be held around the country late this year and in early 2011 to gather feedback. The forum will meet again briefly next year to consider the feedback and pass it on to the government.

“We’re really keen that people do get along to the meetings, and it would be good for there to be support for the general principles in the report. These include the need for limits and standards and timelines to achieve them, and more national direction to ensure consistency around the country,” he says.

Water quality has been in decline, as have the native fish, birds and other species that rely on healthy waterways.

A more collaborative model for water management would encourage more co-operation between parties ahead of planning hearings and major applications for resource consents for water use.

“At Forest & Bird, we know how time-intensive and how expensive it is to fight consents, and we know how it works much better when the parties get engaged early. Everybody benefits and you end up with much less litigation and hassle, and that’s good for everybody,” Hackwell says.

As well as being one of four trustees, Hackwell was a member of the forum’s small group meeting regularly

since last year to pull together recommendations to create a more collaborative and effective model for water management. The forum comprised groups that often find themselves on opposite sides of water allocation arguments, from farmers and industrial users on one hand to conservation and water recreation organisations on the other. Despite past differences, the forum built trust among the parties and reached a consensus on most of its plan.

The report recommends: n Introducing a national policy statement on water n Limits and standards for water quality n A national Land and Water Commission n A restoration fund to restore water quality n A strong regulatory framework to accompany voluntary management Environmental groups including Forest & Bird favour charging commercial users for their water use to fund the restoration fund.

Forest & Bird wants the government to adopt the forum’s report but Hackwell says putting all the elements in place will take time. “Some of the things we are recommending involve serious structural change and need to be done carefully and properly. They require legislative changes and nobody expects them for the next year or two.”

If the government accepts the report, it could start implementing some recommendations before next year’s election, including the national policy statement on water and establishing national environmental standards for water quality.

To check when the meetings will be held, go to www.forestandbird.org.nz

Down to Earth dolphins

Trade Me support

D

own to Earth is extending its support for the environment in a partnership with Forest & Bird to help save endangered Hector’s and Maui’s dolphins. The maker of eco-friendly cleaning products is sponsoring Forest & Bird’s work protecting the small New Zealand dolphins and is helping to educate the public on the threats they face.

A new website from Down to Earth and Forest & Bird will help raise awareness of the plight of our small dolphins. You can even adopt a “virtual” dolphin, with all proceeds going to Forest & Bird. www.dteproducts.co.nz

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Thousands of Kiwis have supported Forest & Bird in a partnership between Trade Me and Forest & Bird. For the past two years people selling goods online through Trade Me have rounded up their success fee to the tune of more than $49,000.

A total of 98,000 people have supported Forest & Bird’s conservation work throughout New Zealand.

“We are delighted at the support of all the people who have recycled their unwanted items through Trade Me and want to make a difference for our native wildlife and wild places. It shows that people really want to get behind our work preserving and protecting what makes New Zealand unique,” Forest & Bird General Manager Mike Britton says.

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Home away 1 16

| Forest & Bird

2

NAPIER •

CAPE KIDNAPPERS

A privately owned Hawke’s Bay sanctuary has launched an ambitious project to make Cook’s petrel chicks feel so welcome that they will return to breed.

By Christine Fallwell.

O

n a Hawke’s Bay hilltop peninsula in early autumn this year, 50 soft-grey, downy-coated Cook’s petrel chicks made conservation history. Their move from Little Barrier Island to the hilltop just south of Cape Kidnappers was the first transfer and hand-rearing of their species.

Early signs of the project’s success were good. Just 16 days after arriving, the first chicks had fledged, to be followed over the next 37 days by the rest. By now they will have journeyed thousands of kilometres to feeding grounds in the eastern Pacific, from Chile to California, further north to the Gulf of Alaska, then finally back to New Zealand waters next August. But it will be three or four years before they make land again and only then will the transfer’s outcome really be clear.

Tamsin Ward-Smith, manager of the Cape Sanctuary at Cape Kidnappers, the Cook’s petrels’ new home, says that given the transfer’s ground-breaking nature and a relative lack of knowledge about Cook’s petrels, it is possible the chicks won’t return to Cape Kidnappers, instead heading to Little Barrier to breed. If all goes well, in 2013, when the project ends with a fourth and final transfer, 350 Cook’s petrels should regard the sanctuary as their breeding home.

Cook’s petrels, or titi (Pterodroma cookie), are endemic to New Zealand, though they spend most of their life at sea. They probably once bred along much of the coastline and into sub-alpine forest but today their breeding sites are limited to Little and Great Barrier Islands, and Codfish Island. With a total breeding population of about 287,000

pairs – about 286,000 on Little Barrier – the IUCN rates them as a vulnerable species.

At the sanctuary they will take their place in an ambitious project to bring back the wildlife that was in the area before the devastations of introduced predators such as cats, rats, hedgehogs and ferrets, and habitat loss from farming.

Ward-Smith says middens show the area once boasted now-extinct species, such as coastal moa and New Zealand raven, plus other animals that long ago moved on, including pateke (brown teal), kiwi, tieke (saddleback) and pekapeka (bats).

By 2006, when the sanctuary was established, only 13 of the area’s 21 native land bird species remained, and just four seabird species were breeding. The 2015 goal of the three land-owning families that set aside and continue to fund the sanctuary is to have 28 New Zealand land bird species there, plus seven breeding seabird species.

Seabirds are fundamental to a diverse, healthy ecosystem, Ward-Smith says. “They’re ecosystem drivers, mobile fertilisers with their droppings and dead chicks and eggs. Tree-ring growth shows when seabirds dropped out of the system, flora and other fauna also suffered. For example, they’re associated with reptiles like tuatara, which we’re also planning to introduce, after about 300 years’ absence.”

Early on, 130 artificial burrows were built along eight kilometres of the sanctuary’s south-eastern shoreline for little blue penguins. They are often seen offshore but they lacked adequate natural land habitat. In preparation for petrels, a 2.5-hectare site was ring-fenced against mice,

from home 1 Cook’s petrels spend most of their life at sea but return to New Zealand to breed. Photo: Brent Stephenson@Eco-Vista 2 Looking from the north over Cape Kidnappers to Cape Sanctuary.

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the only pests able to invade the otherwise predatorproof 10.5-kilometre fence separating the sanctuary from neighbouring farmland.

Perched above the north of Ocean Beach’s long sandy dune-backed scoop, the site is difficult to reach for sanctuary staff and volunteers, who must negotiate a specially constructed and tortuous 12-kilometre vehicle track every few days to feed the chicks sardine smoothies.

But the site’s soils are burrow-friendly, and the hilltop offers good launching platforms.

Burrows were dug, protective planting done and a solar-powered audio system broadcasting five seabird species’ night-time calls was installed to make the birds feel at home. In December 2008, the first new home-makers, 50 grey-faced petrels, were transferred by helicopter from Moutohora Island, near Whakatane.

Forty-eight fledged the following January, leaving for five to seven years’ feeding across the Pacific before returning to breed. Their burrows were freed for another 50 chicks transferred this year, and sanctuary staff and volunteers dug neighbouring burrows for Cook’s petrels.

burrows two-plus metres long. To find the chamber at the end where the adult pair nurtures a single egg, as many as three holes had to be dug for each burrow. The ideal age range to transfer chicks is 50-60 days – about 20 days away from fledging to allow the chicks time to identify with their new location without needing prolonged feeding.

Ngati Manuhiri farewelled the chicks from Little Barrier Island, and they were welcomed to the sanctuary on March 8 by Ngati Kahungunu ki Heretaunga. They were numbered, weighed and fed by tube their first smoothie.

Three days later Ward-Smith was back with parttimer Shayne Storey, volunteer helpers and consultant ornithologist Brent Stephenson to weigh the chicks again.

After banding, the chicks had blood and faecal samples taken to screen for disease. The next day they began a three-day feeding cycle shared by naturally reared chicks, whose adults fish long distances, in male-female roster, to feed their young with squid, crustaceans and small fish.

W

n early March this year, under the guidance of Cook’s petrel expert Matt Rayner and the sanctuary’s ecological consultant, Dr John McLennan, pest control manager Travis Cullen, other staff and volunteers spent a week on Little Barrier’s challengingly steep hills, digging chicks from

ith the Cook’s and grey-faced petrel programmes under way, the sanctuary’s attention is turning to sooty shearwaters (muttonbirds) and possibly fluttering shearwaters and diving petrels.

Cape Sanctuary – at 2500 hectares and stretching along 17 kilometres of coastline – is New Zealand’s largest privately owned conservation area. It includes non-coastal habitats – native and pine forest, farmland, and Cape Kidnappers Golf Course – and it was in these areas that restoration began in 2007 with transfers of other birds.

First were toutouwai (North Island robins) and miromiro (tomtits) from Maungataniwha pine forest, northwest of Napier. They were followed by a further robin transfer, New Zealand’s second-only titipounamu (rifleman) transfer, plus popokatea (whiteheads), pateke, moho-pereru (banded rail) and a successful, ongoing kiwi programme.

Other spin-offs from the sanctuary’s effective pest control are that other seabirds are breeding there in greater numbers and residents as far away as coastal townships north of Cape Kidnappers report more birds in their gardens.

Cook’s petrel fast facts

3 A chick in an artificial burrow at Cape Sanctuary. Photo: Shayne Storey

3

I

Named after: Captain James Cook Found: Breeding on Little Barrier, Great Barrier and Codfish Islands from October to May. When not breeding, in the eastern Pacific Ocean along the North and South American coastlines Harvested: Maori rated young Cook’s petrels highly as food Nest: In long burrows dug by the birds, which they shared with tuatara Conservation status: Vulnerable Threats: Predation by cats, rats, hedgehogs, ferrets, habitat loss to farms

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4 Cape Sanctuary’s petrel site, with Cook’s petrel burrows under reflective covers in the foreground, grey-faced petrel burrows beyond and the seabird call speaker in the distance.

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1

Forest & Bird staffer Karen Baird sailed on the yacht SV Falcon GT to Niue to survey humpback whales. She took the crew through the teeming waters of the Kermadec region while following

Kermad log the whales on their northward migration to the tropics.

DAY

1

Monday, 9 August

It’s a relief when we cast off from the dock at Whangarei Basin and head down river – skipper John Gayford, Gerry Kelly, Karl McLeod, Chris Wild and me.

Once out and round Bream Head we hit a 10-20 knot westerly on a broad reach – a tricky angle to try to get on to our bearing for Raoul. Just off the Hen and Chicken Islands a pod of common dolphins joins us.

Flocks of fluttering shearwaters flying and on the water are a reminder of the productivity of our coastal waters.

Diving petrels burst from the water as we sail through them and the dainty fairy prions float by. Gannets are in ones and twos.

DAY

2

I manage a bit of shut-eye after my nine to midnight watch, though it’s a bit tricky in a slippery sleeping bag when rolling from side to side. We drop the main sail and gib and then put the hydrophone over the side. We hear dolphin whistles – Karl saw about 25 common dolphins at dawn on his watch.

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Seabirds make the day again – our usual complement of grey-faced petrels and Cape petrels. By midday we are joined by grey petrels, distinctive with their silvery grey topside plumage and rounded white underside. It’s quite a large bird except when compared with the giant petrel.

Some of the crew are very excited when one of these cruise in to see what might be on offer.

Several albatross species make appearances but the most amazing turn-up for the day is a Chatham albatross, which swoops past so fast I’m not sure I’ve seen correctly.

These birds are threatened, with a population of just 600 pairs at the Chatham Islands. It’s fantastic to see this one!

We’re still travelling on a broad reach, with the spinnaker up and less than 400 nautical miles to go to Raoul.

DAY

3

An airforce Orion swoops in to check us out on a routine patrol. It’s good to know our Exclusive Economic Zone is well protected. Position at midday: 32° 04.34S; 177° 47.9E

NIUE DAY 14, 22/8/10

2

DAY 13, 21/8/10

Humpback whales seen

20°

170° 175° 180° 175° 170°

DAY 12, 20/8/10

25°

Whales heard on hydrophone

DAY 11, 19/8/10

DAY 10, 18/8/10 DAY 9, 17/8/10

RAOUL ISLAND DAY 6-8, 14/8/10 Humpbacks seen 1 week ago

30°

ec

DAY 5, 13/8/10

DAY 4, 12/8/10

DAY 3, 11/8/10

DAY 2, 10/8/10

Common dolphins

WHANGAREI DEPARTURE 9/8/10 MIDDAY

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DAY

4

DAY

5

We see our first Kermadec petrels – just a couple – and a white-headed petrel. The first pair of Kermadec petrels to return to Raoul Island, now that the predators have gone, nested in 2006. Another pair are breeding again this year.

The island was once covered in Kermadec petrels nesting on the ground. They were the bird of choice as muttonbirds by the early settlers there.

A brown skua flying round the boat gives us a great view. They look so big and heavy bodied, and it’s hard to believe they range so far from their breeding grounds in the sub-Antarctic islands.

The grey-faced petrels stay with us. It is their breeding season in New Zealand, sitting on eggs that must be close to hatching. I wonder if the breeders are ranging this far north to feed. They mostly feed at night on squid, but the birds we see maintain a bit of interest in our trolled line. We cross the 180th meridian at 6.30pm. We’re now in the west.

It’s a heavy sea gusting 25 knots on a close reach with full sail up. I’m fighting to keep the wheel in position. John wrenches open the hatch door and calls all hands on deck for a reef and foresail change.

We make contact with Raoul base this morning on the SSB radio. We’re 90nm out and the seas are heavy, with three-metre swells.

But the birds love it. Our first Kermadec little shearwater comes close by the boat. These little birds are already breeding – most likely with chicks. This bird may be on a feeding foray. Curtis Island, in the southern Kermadec group, has a huge colony of these birds. We also see our first Tasman booby – a young bird. It’s very curious, flying around the boat several times before drifting off. Tasman boobies are only found on the Kermadec, Lord Howe and Norfolk islands.

1 Kermadec black spotted groupers are friendly and curious and often investigate divers. Photo: Tom Hitchon

3 The Kermadec crew, from left, Chris Wild, Karen Baird, Karl McLeod and Gerry Kelly Photo: John Gayford

2 A Kermadec white-necked petrel. Photo: Hadoram Shirihai

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4 Mother and calf humpback whales. Photo: Karen Baird 5 Kermadec white-necked petrel. Photo: Hadoram Shirihai 6 Kermadec petrels on the nest. Photo: Karen Baird 7 A Kermadec petrel. Photo: Karen Baird 8 Common dolphins. Photo: Karen Baird

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DAY

6

No one has much sleep because of the heavy seas.

Five or six dainty white terns can be seen against the backdrop of the pohutukawa-covered hills of Raoul Island.

Just a handful breed on Raoul, though they are widespread in the tropics. They lay their cone- shaped eggs on a bare limb of a pohutukawa tree. It’s amazing they don’t fall off.

We finally set anchor. In the afternoon we snorkel around Boat Cove – it’s very clear straight to the sandy bottom under the boat. We see a spotted black grouper sitting on the sand under the boat. These fantastic animals are a feature of the marine reserve here. They’re friendly and curious and often investigate divers. We swim closer to shore and begin to see the tremendous variety of fish found in the Kermadecs. Most spectacular in the fading light are the large bright blue fish – called blue fish! They are fearless and swim in a large school around me. The fish that cause the most excitement are the Galapagos sharks.

Several approach us and follow us, more curious than threatening, and magnificent to watch gliding effortlessly through the water.

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DAY

7 Sunday on Sunday Island

Raoul is notorious for poor anchorages and our experience is no different. The wind gusts into the bay and by morning has risen to 50 knots from the north with willy-whorls forming in the bay. Karl dives in to check the anchor, which seems secure. Three of us head for shore.

Kermadec parakeets frequently fly off the track in front of us, a reminder of the success of the Department of Conservation rat and cat eradication programme in the early 2000s. These birds were previously confined to the tiny Herald Islets nearby.

The track from Boat Cove passes through lush Kermadec pohutukawa and nikau, an internationally significant mixture of temperate and tropical vegetation.

They are an eclectic mix of plants introduced by Polynesians passing through and from early European attempts at settlement. Some of these introduced plants will be eradicated in a restoration programme that has spanned nearly 40 years.

The DOC hub is the hostel, a colonial-style 1939 wooden building with a double-hipped roof and inbuilt veranda. We meet the team and hand over the eagerly

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awaited mail bag from home. The last mail drop was more than three months ago. We sit down for a welcome cuppa and traditional scones and cake.

Small flocks of grey ternlets drift past as we gaze over the sea to the now sunlit Meyer Islets. The storm has passed. Chloe – one of the volunteers – describes how just a week ago they watched a pair of humpback whales cavorting below in the bay.

Back at Boat Cove, a low tide exposes the enormous limpets that make the rocks look knobbly. These limpets are yet another endemic feature of these remarkable islands.

DAY

8 Departure from Raoul Island

We head through the Herald Islets. While cats and rats roamed on Raoul Island, these islets were the last bastion for many Raoul species. Kermadec petrels wheel around over the tops of the islands. White-capped noddies dip and dive in the eddies between the islets, and further out to sea we begin to see many small groups of Kermadec little shearwaters dive to feed.

Light winds and fair sailing.

Post script Late September 2010 The humpback whales are back at Raoul after their tropical sojourn to have their calves. The island appears to be a stop-off on their southward migration to their feeding grounds in Antarctica.

Many of these humpbacks are likely to belong to the endangered Oceania sub-population of about 3500. The population is recovering only slowly after intensive illegal Soviet whaling up to the 1970s. There is little interchange with other groups, and genetic distinctiveness and the slow rate of recovery led the IUCN to declare them endangered in 2008.

Surveys at Raoul have revealed up to 100 whales around the island on a single day. Sound recordings taken using the hyrdrophone are still being analysed. Beaked whales make sounds above normal human hearing so recordings need to be checked using special equipment.

For more information about this wonderful region and the recent Kermadec scientific symposium at Te Papa, see www.thekermadecs.org

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Southern comfort for 1 24

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The fight to save the Waitutu Forest’s iconic kaka and mistletoe is a race against time. By George Ledgard.

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n southern Fiordland, the Waitutu Forest spans vast raised terraces wedged between the windswept Southern Ocean and the remote and rugged southern Fiordland mountains. Covering more than 450 square kilometres, this ancient forest provides an insight into a lowland forest ecosystem that was common across New Zealand before humans arrived, but is now under severe threat from introduced rodents, stoats and possums.

For five years DOC scientist and kaka expert Terry Greene and fellow kaka expert Peter Dilks have been monitoring breeding kaka in the Waitutu Forest. They are concerned at the precarious situation kaka are in because of predators such as stoats and possums.

Female and fledgling kaka are particularly at risk. Kaka nest in tree hollows and, with a predator at the entrance to their hollow, there is no escape. This has already led to the decimation of other hole-nesting birds such as kiwi and mohua (yellowheads) in the Waitutu.

Kaka demographics reveal the impact of pests. On predator-free offshore islands there are usually equal numbers of males and females. In other parts of the country where predator numbers are low, kaka have a female-tomale ratio of about 1:1.6. In 2008, a survey put the Waitutu Forest ratio at 1:5.7 – the worst kaka demographics on mainland New Zealand.

Examinations of plundered nests showed both possums and stoats as the culprits. Without the control of these pests, the number of kaka fledglings is likely to be zero, with chicks and their mothers eaten on their nests.

Other iconic birds used to call the Waitutu Forest their home. Kakapo, brown teal, South Island kokako, weka and bush wren have all disappeared – savaged by introduced predators.

DOC ranger Colin Bishop leads the Waitutu Restoration Programme and knows only too well the impacts possums,

stoats and other predators have had on the forest.

“Mohua used to be pretty common right throughout the Waitutu, but they’ve just been decimated by rats and stoats to the point where we only see them on very rare occasions. Kiwi and bats have gone the same way too and now iconic flora such as the mistletoes 2 are disappearing at alarming rates.”

In the western Waitutu Forest, where possum numbers are still relatively low, endangered native mistletoes are abundant and are found in numbers rarely seen elsewhere in New Zealand. Mistletoes are parasitic plants and use specialised roots to extract nutrients and water from host plants. They are slow growing and species such as the scarlet mistletoe are thought to grow to as old as 150 years.

As an important seasonal food for kaka and other forest birds, healthy numbers of mistletoe are essential for a healthy Waitutu forest.

In the western Waitutu forest, many trees have multiple mistletoes – often the size of a large station wagon. In such dense numbers, the mistletoes offer an insight into a rare and almost extinct New Zealand habitat – the beech mistletoe ecosystem. This uniquely New Zealand ecosystem, where mistletoe rely on a few bird species, has evolved over thousands, perhaps even millions, of years.

The future of this ecosystem hangs in the balance, with only moderate levels of possums needed to eat mistletoe to extinction.

kaka

WAITUTU FOREST

1 Waitutu Forest has a disturbing shortage of female kaka, caused by stoats eating the females on their nests. Photo: Rod Morris

2 Scarlet mistletoe (Peraxilla colensoi). Mistletoes provide important food for kaka and other birds but the parasitic plants are being devoured to extinction by possums. Photo: DOC

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Johan Groters, a local jet boat operator, sees the impact of possums on mistletoes. He often stops to show tourists the last few surviving plants along the fast-flowing Wairaurahiri River. “The only place we see them now is on islands in the middle of the river – a couple of trees full of them. No possums can get there.”

A recent survey of mistletoes tells a sorry tale. In 1998, 495 mistletoes were surveyed for possum damage throughout the forest. A new survey in the summer of 2010 found that 97 per cent of mistletoes measured in the area with no possum control had died. To the west, where possums are still invading and have been maintained at near zero densities, only 11 per cent had died and there were still good numbers of healthy mistletoes present.

Possums have decimated the once healthy mistletoe populations east of the Waitutu River. Importantly, however, this highlights that it is possible to secure the long-term future of mistletoes in the Waitutu Forest if possum numbers are kept at very low levels.

DOC is renewing efforts to reverse the losses. The Nature Heritage Fund (NHF) has funded broad-scale possum control over 25,000 hectares of the Waitutu Forest this year, and aerial 1080 drops began in early October.

Possum control will go a long way to relieving the pressure from browsing possums on mistletoes within the control area. Follow-up monitoring of mistletoes will be done to assess if these and other possum-affected plants recover in health and numbers after the reduction in possum numbers. The Waitutu and Wairaurahiri rivers are natural barriers to possum reinvasion into the control area, and will help slow the build-up of possum numbers and, most importantly, buy precious time for possum-affected species to recover.

There is renewed hope for the kaka, too. In 2008 predator control began over 4000ha and, in the next breeding season, at least 20 chicks successfully fledged from monitored nests. With possum numbers set to be reduced, and with ongoing stoat trapping, kaka numbers can slowly recover.

However, these short-term positives need to be sustained for many years for meaningful recoveries to happen. Long-term funding to keep possum and stoat numbers down is this great lowland forest’s best chance of survival.

George Ledgard is a Department of Conservation technical support officer.

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Forest & Bird fighting for Waitutu Forest & Bird’s Southland branch publicly backed the Department of Conservation’s use of 1080 to protect the Waitutu Forest. Branch members and visiting staff presented a public message of thanks to DOC on October 4 in Invercargill.

“There are no longer any kiwi in Waitutu; there would have been 100 years ago,” Forest & Bird Conservation Advocate Nicola Vallance said in supporting the use of aerial 1080.

Southland Forest & Bird chairman Craig Carson said: “If we don’t do this, we will end up with forests that are silent.”

3 Rata flowering alongside the fast-flowing Wairaurahiri River in Waitutu Forest. Pest control in Waitutu will help save its rata trees from being eaten by possums. Photo: Jesse Bythell

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4 Waitutu kaka fledglings in their tree hollow nest. If a stoat appears at the nest entrance, there’s no escape. Photo: DOC

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lizards Lounging with

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Jan Kelly has created a skink nirvana in her Central Otago garden.

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e inadvertently acquired McCann’s skinks when we built a house on land that had been a deer farm.

As the garden was formed, skinks walked in off the hill and settled. When young skinks – no broader than a grass stalk, with tiny, perfect feet – emerge to sun on stones after a bitter winter, we know that the garden is working.

Before we came there were no rocks for cover on this hill, no water apart from rain and, after 100 years of farming, no native plants. But skinks skitter off the grass as you walk through, spiralling down into the tight mat of dead leaves and into cracks in the soil. I’ve seen them in rabbit holes.

They have somehow survived the predation of hedgehogs, ferrets, stoats, rats and the stringy, fearless hill cats. They are small, fast creatures, well camouflaged, basking in places that are no more than a body-length from safety.

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The McCann’s skink (Oligosoma maccanni) is usually grey-brown but can vary from black to cream or coppery ginger. It has an intricate design on its back, a side stripe that is broken or wavy down the length of the tail and black speckles on its pale underbelly. The exact pattern of markings is unique to each individual. Common skinks have no speckles and a clear, unbroken side stripe from nose to tail tip.

The skinks have become part of our lives. On a hot January day I have the watering can with me, and the native Corokia cotoneaster shrub, which is in yellow flower, is wilting and dull so I send a gentle spray of water down through it. A small gingery skink races over to look. It stands up tall on a piece of bark, turning its head to watch, obviously wondering why the plant is raining only on the inside.

When we dig post holes, and stop for lunch, we have

BACKYARD conservation

to pick out three or four skinks, and check again before the posts can be placed and concreted in. Skinks are attracted to newly turned soil so covering the holes doesn’t help.

Skinks drape themselves on the warm curves of the wooden retaining wall at the parking area, and hunt in pea straw. In winter they ease out from under the aluminium door frame to bask on the front step.

I watch ours daily from the window to see where they are and when. They come and go, accept or reject, fight or sunbathe together according to rules I haven’t discerned yet, though there is seasonality to their behaviour. A skink fight looks like a rolling ball of silk on the bank.

We have learned that a garden made of stone shards offers complex, narrow spaces and sun-heated surfaces. A dry-stone wall would be as effective. Porcupine shrub, or Melicytus alpinus, sprawling over the stones provides a rich crop of flowers and fruit, as do the native cushion plants, helichrysum and raoulia. The skinks stalk insects and flies that come to the nectar on flowers.

Tussock clumps and chionochloa, or snow grass, that can be burrowed into or hidden under, and sprawling Pimelia with its fragrant bed of dry leaves are all preferred skink habitat.

Low scrambling muehlenbeckia and the many zcaena species, the native bidi-bidis, give both cover and food.

The striking shrub Muehlenbeckia astonii, which is deciduous and has stems like tangled red wire, attracts thousands of miniature moths to its flowers. In autumn its abundant fruit falls if you touch it.

Hebes will lay their flowers over a rock, bringing flying insects to ground. Coprosma species are most valuable for their fruit but the difficulty is to keep rabbits from cropping their tasty, leading twigs. My fruit-heavy, prostrate coprosmas are permanently under netting – I don’t care how it looks.

I keep a dead-leaf pile behind a log, meshed to stop blackbirds and cats digging it up. It has been made airy inside with clumps of pine cones and oddly shaped stones, and its composting layers provide living food.

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Holes dug into the bank and packed with river stones give a multitude of safe cracks for midday sleeps and for semi-hibernation. On a day in icy June there may be five skinks basking in front of one of these.

Pine bark is warmer than stone to lie on. The leaf piles freeze in the winter but the skinks don’t seem to care. I worry about the great cold but the skinks emerge from winter gleaming and pregnant.

I’ve also built Onduline stacks – pancake piles of a corrugated roofing material made of compacted hemp and tar, the sheets separated by thumbnail-sized pebbles. Skink researcher Marieke Lettink invented these safe-houses for her study site at Birdlings Flat in Canterbury. Terracotta roofing tiles will do as well, their ridges and hollows holding the sun’s heat.

Skinks come to water. After three had drowned in the stormwater sump, trapped by its plastic walls, I floated a log of macrocarpa firewood to give foot purchase and an exit. There is little chance of keeping them out. I’ve also placed water bowls every 10 metres among the rocks.

McCann’s skinks are good hunters. I’ve watched one trying to chew a slug, in twisting battle with a muscular meal, and another almost catching a white butterfly. An energetic “boil” of motion under a grass bush resolves itself into a skink with a live porina moth in its mouth, each waft of the wings almost knocking it over. It saw us and ran, very awkwardly, brown moth wings sticking out each side of its jaws like an oversized, vigorous moustache.

Visitors who have heard about the skinks ask to see them. As we stand looking and talking, a skink comes out, climbs on to a curve of bark and stretches itself in the sun. It lies there looking elegant and silken for about four minutes while the visitor takes a photo, then glances at us sideways and goes away again.

1 A McCann’s skink in Jan Kelly’s Central Otago garden. Photos: Jan Kelly 2 Basking on sun-warmed stones.

3 Lilac coprosma fruit make a skink meal.

4 Two skinks entangled in a fight.

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DIY

Think like a skink 1 2

Skinks need a living space that will last (we used stones piled up on dry ground), including sunny spaces for basking and complex cover – cryptic shrubs, grasses and plants that give streaky shadows.

Just a few square metres are needed – any dry space will do, provided it has safety, warmth and food.

Skinks bask on open, sunny sites with good visibility, only a tail-length from a retreat. These are cracks and holes no more than a finger-width in size, in a retaining wall or bank or under a rock. Make spaces underneath rocks using smaller stones. When building a retaining wall, make it less than perfect.

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Because our property borders farmland we set traps for ferrets, stoats and hedgehogs. A surprising number of people think hedgehogs are harmless, but they hunt at night and are very hard on native wild life. A Timms trap (designed for possums) gets mustelids, and is quick and humane. A piece of drain pipe added to its opening prevents the accidental trapping of pet cats, because they won’t use a narrow tunnel.

Now that we don’t have a compost bin and bury all kitchen scraps, we don’t get rats. For tiny brown field mice, we use bait tunnels – a ceramic pipe in the garden, with a wire hook inside, and rat bait strung on it. As it is suspended in the tunnel, nothing walks over it.

In a cold climate skinks need a winter retreat such as a hole in the bank. The earth is warmer inside and several will sleep together. Skinks in semi-hibernation don’t eat but do emerge to bask on sunny days.

Plants that flower close to the ground bring insects and flies within reach. Native fruits small enough to be a mouthful come from coprosmas, muehlenbeckias, melicytus or gaultheria.

Place water bowls in the garden – skinks use them every day in summer.

Protection from predators is critical. Skinks slow down in the cold and are vulnerable to predation from hedgehogs, stoats, ferrets, rats, mice and cats. They need to be well hidden at night. Cats will wait for an hour or more for a skink to reappear, ready with a swift claw to hook it up. Placing netting over the living area is one option.

Jan Kelly in her skink garden. Photo: E Kelly

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South Canterbury farmer Jim Morris at his Ben Avon property in the Ahuriri Valley. He fenced off the wetland behind him for native planting. Photo: Otago Daily Times

Tussock

hugger A dyed-in-the-wool Mackenzie Country sheep farmer sees a future in farming carbon. By Mandy Herrick.

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ong-time musterer Jim Morris is a curious poster boy for carbon farming. He’s a formidable, ruddy-faced, big-mitted man with boyish eyes set beneath a tangle of salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Five decades of dry, scorching high-country weather is written into his leathery face.

Tussock hugging was never a big part of his job description when he took over his 10,000-hectare highcountry sheep farm in the Ahuriri Valley in South Canterbury’s Mackenzie Country 22 years ago. However, since the bottom fell out of the wool market, high-country farmers such as Morris have been looking at their vast tracts of high-country land with a head full of philosophical questions.

Tenure review has downsized his privately owned patch of land to 2500 hectares and, given the crippling wool prices, he may have to sell up. But he doesn’t want to relinquish his land only to see it be reborn as a cow-filled paddock home to giant irrigators.

“Every generation has a different feeling for what’s best for the land. My grandfather was proud that he cut his farm from standing bush – of course, he didn’t know the consequences of his actions,” he says.

“Can you say that the world was a better place when we had moa and dinosaurs? What’s the value of the spiders, the caterpillars, the birds that occupy that land and, more importantly, how do you put a dollar value on that?”

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Morris feels this land is in better hands with the families that have lived and worked here – people who have a feeling for the land. The gnawing realist in him kicked him into action five years ago and he began a search for the true value of his land – the dirt, the insects, the russet-brown tussock, the bog pines, the vast landscapes and empty skylines.

Back then, there were few qualitative measures of a landscape other than the amount of tourist dollars it earns, which fails to take account of the environmental “services” the high country provides. “The environment has been totally factored out of the economy. It’s a matter of changing people’s mindset, so that they understand these benefits of, say, a clean river, or carbon-filled soil.”

Morris went about bringing together some unusual bedfellows – Federated Farmers, Forest & Bird, Fish & Game, Federated Mountain Clubs, regional councils and Landcare Research – to discuss ways to use high-country land.

In 2009, the High Country Carbon Project was launched with a grant from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s Sustainable Farming Fund to investigate high-country carbon sequestration. One of the chief scientists behind the scheme is plant ecologist and bushman Larry Burrows from Landcare Research.

He says overseas there are many examples where companies, regional councils or central governments pay

MACKENZIE COUNTRY

for environmental and conservation services. “In Costa Rica, there’s a brewery that relies on a clean water supply, so they pay the farmers upstream to keep the forest healthy.

In Switzerland, landowners are paid to keep their land as it is for tourists. In Scotland, landowners can get money for replacing or establishing hedgerows. Overseas they’re really supporting people to maintain the look of the land,” he says.

Morris hopes the study will confirm his theory that ungrazed high-country land contains significantly more carbon. Then he can look at trading bundled carbon, biodiversity and possibly landscape beauty credits.

It’s visionary stuff. “Obviously you’ve got to look at the buyers. I could be paid by the local council because it retains the social fabric of the place and maintains these iconic grasslands, thus keeping the ratepayers happy. I could be paid by the government to keep the tourists flocking here. Or I could be paid by the big polluters wanting to offset some of the stress they’re putting on our environment and the local species. Alternatively, I could generate income from all three of these sources.”

Measuring carbon The High Country Carbon Project received $185,000 from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s Sustainable Farming Fund. The project team aims to quantify what is happening with carbon sequestration in native shrublands and tussock grasslands under different management regimes.

Working out how much carbon is sequestered is crucial not only for private farm owners such as Morris, but also New Zealand. South Island high country is 10 per cent of New Zealand’s total land area and could be a useful carbon sink.

Using the funds, Landcare Research has investigated three paired locations in the high country – Rakaia, Clutha and Waitaki – that are grazed and ungrazed (by retirement, destocking, or managed reduction) by sheep.

They will present initial results this November. One of the major questions hanging over this study is the amount of carbon locked up in high-country soil, and whether this increases under different management options.

Soil contains many times more carbon than grasslands, however, along with shrubland less than five metres tall, it is not included as a carbon sink under New Zealand’s adopted Kyoto protocol.

“There would need to be massive changes in national policy to allow for markets like this to become established,” says Landcare plant ecologist Larry Burrows.

YOU CAN’T CUT DOWN A FAMILY TREE Leave a gift in your WiLL that WiLL Last forever A gift in your will can help make sure our native trees will be here for generations. Help us continue the work of protecting and nurturing all our indigenous animals and plants for many years to come.

Bequests can be made to “Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Incorporated”.

For a copy of our bequest brochure or to discuss leaving a gift in your will, please contact Kerin Welford, Senior Fundraiser.

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0800 200 064 k.welford@forestandbird.org.nz PO Box 631, Wellington, 6140 www.forestandbird.org.nz

Help give nature a voice. Help Forest & Bird

NATURE OF TOMORROW 1

The test of time

David Young kicks off a series about the future of New Zealand conservation by looking at where it’s come from and where conservation – and Forest & Bird – might be heading.

I

used to think that before immigrants were awarded full New Zealand citizenship that they should show a modest understanding of life here. One area of knowledge might be of our nation’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi. The other might be to show some understanding of our unique flora and fauna, including that of our coastline. Arguably, this provides a compass as they take their place as citizens of the historical and biological ecology of one of Earth’s special island groups.

I wonder whether this requirement might be extended.

Given the government’s revisionism on mining in national parks and its panicky breakdown on talks about power sharing in Te Urewera National Park, it has become clear that politicians of most shades need to show aptitude in both history and natural science before we let them anywhere near the Treasury benches.

So what are the markers of New Zealand’s national and natural history protection that may guide us? Inevitably, much debate always devolves to the division between: n The private sector and the public good n The thrust for wealth/energy/development versus the need to protect what is left of the commons, or its 21stcentury equivalents n Short-term and long-term thinking n Local action and global orientation Many of the debates Forest & Bird has engaged in, often with some success, may be characterised in one or more of these ways. Yet even today on private land we find a sharp

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chainsaw can still swiftly silence a conservation argument, no matter how persuasive. Consequently, overall we are still losing ground on the protection of natural biodiversity, be it on land, water, wetlands or ocean.

Thomas Potts provides an early signpost for New Zealand conservation. In the mid-19th century the Canterbury MP, run-holder, ornithologist and admirer of Maori living culture was an advocate for protecting native forests. Already he could see where “our birds” were headed as their lowland forest habitats, notably of Banks Peninsula and the Hutt Valley, yielded to farms and settlements.

Not until – and perhaps not since – 1874 did the conservation of forests get a full airing in the House.

Prompted by Prime Minister Julius Vogel, the debate was well researched and issues widely canvassed. In spite of that and a subsequent expert review of forests and forestry nationally, there was little let-up. Even a century later, some of the same arguments still had to be made – with increasing urgency – for podocarp forests in Pureora, Whirinaki and South Westland and beech in Nelson, much of Westland and Southland. Belatedly, these battles and, finally, the West Coast Forest Accord of 1986 were all significant wins for public conservation. Now we know, for saving endangered species, that was only a beginning.

In 1887 Tongariro, our first national park, was created.

The nation is proud of the story of its Maori associations and its gifting, but Forest & Bird is in the camp associated

with recreational development. A new opportunity for a different kind of relationship will emerge shortly with the publication of a Waitangi Tribunal report on the park. Let us not forget that until Abel Tasman National Park was created in 1942, national parks were formed only from land that had no prospect of being farmed. As a nation, it seems we still struggle with notions of preservation, let alone of customary use.

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oing back to the 1880s, a previous government introduced weasels, ferrets and stoats. Like the calicivirus and like gorse thrips, these animals were imported at the urging of farmers, then suffering from exploding rabbit populations, notably in the South Island.

Even today the government argues that it couldn’t possibly have foreseen the consequences. Yet ample scientific evidence about the risks is described in late Victorian literature. As anyone who services a trap line knows, the effects of this decision remain disastrous – a negative biosecurity marker 130 years later.

On the positive side, by the late 1800s the scientifically informed and far-sighted pioneers of modern conservation had overseen the creation of our first three offshore island sanctuaries. Resolution, Kapiti and Little Barrier ensured the survival of several species, including the hihi (stitchbird) and tieke (saddleback), already gone from the mainland.

Since then, offshore islands have multiplied, providing the only havens for everything from Hamilton’s frogs to tuatara, tecomanthe evergreen climber and a host of terrestrial and sea birds and marine mammals.

Yesterday’s achievement can be tomorrow’s complacency. The government’s slipshod management of Kapiti Island in 1923 prompted Captain Val Sanderson and a group of mostly businessmen to found the Native Bird Protection Society, which grew into today’s Forest & Bird.

Since World War II we have seen conservation opportunities grow. In 1979 Gordon Stephenson’s QEII covenanting of native remnants on private land helped break a significant impasse of private property-public interest. Almost simultaneously, community-driven efforts on near offshore islands in the Hauraki Gulf such as Tiritiri Matangi began. Here the exotic was systematically replaced by native plants and animals.

Looking back, there is no doubting the eventual success of the Save Manapouri campaign through the 1960s and early 1970s and its impact on modern conservation. However, it owes 2 much to the largely unsuccessful

3 1 Captain Val Sanderson’s discovery of the degraded state of Kapiti Island in the early 1920s spurred him to set up the Native Bird Protection Society, which grew into today’s Forest & Bird. Photo: G L Adkin Collection/Alexander Turnbull Library 2 Forest & Bird staff members Mrs V G Lawson and Miss R Bellett with the 264,857-signature Save Manapouri petition presented to Parliament on 26 May 1970. Photo: Dominion Post Collection/Alexander Turnbull Library 3 Island sanctuaries have ensured the survival of species such as the tieke (saddleback). Photo: Marguerite Quin

1960s efforts to save Tongariro rivers and lakes from the power scheme that eventually redefined them. Both campaigns mark the beginning of a popular effort to define what is sacred in this land.

Two other highly significant developments occurred soon after. One was the reminder that Maori had lost a great deal that they considered both sacred and useful.

As the Treaty processes and settlements of the 70s and 80s kicked in, Pakeha conservationists realised that while they could sometimes find common cause with Maori, bicultural negotiation was something else. The wilderness view of nature uninhabited was not an absolute – as Forest & Bird discovered when it pursued a water conservation order over the Whanganui River.

During the 1970s, Forest & Bird shifted its style as a loose, politically polite body into a professional and focused agency. It was more a force to be reckoned with but moving through that transition was painful. Thirty years later, Forest & Bird again may be at a challenging point. It needs to step up to a new level of relationship with iwi and hapu.

In doing so, some of its own principles may have to be adapted. An early opportunity for this is presented by the Wai 262 report on indigenous flora and fauna, due before the end of this year.

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T

he Department of Conservation – created in 1987 at the urging of conservationists – offered for the first time integrated management of conservation. It was another milestone, and the prime goal of the businessmen and conservationists who had established Forest & Bird.

On the one hand DOC became a key agency to assist restoration projects with funding, especially from the Biodiversity Fund. On the other, its techniques to blitz rats and other vermin, including mustelids and possums with 1080 (opposed by Forest & Bird back in the 1950s but supported today) extended over a larger and larger landmass. DOC cleared Kapiti, then Auckland Island. Now they are trapping to extinction the undesirables of even larger Secretary Island in Fiordland. With even more safe habitat available, most at- risk species have a better chance of survival.

At the same time, on the mainland the restoration movement was under way with traps, grubbers and spades.

Restoring the dawn chorus emerged as a conservation mantra. The idea of mainland islands – fenced sanctuaries or intensively pest-controlled areas – became almost regional necessities. As they expanded on public land in number and scope, sophistication and community involvement, they became a practical and symbolic antidote to what is still declining native habitat on private land.

With the wagons in a circle, soon the ability to reduce exotic predator numbers significantly across our mainland may morph mainland islands towards a single exotic predator-diminished New Zealand. Forest & Bird needs to consider all the implications of this and how community action – including important dimensions in this conservation story such as Maori and hunting as well as some blurring of public and private boundaries – might fit.

Forest & Bird also needs a stronger relationship with farming. The national shame that is dirty dairying, which manifests the tension between private interests and the long-suffering commons, has for 20 years imperilled our rivers and streams with diffuse nitrate and faecal contamination. Just when it seemed that local bodies had awakened to the necessity for effective civic sewage treatment, we find 70 per cent of rivers are now unsafe for swimming.

After 20 years of being on notice, the time for serious regulation of dairy farmers may finally have arrived. The new report of the Land and Water Forum – to which Forest & Bird contributed significantly – advocates a national policy statement for water quality and allocation of quantity.

Regulation is needed – our rapidly extinguishing native fish tell us that – and ownership of a dairy farm may no longer be a licence to treat the communal asset of a river as a sunk cost.

As we evolve towards integrating conservation and community, new opportunities presented by climate change for carbon sequestration on conserved and private land should hasten an integration of the economy into our ecology and social values. The absurdly outdated measure of GDP will be replaced by a more holistic and equable indicator of well-being. Now, though, for the goal of sustainability, arguments must be marshalled around full

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Pioneer conservationist Thomas Potts could see where New Zealand’s native birds were headed. Photo: Steffano Webb Collection/Alexander Turnbull Library

imputation of costs. Is a fleet of electric cars run on hydro power from the Mokihinui River really more sustainable than those plugging in to a coal-fired power station? Forest & Bird needs to consult and engage, helping set the values as it has so well in the past.

For New Zealanders to become active citizens of the post-carbon era, Forest & Bird needs to take us beyond complacency, beyond even the love of a local landscape to awareness that is global for our ecological footprint.

To do this, green organisations generally will need to get even better in their use of science and of providing social context. They need to combine, as Australian ecologist Tim Flannery puts it, reductionism with holism. Forest & Bird can take pride in its many achievements but setting New Zealand on such a path will require even greater effort.

American writer Paul Hawken recently reminded us that it is people, not governments, who will set the agenda.

David Young is the author of Our Islands, Our Selves: A History of Conservation in New Zealand.

Soon the ability to reduce exotic predator numbers significantly across our mainland may morph mainland islands towards a single exotic predator-diminished New Zealand.

International milestones and challenges

T

he far-sighted 1961 Antarctic Treaty, now signed by 47 countries, preserves Antarctica for scientific research and bans military activity. Conservation lobbies have protected, enhanced and extended the treaty, preventing Antarctica largely from exploitation. Currently, the Arctic is not so favoured.

Since the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, we have seen progressive declines in fish stocks, increasing technological interventions for mineral recovery and massive increases in pollution – culminating in 2010 with the BP wellhead spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The effect of this in New Zealand is that that the precautionary principle has been replaced by the pecuniary principle. Another commons is up for grabs. Long-term sustainability of our own much-vaunted quota management fisheries system remains questionable – especially given plans to further deregulate. A powerful precautionary imperative is needed over foreshore, seabed and oceans.

The urgently agreed 1987 Montreal protocol helped

A N TA R C T I C A stem the life-threatening depletion of the planet’s ozone shield. Increasingly effective over the long term, ROSS SEA this treaty is often seen as a prelude to an agreement on measures to combat climate change. It is also a model for the agreement on POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants), which aims to take leading intractable environmental and health risks out of the biosphere , which is where modern environmentalism began with Rachel Carson in the 1960s.

The 1992 Environment Summit led to New Zealand’s Biodiversity Strategy, stimulating important conservation and restoration achievements. It is time now, however, to re-examine and set priorities for the next phase. Almost certainly this will include carbon sinks to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions combined with native restoration.

At Flooring Xtra, our local roots mean more.

Each of our stores has developed a business from the ground up, founded on honest to goodness local values, assisting people within each local region with their flooring to create better home or business environments.

Now, together as we grow beyond 50 stores nationally, we have a combined will to help better New Zealand’s greater environment. It’s why we have developed a partnership with New Zealand’s largest national conservation charitable organisation, Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society of New Zealand.

The environmental programme, which we’ve called ‘Restoring New Zealand’s Forest Floor’, commits regular funding from every local Flooring Xtra store to Forest & Bird, so that they may plant in excess of 20,000 native plants and trees around New Zealand every year.

Because, like you, we’re locals who want to see local environments looking beautiful for generations to come.

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1

In nature’s

footsteps

Joining a Forest & Bird walking group has changed Gillian Candler’s view of the outdoors.

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I

ntriguing names such as Deer Pen and Green String Track would get me wondering when I glanced at Forest & Bird’s mid-week Wellington walking group schedule.

When I moved to a flexible working week, I set Wednesdays aside for walking.

I discovered that Deer Pen walk is a little-used track starting at the entrance of the Mangaone Walkway. The track crosses a stream many times until it reaches an old bulldozer at the bottom of what was presumably once a bulldozed track up the hill. Punga, mamuku, lancewood and tawa are reclaiming the track and young pukatea are springing up among them. At the top of the hill among all this regrowth are the remains of a fence once used to hold deer captured live in the bush.

On my first walk I was shown the fragile membrane covering a hole in a putaputaweta tree, from behind which a puriri moth would one day emerge. On my next Deer Pen walk I could show others these amazingly camouflaged holes. The more we looked, the more we saw. I wondered if it was a particularly good year or whether, without my new knowledge, I'd have just seen bark.

The toughest and most rewarding walk was up a bush track to North Climie (aptly named, we thought) on the eastern hills of Upper Hutt. At over 800 metres we discovered goblin forest, mountain beech, Prince of Wales ferns, purple pouch fungi and mountain cabbage trees. I knew the ferns I saw were Prince of Wales ferns because several weeks earlier we'd been crossing Mt Titi to Mt Maunganui and one of our leaders had pointed out these beautiful filmy ferns that grow at higher altitudes.

This traverse in the Maungakotukutuku area of the Akatarawa Forest was also the first time I saw whiteheads (popokatea). They came extraordinarily close and perched

on a branch right by me as we paused on the track. On the McKerrow track in the Rimutaka Forest Park, a fellow walker helped me distinguish the whitehead's song from other birdsong. Until then I didn't even know they could be found around Wellington.

With each walk, the details of the forest have begun to emerge. In what was once just green leaves and brown trunks, I now see berries and flowers, tiny epiphytic orchids and different types of ferns. In what was once just mud, stones and roots, I see a patchwork of fungi, mosses and grasses, decorated with an array of fallen nest epiphytes, blooms and even birds’ nests. For every new discovery there is a puzzle, a plant that no one recognises and which reference books at home don't cast any light on.

2

3

1 Forest & Bird’s Wellington walking group at Smith’s Creek in the Tararua Ranges. Photo: Gillian Candler 2 On the coast. Photo: John Groombridge 3 Wellington’s Southern Walkway.

4 On the Deer Pen walk. Photo: Max George

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My walking companions are willing to share their knowledge about plants and birdlife, and many are involved in conservation. From them I learn about the weed eradication that's taken place along the Korokoro dam track, the kiwi release and pest trapping in Rimutaka Forest Park, replanting at Maara Roa near Cannons Creek, and the shore plovers recently introduced to Mana Island visiting the mainland.

Wellington’s hills have given me new perspectives. I've glimpsed Kapiti and Mana islands from across the Hutt Valley and over the Belmont hills. I discovered how close the end of Takapu Road is to Cannons Creek, when we returned from admiring the plantings at Maara Roa on a loop walk in Belmont Regional Park. The Southern Walkway leads us through the hills and parks of Wellington, linking suburbs and places in unexpected ways. Things take shape, become connected, maps start to come alive.

My first year of walking has brought the landscape and forest into clearer focus. Best of all, it has brought new friendships and overwhelmingly good company. I look forward to Wednesdays.

5 Kidney ferns beside a Holdsworth track. Photo: Gillian Candler 6 Mana Island. Photo John Groombridge

Wellington walkers The Forest & Bird Wellington Regional Walking Group welcomes all members on regular jaunts. The trips take in Wellington’s most scenic and interesting spots, as well as some lesser known places. Warm clothing and strong footwear are essential. We ask that children under 15 are accompanied by an adult, plants are not collected and dogs are left at home.

The Wellington region also has an E-tramp Group which runs shorter tramps than the Walking Group.

See www.forestandbird.org.nz/whats-on-in-yourarea/wellington/wellington-regional-walkinggroup for walking group details.

Please write and tell readers (in up to 200 words) what you’ve learnt or enjoyed as a Forest & Bird member. Send your letters and photographs to Marina Skinner, Forest & Bird magazine, PO Box 631, Wellington 631 or email m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz 5

7 A swing bridge at Holdsworth in the Tararua Ranges. Photo: Barbara Murison

Walking tips Look down When tramping you need to watch where you put your feet, so paying attention to what’s on the ground is the easiest place to start observing. Some coloured fungi – such as purple pouch fungi, which grow in leaf litter – stand out.

The crown fern is distinctive in shape and often covers large areas of the forest floor. Less common ferns include the Prince of Wales fern and umbrella fern, which grow at higher altitudes. Often fallen blooms and berries from the forest canopy can be found on the ground, including clematis flowers in spring and rata flowers in summer and autumn.

Stings and scratches It makes sense to get to know the plants that can cause a nasty rash so you can avoid them. Ongaonga (stinging nettle) and bush lawyer are ones to watch out for.

Ongaonga, with its spiny leaves, is reasonably easy to spot but bush lawyer is a creeper with attractive flowers and can be mistaken for part of a tree or shrub.

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Common trees It’s great to see forest giants such as rata, rimu and pukatea but it’s also worth getting to know other trees that you might see a lot more of. Visit a reserve where plants and trees have been labelled and pick one or two to try to identify as you keep walking. In Wellington, Otari-Wilton’s Bush and Kaitoke Loop Walk are two places where you can do this.

Know your birds Thanks to all the work making parks and reserves better places for wildlife, you have more chance to see native birds, even in built-up areas. For help identifying bird song, visit the Department of Conservation website: www.doc.govt.nz

6

Amazing facts about…

PERIPATUS

By Ann Graeme

I

7

Nature Tours Australia and beyond!

• • • •

Informative naturalist/birding leaders Small groups (6 - 14 participants) Scheduled tours or private charters Fully accommodated or camping tours

t‘s called a “velvet worm” though it looks like an extra-long caterpillar. But it has too many legs for a caterpillar and the legs are not jointed as insect legs are. Its legs suggest the paired appendages of a segmented worm and so do its simple eyes.

So what is a peripatus (say it pah-rip-ah-tuss) and and how many New Zealanders even know we have this strange creature living in our forests and even our backyards? Its ancestors have been walking on Earth for more than 500 million years. It is a shy and retiring animal and it can only live in very moist places. It hides by day but at night it comes out to hunt – and what a hunter it is.

On its many legs it motors slowly and smoothly through the leaf litter, feeling – for it can scarcely see – with its antennae for an insect or worm. Then from the sides of its head it squirts its prey with twin streams of sticky white glue. The glue hardens on contact and immobilises its prey. Peripatus then chews a hole in its victim, spits in saliva and sucks out the partly digested innards at its leisure.

Its reproduction is remarkable too. On the back of a female a male peripatus will lay a parcel of sperm, which dissolve through her skin to fertilise her eggs. She will give birth, not to eggs but to live babies.

In New Zealand we have five named species.

Peripatuses are also found in Australia, Tasmania, South-East Asia, South Africa and Central and South America. No animal has provoked more zoological debate. The peripatus belongs on a twig that shared the ancestral branch in the evolutionary tree with modern arthropods, which include insects and crustaceans.

Peripatuses are not uncommon though you’ll seldom find many in one place. They live in damp and secluded places — under stones, in rotting wood, under the bark of fallen logs and in leaf litter. Mostly they live in native forests but they can also be found among tussocks in the high country, in remnants of forest in paddocks, in city parks and even in gardens.

Inspiring natural history tours include: • • • • •

W.A.’s Pilbara, Reef & Ranges; W.A.’s Kimberley by land and sea; Dirk Hartog Island & W.A.’s Coral Coast; South Australian Outback Expedition; Tanami Road Expedition.

For full details of our 2011 program contact:

COATES WILDLIFE TOURS

Phone: (61 8) 9330 6066 Fax: (61 8) 9330 6077 Web: www.coateswildlifetours.com.au Email: coates@iinet.net.au Mail: P.O. Box 4502 Myaree, Western Australia 6960 GSA Coates Tours Licence no 9ta1135/36

Photo: Rod Morris

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going places

1

A warm

welcome

Marina Skinner can’t help comparing Forest & Bird’s Ruapehu lodge mark II with the original.

A

North Island brown kiwi welcomes us to Ruapehu lodge, shrieking as we unpack the car in the dark.

The kiwi crossing signs on the road to Whakapapa Village have prepared us but it’s exciting to hear one so close. A few metres from the lodge, blue ducks, or whio, paddle Whakapapanui Stream’s gentle rapids, we’re told, though we aren’t fortunate enough to spot one during our weekend.

The lodge is a sanctuary from the wintry alpine air.

Down the hall in the warm dining area our fellow guests play cards. At the other end of the long, high-ceilinged room is the carpeted lounge area, cosy with ruby sofas and window seats. On a perfect weekend the white mountain and the blue sky would have been revealed through the large windows. We have to settle for a massive photo of Mt Ruapehu blowing its top mounted at the top of the wall above the lounge.

The large kitchen beside the dining area is kitted out well, with two ovens, two fridges, great food storage and enough cutlery and dishes for a platoon of visitors.

Off the hallways are the four-bed and six-bed bunkrooms. Each comfortable room has a shelf and drawer unit with a mirror, and each bed has a cubby space and light. The bathrooms, including one with wheelchair access, are nearby.

Upstairs is the 14-bed bunkroom, with more privacy than you’d expect since the bunks are separated into bays.

At one end is a bathroom and at the other a lounge with red sofas, tables and chairs. From the upstairs balcony

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are immense views of the plains and hills stretching to the north-west.

On the other side of the upstairs landing is the library.

It’s edged with more comfortable sofas, and at the centre are tables and chairs arranged for meetings or classes. A data projector and screen make this room perfect for the nature and conservation workshops and camps that Forest & Bird hopes will be held at the lodge. It’s also a small, cosy space to spend an evening.

T

he rain stops us rushing to the Whakapapa slopes on our first day. We put on our rain coats and head out with a handheld GPS to follow the teenagers on a spot of geocaching, or hi-tech treasure hunting. Download GPS coordinates for the treasure sites from the website and you’re away. Of course, no one should need the lure of a plastic lunchbox stuffed with cheap trinkets and a tiny logbook to get outdoors but it helps for hibernating teens.

We start with an easy find down the road from Whakapapa Village along the Mounds walk, which takes us past a volcano’s cast-off rocks through low flax, fivefinger and tussock. Other treasures are claimed under the Makatote Viaduct and at a remote DOC campsite. At the next spot, the nature-averse teens plunge through low tanekaha and flax in search of an elusive treasure. The clue is it’s at the base of a flax bush behind a manuka bush. It’s a geocaching flop but a modest botany lesson.

The adults abandon the geocachers to head for Taranaki Falls, an easy walk across the red tussock from near

2 WHAKAPAPA VILLAGE

F&B Lodge Whakapapa Village

Getting there 3

Forest & Bird’s Ruapehu lodge is in Rehua Place at Whakapapa Village. Turn left into Rehua Place just before the barrier at the bottom of the Bruce Road. The lodge is the last lodge in the road.

The lodge sleeps 32 in three four-bed bunkrooms, one six-bed bunkroom and one 14-bed bunkroom.

Take:

Sleeping bags, pillow cases, tea towels and food.

Prices: Individual bunks range from $30 a night in the low season for members to $55 in the high season for non-members. Reduced prices for children. Entire bunkrooms can be booked.

Book: At www.forestandbird.org.nz or phone 04 385 7374 1 Snow dusted the newly finished Ruapehu lodge. Photo: Jon Wenham 2 The downstairs lounge has views – on a good day – of Mt Ruapehu.

Photo: Jon Wenham 3 The upstairs bunkroom is divided into bays. Photo: Jon Wenham 4 An umbrella fern on the Taranaki Falls track. Photo: Marina Skinner 5 Forest & Bird President Barry Wards, left, Sir Anand Satyanand and Sir Tumu Te Heuheu at the lodge opening. Photo: Marina Skinner

the Skotel at Whakapapa Village. It’s marked two hours but rain drives us to finish more quickly. Some of our tracks host dainty streams and the rain has created a mighty Taranaki Falls where the Wairere Stream squeezes between solid lava pincers and plunges 20 metres. Mountain beech forest shelters us from the showers as we buddy up with Wairere Stream on the return trail.

Back at the lodge, the drying room overnight sucks every hint of moisture from our wet clothes. There’s no woodburner in the new lodge. It’s sensible, considering the fire – probably started by embers – that destroyed the previous lodge. Heat pumps in the living areas quickly warm the spaces and in the bunkrooms are electric wallpanel heaters.

At the official opening, one long-time member laments a lack of character compared with the old lodge. I’ll trade character for comfort any day.

4

Rising from the ashes Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand and Ngati Tuwharetoa paramount chief Sir Tumu Te Heuheu officially opened the lodge on 20 October. More than 70 people attended the event, including Forest & Bird Distinguished Life Members, representatives from Ngati Tuwharetoa, local organisations, councils 5 and the Department of Conservation, plus members from several North Island Forest & Bird branches and staff.

The $1 million lodge was built on the same site as the original 1967 lodge, which burnt down on 28 October 2008.

Forest & Bird Executive member Jon Wenham led the fivemonth building project, which was financed by insurance and donations from individuals and branches.

Members donated and loaned about £2500 to build the first lodge, and volunteers helped build, paint and furnish it. The idea for the lodge sprang from a successful Forest & Bird summer camp at Tongariro National Park in 1960, and the desire to have a permanent base from which members could enjoy forest and alpine walks and learn about native plants and animals.

When the lodge opened in 1967, fees were $1.50 a night for everyone during winter, dropping to $1.25 a night for adults and 75c a night for children during summer. Nonmembers of all ages paid $1.50.

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in the field

High in

natural fibre

1

When is flax linen and when is flax simply flax? By Ann Graeme.

F

lax has style. Just look at the swamp flax, harakeke, holding up its glossy swords like regiments of soldiers or the tousled clumps of mountain flax, wharariki, spilling down mountainsides and coastal cliffs.

These two flaxes are the only members of the genus Phormium. But though the genus may be exclusive, its species are not snobby. Wharariki and harakeke can be found everywhere, decorating the meanest gullies and the bleakest road cuttings. They make ideal plants for our gardens (as long as their tough, entangling leaves are kept well away from the lawn mower). They forgive the neglect of the worst gardener and endure life between the traffic lanes to soften our stark motorways. Their natural variability has been used to create the 65 or more cultivars that give form and colour to gardens around the world.

But flaxes are much more than decorative plants.

They are providers. Their curved flowers fit the beaks of tui and bellbirds and the nectar glistening deep in the tube of petals awaits their paint-brush tongues. In spring, tui scamper up and down the flower spikes, their heads orange

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with the pollen that they carry from flower to flower.

Long-tongued geckos were just as appreciative and so were Maori.

Maori relied on flax for their everyday needs. They knew and named more than 60 varieties of harakeke and cultivated many for the different qualities of their leaves.

They harvested the flax leaves very carefully, always leaving the growing shoots so that each fan would be sustained.

The leaf blades were used to make kete or baskets, decorative tukutuku panels and mats. The flax leaves were first “retted� (softened in running water) and then the women would use sharp shells to scrape them and remove the fibre. This could be made into ropes, clothes and fishing nets. The dry flower stalks or korari were used for buoyancy and the antiseptic gum from the leaf bases to dress sores and wounds.

When European explorers arrived, they quickly recognised the potential of this new plant. They called it flax, after the linen flax that grew in England and whose fibres could be made into fabric.

So the flax industry began, with Maori harvesting it from the vast swamps and selling it to traders for shipment to the mills in Australia. But as land was cleared and drained for farmland, the swamps diminished and so did the source of naturally growing flax. To take up the slack, flax was planted in the low-lying plains of the Manawatu to supply the rope-making industry at Foxton. At its height, 50 flax mills were operating around the town and the industry thrived during the latter part of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th.

But the boom didn’t last. Outbreaks of yellow leaf disease hit the flax plants and the natural fibres were supplanted by synthetics. The industry dwindled and the last flax at Foxton was harvested in 1973. Now only the story lingers on in the little museum.

New Zealand flax is a source of fibre but that is its only similarity to linen flax. New Zealand flax is a tough, sinewy perennial plant. Linen flax is a soft, delicate annual.

It belongs to the Linum family, and the commercial blueflowered species was first cultivated in Egypt 5000 years ago.

Just as Maori selected harakeke for different fibre or weaving qualities, linen flax has been selected for the production of fibre and oil. Fibre making requires long single-stemmed plants to make fine cloth such as damask, lace or linen. Oil production requires branching plants with many flower heads to produce quantities of seeds, which yield linseed or flax seed oil. Most linen flax is cultivated in the northern hemisphere, particularly in Russia, Canada, the United States and Argentina but some is grown in the South Island for flax seed oil.

Only one member of the linen flax family is native to New Zealand. It doesn’t have the blue flowers of the commercially grown species. Our native linen flax is Linum monogynum. It has the trademark white flowers of many native plants. Its petals are designed to lure colour-blind beetles or night-flying moths, not the bees of the Old World. They have colour vision and so are attracted to the blue-flowered linen flax.

2

Native linen flax grows on coastal cliffs throughout the country. It would be more common were it not so palatable to rabbits and wandering stock. It is a beautiful plant with pure white flowers and fine, grey-green foliage and grows readily from seed. Watch out for it in December when it makes a brave show along the coastal highway around Kaikoura, growing on the cliffs along with the Marlborough rock daisy.

From mountain to sea New Zealand has two species of flax. Harakeke or New Zealand flax only grows here and on Norfolk Island. Its scientific name is Phormium tenax. Phormium is from the Greek word for basket and acknowledges its use to Maori, and tenax means tough.

Wharariki or mountain flax is endemic. Its scientific name is Phormium cookianum and there are two subspecies, hookeri and cookianum. The subspecies cookianum deserves the name of mountain flax because it grows in the South Island mountains and in the Tararua Ranges in the North Island. But the subspecies hookeri grows throughout the North Island from the coast to the mountains and on coastal cliffs in the South Island, so calling it mountain flax is rather confusing.

Wharariki is usually smaller than harakeke and its flowers are more yellow than red, but it is best identified by its dangling, twisted seed heads which are quite different from the upright heads of harakeke.

1 A tui laps up nectar in harakeke or New Zealand flax (Phormium tenax).

Photo: Danica Devery-Smith/DOC 2 New Zealand’s native linen flax (Linum monogynum). Photo: Ann Graeme 3 Wharariki or mountain flax (Phormium cookianum). Photo: Philippe Gerbeaux/DOC

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New hope for

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pacific Rats are killing off entire seabird populations on many Pacific islands. David Brooks reports on an expedition surveying small French Polynesian islands where rats could be removed to give the birds a chance.

island survivors T

he scattered islands dotting the vast Pacific Ocean provide a huge conservation challenge, with the relentless spread of pests ensuring the region has more critically endangered birds than any other in the world.

But communities in the Pacific are fighting back.

Seabird scientist Susan Waugh has been taking part in a study in French Polynesia identifying islands where rats and other pests could be eradicated to ensure the future of seabird colonies.

Waugh, who has been working with BirdLife International in its Pacific regional office in Fiji, earlier this year travelled with colleague Steve Cranwell and staff from French Polynesian bird conservation group, Société d’Ornithologie de Polynésie “Manu” (SOP Manu), another BirdLife partner. The team surveyed 13 sites to assess their potential for restoring seabird populations in work funded by the US-based David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The Pacific region is home to 42 critically endangered species and, despite the 25,000 islands being typically tiny and isolated, they are home to a rich diversity of animal life. As in New Zealand, the native species have been decimated by invaders, especially the Pacific or Polynesian rat, which has spread through the islands by hitching a ride with human settlers and travellers over thousands of years.

Rats have continued to spread to previously uninfested islands in relatively recent times, threatening birds, reptiles and insects in some of their last havens.

Seabird colonies have largely disappeared from human inhabited islands, where black or ship rats – and in some areas Norway rats – introduced by Europeans have also been very destructive.

But the good news is that eradicating Polynesian rats and other pests on islands rarely visited by people can restore safe habitats for many seabirds, which require predator and disturbance-free homes for nesting.

Since 2006, BirdLife International has led projects to eradicate rats from 17 islands in Fiji, New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Palau. As part of the latest survey, the team visited sites on uninhabited islands in two island groups in French Polynesia – the Gambier Islands in the south-east and the Marquesas in the north. Both are isolated regions where the people remain closely connected to the land and sea.

In the Gambiers, locals use many rocky motu, or small islands, as storehouses for game, introducing pigs, goats, and rabbits for food. Other motu were left untouched, based on informal rules set by land owners.

At one site the team visited in the Marquesas, the community has traditionally harvested tern eggs, an activity seen as an important part of the annual calendar linked to the maturing of breadfruit around villages. The larger motu visited are of volcanic origin, with high cliffs and covered in low tussock and occasional shrubs. The island of Hatu Iti in the western Marquesas supports only tussock, ferns, and a succulent plant – just four plant species in all – on an island that is home to 22 seabird species.

In both regions, the visited sites sustain important seabird populations. The islands visited in the Gambiers have about 20 species of seabird nesting across a dozen sites. Three sites in particular look very promising for restoration because pests are restricted in one case to rats, rabbits only at another, and a combination of rats and goats at a third location.

A few of the tiny, rat-free motu are havens for rarer bird species, such as the threatened Polynesian storm petrel and Tahiti petrel. Some contain populations of seabirds that would readily colonise nearby restored sites, such as noddies, Christmas shearwaters and Audubon’s shearwaters.

In the Marquesas, at Motu Oa, the team saw eight species of ground-nesting tropical seabirds, including a sooty tern colony of several thousand birds, which would benefit greatly from pest removal. “We saw rats removing eggs from nests, and rolling them away to crack them,” 1 A brown booby and chick at Motu Oa, Marquesas Islands. This is one of many species that would benefit if rats were removed.

Photos: Steve Cranwell 2 A red-tailed tropic bird on its nest.

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Waugh says. “Several rats attacked one egg, and many of the eggs lasted only a few days on the nest. Chicks were almost entirely absent from the tern nesting areas.”

Audubon’s shearwaters occupy burrows in considerable numbers, and their nesting success would improve if rats were removed. The sites would probably be colonised by the threatened Polynesian storm petrel and Phoenix petrel in the absence of the predators.

Some motu, including Hatu Iti, are outstanding prospects for restoring rich bird life if rats and other pests are removed. Motu Teiku in the Gambiers is brimming with seabirds on all of its three hectares but just a few hundred metres away the island of Makaroa is completely ravaged by goats, with only three tree species evident and no ground cover.

A key question in deciding whether pest removal is worthwhile is the likelihood of rats reinvading the islands, and the answer to this lies in the local communities. On Motu Oa, the community from the nearby inhabited island of Ua Pou is motivated and well led, suggesting the single point of access to the islet from the mainland could be effectively managed to keep rats out.

For the Gambiers, the question is far more complex because many locals involved in the black pearl industry have access to boats, and the community uses the uninhabited motu regularly for picnics and recreation.

The best prospects for pest removal in the Gambiers are sites where a single land-owning family is involved and

prepared to reduce the rat invasion risk by managing their activities on the island. Local officials in both areas are very supportive, and want the restoration project to go ahead because rats damage crops and spread diseases, and their absence would improve prospects for eco-tourism.

SOP Manu and BirdLife International would provide an initial intervention, such as a rat eradication programme, or technical advice to boost local efforts. “Local people are already managing wildlife and want to protect biodiversity,” Waugh says. “If everyone works together, there is hope for the future of some of the world’s most endangered birds, animals and plants.”

MARQUESAS

S O U T H PA C I F I C O C E A N SOCIETY ISLANDS

GAMBIER ISLANDS

3 A white tern chick awaits its parents and a feed of fish.

Photo: Steve Cranwell 4 Steve Cranwell examines an endangered Phoenix petrel found nesting at Hatu Iti, Marquesas Islands. Photo: Susan Waugh 5 Black noddies are sensitive to predators throughout tropical areas.

Photo: Steve Cranwell 6 Brown booby chicks spend many hours each day in baking sun at exposed rocky nest sites. Photo: Steve Cranwell

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Awesome

PART

Aotearoa 2

1

In the second of a two-part series, English author Julian Fitter finds even more unique New Zealand plants and animals.

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PART 2

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ew Zealand’s location contributes to a remarkable ecosystem. We sit between latitudes 24 and 47 south, way closer to the equator than any part of Britain. London is further away from the equator than Antipodes Island, 800 kilometres south of Dunedin. In a more continental situation our climate would be called Mediterranean, in the northern hemisphere Auckland would be in North Africa. Being isolated, we are very much affected by oceanic weather patterns, with lots of change, the Roaring Forties, depressions followed by highs, with the occasional cyclone thrown in.

Add to this a very varied and mountainous topography, with long mountain ranges that interrupt and distort the weather patterns, and you have a huge amount of climate variation in a very small area. Just look at the rainfall contrast between Fiordland, with up to 12000mm a year and Central Otago, with less than 400mm, and only 100km between them. One atlas identifies 17 different climate districts from the sub-tropical north to semi-arid continental climate of the central South Island and the very wet, cool, temperate Stewart Island.

The combination of a mountainous topography, a climate that can be described as oceanic Mediterranean, the long isolation and very varied sea levels has produced a most unusual biodiversity.

In the first instance there is the forest. Before the arrival of the first Maori, as recently as 1250, the country was more than 80 per cent covered in dense forest. Most interestingly for temperate forest, it was almost entirely evergreen.

Only a few trees such as the tree fuchsia, or kötukutuku, lose their leaves in winter, and others such as kowhai are semi-deciduous, losing most of their leaves at the same time. Most evergreen rainforests are tropical; New Zealand is an exception.

This forest, thanks to the many climatic regions and microclimates, and thus very varied habitats and ecosystems, is incredibly species rich. There are, for

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example, some 700 species of native tree and shrub, compared with maybe 80 species of native tree and shrub in Britain. Our trees and shrubs are not just native – 80 per cent of them are endemic, or found only here.

My favourite has to be the kauri. I have seen some pretty old and nifty trees, but Tane Mahuta and Te Matua Ngahere inspire awe. You can see spectacular mountains and valleys, and wonderful birds and plants in other parts of the world but you cannot find anything like these two giants anywhere else.

The trees have other strange features. When I first heard the word “divaricate”, I thought my friends were inventing a new word. I discovered divaricating shrubs, which are found only here and in Patagonia, though there they are found only in the open and not in the forest. Consider the term “juvenile tree”. Of course all trees start small and get bigger, but here quite a few have distinct juvenile forms that do not look in the least bit like their adult counterparts.

The lancewood, or horoeka, is probably the best known example, but pokaka and matai also have juvenile forms.

This is something very special and amazing that is not common elsewhere.

There is no doubt that kakapo and kiwi are amazing and fascinating but the greater interest is in the smaller, less visible members of the ecosystem. We have at least 11,000 native invertebrates, plus far too many unpleasant introduced ones. We have some 2000 species of lichen, 40 per cent of them endemic. We have 7 per cent of all known lichens, yet we are only 1 per cent of Earth’s surface. We have a wonderful richness of ferns – 165 species, including eight tree ferns which give beauty and character to the forest. There are at least 22,000 species of fungi, including the delightful bird’s nest fungi.

An astonishing variety of daisies is here, some shrubs up to 4 metres high. We have more than 40 species of tree daisies and at least 75 species and sub-species of just one genus of herbaceous daisies, the celmisias. These are

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largely in alpine areas in the South Island but there are easily accessible areas in Tongariro and Egmont national parks in the North Island.

The alpine areas are very special, not just because of the wonderful variety of plant life, from the giant buttercup, and the Mount Cook lilly to the Maori onion, or bulbinella, and the huge variety of daisies. There is also the lowest shrub of all, the aptly named prostrate coprosma that grows to all of 30mm high. Coprosmas are another interesting genus – members of the coffee family – with more than 50 different coprosmas in New Zealand.

Get outdoors and look for the natural wonders that are everywhere in Aotearoa New Zealand. Few people really appreciate our native biodiversity. Wildlife is not a oneoff resource like gold or oil. It is, if handled carefully, an infinitely renewable and sustainable resource. If we do not look after our wildlife and our ecosystems, we will almost inevitably become extinct as a species.

Anti-moa plants Tangled-looking divaricating shrubs are found only in New Zealand and Patagonia, in South America. The branches diverge from the main branch at right or obtuse angles rather than the more normal acute angle. Several theories explain why this developed, and the most widely accepted is as a protection from browsing birds such as moa. Such a tactic would probably not have worked if browsing mammal herbivores had been around.

1 Tane Mahuta in Waipoua Kauri Forest, Northland. Photo: DOC 2, 3 There are at least 75 species and sub-species of just one genus of herbaceous daisies, the celmisias. Photos: Craig McKenzie 4 Coprosmas are perfect homes for lizards such as this jewelled gecko.

They have berries to eat, offer predator protection and attract insects to feed on. Photo: Craig McKenzie 5 The divaricating Corokia cotoneaster. Photo: Craig McKenzie

Correction In the August Forest & Bird magazine, to highlight how unusual New Zealand wildlife is, I included a list indicating several genera of animals and plants that are endemic to New Zealand. Unfortunately, some non-endemic genera were included. Those on the list that are not endemic to New Zealand are: Libocedrus, Dacrycarpus, Phyllocaldus, Rhopalostylis, Dracophyllum, Vitex, Metrosideros, Pittosporum, Olearia, Hebe and Dicksonia.

Had I checked with my book, Bateman Field Guide to Wild New Zealand, the error would not have arisen. My apologies for the mistake and my thanks to those readers who were kind enough to point it out.

The list of genera was by no means exclusive, so the error does not detract from the uniqueness of New Zealand biodiversity.

n Julian Fitter The winners of the draw for Julian Fitter’s Bateman Field Guide to Wild New Zealand (Bateman, $49.99) in the August issue of Forest & Bird magazine are: Michael Stace, of Raumati South Charlotte Stephen-Brownie, of Christchurch Jo Thompson, of Kaikoura 3 Forest & Bird

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New front in

war on possums

Robbie Greig sets Goodnature’s stoat and possum trap in the bush

A Wellington trio have designed rat, stoat and possum traps that reset themselves.

They will save time, money – and native birds. By David Brooks.

A

trio of enterprising local designers believe they have made a major breakthrough in the war against possums by developing a light, resetting trap that could potentially save millions of dollars in pest control.

Stu Barr, Craig Bond and Robbie Greig have already successfully launched a trap for rats and stoats, which was developed with the help of the Department of Conservation. The trap was launched in Conservation Week last year and far 2,200 have been sold to customers, including DOC, community groups and regional councils.

Their company, Goodnature, has finished testing a new trap for possums and, despite needing to find a new manufacturer for their products, they hope to start selling them in the first quarter of next year.

The government announced in October that a three-year trial of about 10,000 of Goodnature’s traps – including both models – will start from late next year.

The $4 million deal between the Green Party and the government will roll out the traps from summer 2011-2012.

“We’re pretty excited about it,” Bond says. “It’s going to allow us to go out and test our products on a large scale and get some strong scientific data on how well the traps are working. That, for us, is probably the most exciting aspect of it.”

Five years have passed since the trio – inspired by Greig’s spell working for DOC as a volunteer trapper – first approached DOC with their idea to develop a cheap, light, resetting trap. “People had made prototypes before, but no one ever got anything produced commercially.

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It seemed like a pretty difficult task but we thought we would take it on,” Barr says.

DOC’s traditional traps are effective but need to be cleared and reset each time an animal is trapped. The trio, who formed Goodnature in 2005, have developed a trap that resets itself 12 times using a compressed carbon dioxide canister. This saves people having to go into the bush to check and reset traps every time they catch a pest, potentially saving millions of dollars.

The other big advantage is weight. At 700 grams, the stoat and rat trap weighs just a tenth of the DOC 250 trap.

“Someone laying trap lines can carry only three of the DOC traps but they could carry 30 of ours,” Barr says.

The trap is fastened low on a tree, and bait lures the animal up into the trap. In the case of the stoat and rat trap – named Henry after New Zealand’s pioneering conservationist Richard Henry – a plate powered by the carbon dioxide crushes the animal’s head and it falls out of the trap to the ground.

The principle of the possum trap is similar but the animal is killed by a bolt that pierces the back of the head and releases air into the skull to ensure an instant kill.

The five years since Goodnature was set up has included a lot of hard slog but Barr says it has been worthwhile. “We get these boosts that keep us going, like successfully developing the only possum trap to achieve a Class A humane standard,” he says. “That was an amazing high that lasted months.”

Under New Zealand guidelines, animals must become

irreversibly unconscious within 30 seconds for a trap to be given a Class A rating, compared with three minutes for a class B rating.

A successful possum trap could make a big difference to conservation and save a lot of money in pest control.

The business should start making a profit with the two traps on the market and the Barr says the trio – whom he describes as being like hyperactive boys – plan to develop new types of traps that can be used for other pests.

“We kind of have these dreams if we can create a commercial rat trap rather than just a biodiversity rat trap and sell that all over the world, then that could hopefully pay for us to give traps for conservation in New Zealand.

“That might be 15 years in the future but that’s kind of the way we look at it.” www.goodnature.co.nz

Online shopping

www.nopests.co.nz Phone 0800 111 466 Rabbits • Possums • Rats • All other pests

A special offer for Forest & Bird readers Wild Encounters Our popular Going Places articles and other nature-themed travel stories from Forest & Bird magazine have been collected together in a handy book edition, Wild Encounters, published by Penguin.

From the rocky shore to dense rainforests, from braided riverbeds to alpine meadows, Wild Encounters is a handy guide to the best place to experience New Zealand’s wildlife and wild places.

Wild Encounters will retail in shops for $40, but Forest & Bird readers can purchase this book for just $35, including post and packaging, with $10 from each copy ordered going towards Forest & Bird’s important conservation work.

That means you will receive this beautifully illustrated guide and get to help nature in New Zealand.

Please send a cheque for $35, or provide your credit card details in the form below and send to: Wild Encounters Forest & Bird PO Box 631 Wellington

Please send me my copy of Wild Encounters for a total price of $35 (price includes post and packaging and my $10 contribution to help Forest & Bird’s conservation projects).

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two of us

In touch with our members A

s key members of Forest & Bird’s membership team, Catherine Burns and Melissa Ho love communicating with our members but their opportunities are fewer these days due to the demands of setting up our new database.

Burns and Ho are busy in our Wellington office adding new features to the database, which will ensure members are better served than ever. “I love talking to members and getting letters, especially the nice ones. They’re so passionate about Forest & Bird, too, so it’s great to talk to them and help them achieve their goals,” Burns says.

“The thing that impresses me is the loyalty of our members. I think about a quarter of our adult members have been in Forest & Bird for at least 25 years, and that’s just incredible.”

The youthful members of the Kiwi Conservation Club also provide inspiration, especially those who ask their friends to make donations to KCC instead of giving them birthday presents. “When I was a kid I wanted presents, so some of these kids are so selfless, it’s just amazing,” Ho says.

Both started working for Forest & Bird in 2008 and have become firm friends, sharing a passion for travel and board games, which often pits them in competition after work and at weekends. “My favourite games are strategy games, Melissa’s are word games. We also play a lot of trivia games, especially travel trivia,” Burns says.

The membership team now numbers four – including administrators Cynthia Monica and Kerri Lukis – reflecting the growing amount and complexity of the work.

The processing of payments from members and

supporters has expanded greatly over the past 2½ years, with more than 20,000 supporters added to the database.

A door-to-door recruitment programme started in May has resulted in about 900 new members being signed up.

“We used to get about 100 new members a month and 100 new KCC members a month. With our best door-todoor week we got nearly 100 Forest & Bird members and some KCC members,” Ho says.

The new database allows members to switch to a monthly payment by credit card or direct debit rather than having to pay an annual subscription in one big hit. The monthly payment will mean less administrative work.

“There’s less paper and less time needed, so there’s more money that goes towards conservation work,” Burns says, adding that regular payments also help Forest & Bird manage its cashflow.

New features in the database will – hopefully by early next year – allow members to easily update their information online and give branch committees access to member information.

It may not be in their job descriptions, but the duo’s formidable computer skills have led them to become unofficial technical advisers to their less savvy colleagues in Wellington. But they admit that occasionally even they can be stumped by an inquiry.

“We do get people ringing in and wanting us to identify a bird they’ve heard in their garden by imitating the sound of the bird down the phone line,” Burns says. n David Brooks

The thing that impresses me is the loyalty of our members. I think about a quarter of our adult members have been in Forest & Bird for at least 25 years, and that’s just incredible.

Catherine Burns and Melissa Ho

Kaikoura, Albatross capital of the world.

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Encounter Kaikoura is a Green Globe certified business

Rangatahi

Kiwi: Dick Veich, Ruru: Ian Gill/DOC

Pupils for penguins A

three-day penguin workshop was as close as it gets to perfection for Timothy Parr, 13. The New Plymouth college student wants to be a marine biologist and has been fascinated by creatures of the deep for more than half his life.

In the July school holidays, Timothy joined nine other year 9 students for the Penguin Experience camp run by 60 Springs, a sustainability education project based at Puke Ariki and run with Taranaki Regional Council and Shell NZ. The students now know an awful lot about little blue penguins, or korora, after working with several experts.

The students learnt about the life cycle of the penguins and about the problems they encounter – losing their coastal habitat, and being killed by dogs, stoats, cats and passing cars on coastal roads. They talked about ways to improve the penguins’ chances of survival, and made penguin nesting boxes.

“I learnt that a lot of penguins are being chased by dogs, and penguin [nesting] boxes are being invaded by cats,” says Timothy, a student at Francis Douglas Memorial College in New Plymouth. “Dogs need to be on leashes at the beach.”

The experts – Oamaru blue penguin colony marine biologist Philippa Agnew, Forest & Bird Places for Penguins project leader Jenny Lynch, Royal Society teacher fellow Mark Meyburg, and Elise Smith and Barbara Hammonds from Nga Motu Marine Reserve Society – shared their knowledge and skills with the students, and were peppered with questions, 60 Springs educator Nathan Hills says.

They examined penguin footprints at Urenui and Wai-iti beaches, and on a night expedition hoped to see the little blues tiptoeing up the beach. They heard squawking but never caught sight of the world’s smallest penguin.

The Penguin Experience students surveyed more than 70 dog owners in New Plymouth to find out about the attitudes and behaviour of people walking dogs. Among their findings: n 70 per cent said it was not OK for their dogs to chase shorebirds. n Half the dog owners lacked confidence in the behaviour of other people’s dogs when walking their own dog. n 60 per cent agreed that dogs should always be on a lead.

The survey results were submitted to New Plymouth District Council as part of proposed dog bylaw changes.

The outcome is better protection for penguins during the

nesting season. Dogs must now be walked on a leash on the 10-kilometre New Plymouth Coastal Walkway. “The students were pleased with the outcome,” Hills says.

The camp was a productive way for keen students to learn. “They got to hang out with experts in a safe, relaxed way. The students said we didn’t seem like teachers,” he says. “A lot live near the beach and they care about shorebirds.”

For Timothy, Penguin Experience’s lessons are ongoing.

He’s shared what he learnt with his family, and took his parents to Urenui and Wai-iti beaches to show them penguin track prints. They wouldn’t have recognised the prints without Timothy’s guidance. He’s also interested in other New Zealand wildlife, and is aware of declining numbers of native birds.

“I felt really good that I was helping penguins stay alive,” Timothy says. “I’m going to the beach tomorrow to look for penguin prints.” n Marina Skinner See http://penguinexperience60springs. blogspot.com/ 1

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1 Wai-iti Beach, in North Taranaki, is home to little blue penguins.

Photo: Neil Ingram 2 Penguin Experience students with penguin nesting boxes. Timothy Parr is in the centre in the black shirt. Photo: 60 Springs

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community

conservation

Shearwaters find new home A

predator-proof fence protecting a newly established Hutton’s shearwater nesting colony on Kaikoura Peninsula was officially celebrated in August. Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson praised an outstanding community effort. “Thanks to Geoff Harrow and the Hutton’s Shearwater Charitable Trust, $220,000 was raised to build a 563-metre predator-proof fence around the new colony. This is a tremendous achievement. It’s great to see the Kaikoura community working together to achieve conservation goals.”

The new colony was established by the Department of Conservation on land donated by the Kaikoura Charitable Trust (Whale Watch Kaikoura), with support from Ngati Kuri and Te Runanga o Kaikoura, Kaikoura District Council and other major sponsors. Forest & Bird Kaikoura branch members have played a significant role, along with the Hutton’s Shearwater Charitable Trust and the Friends of Hutton’s Shearwater.

There are only two colonies left, high in the Seaward Kaikoura Ranges, where Hutton’s shearwaters breed naturally, and for a time the species was thought extinct.

During the 1960s amateur ornithologist and Forest & Bird member Geoff Harrow heard deerstalkers talk of a shearwater colony in the mountains and set off to find it.

For more than 10 years he searched remote sites, climbing as high as 1800 metres, and discovered seven more colonies. Years later, Harrow returned to find wild pigs had decimated all but two of the colonies.

These colonies, protected from marauding animals by massive waterfalls, are high in the Kowhai Stream headwaters in Uerau Nature Reserve and in Shearwater Stream, on Puhi Puhi Peaks Station and protected by a QEII covenant.

With Hutton’s shearwaters now on the nationally endangered list, DOC wanted to establish a third colony near Kaikoura by moving chicks to artificial burrows and feeding them until they fledged. The aim was they would recognise this as their home colony and two or three years later return there to breed.

From 2005 to 2008, volunteers, including Forest & Bird members, helped DOC with the translocation project, setting up the new burrows and feeding and monitoring the 270 chicks moved down from their mountain colony at Kowhai Stream.

The strategy worked. In 2008, the first shearwater returned to its new peninsula home, and more returned the next summer. However, despite intensive pest control on the new colony, these birds remained vulnerable to cats, stoats and other nasties. Harrow rallied the community and founded the Hutton’s Shearwater Charitable Trust to raise funds for a predator-proof fence. By May 2009, $220,000 had been raised and by February this year, the fence was complete.

Trust secretary Jodie Denton says Forest & Bird members had an active interest in the project from the start. “Forest & Bird were very much a large voluntary component of the translocation project. They spent many tireless hours helping DOC staff and other volunteers feed chicks for three years running, in a range of weather conditions on the peninsula.”

The trust is now collaborating with Microsoft Research and Oxford University to attach geo-locators to some birds to learn more about their migration habits. And further protection work is safeguarding the mountain colonies, with a walk-in pig trap at the Kowhai site and intensive stoat trapping at Shearwater Stream. n Kathy Ombler

1 Hutton’s shearwater chicks are getting a better chance of survival at a new fenced colony at Kaikoura. Photo: Phil Bradfield/DOC 2 Adults are vulnerable to predators at their natural nesting sites in the Seaward Kaikoura Ranges.

Photo: Rod Morris

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Nature house restored F

orest & Bird’s Hansel and Gretel house on South Auckland’s eight-hectare Olive Davis Reserve is having a $200,000 makeover. The 1920s Chapman-Taylor-designed house is the size of a wren’s nest – 680 square feet – and once belonged to eccentric horse lover Olive Davis, who bequeathed the house to Forest & Bird in 1979. The house has never had power or a telephone.

“The famous arts and crafts architect Chapman-Taylor was a good friend of hers, so she commissioned the building off him. He really specialised in site-specific pieces that worked in harmony with nature,” Forest & Bird North Island Field Officer Nick Beveridge says.

South Auckland Forest & Bird branch members have worked to give the house a proper storybook setting: a forest of puriri, totara and nikau palms. After the foundation and restoration work on the house is completed after Christmas, members will look at ways in which the house can be used.

“There have been a number of ideas that have been tossed around. It could become an education centre, or a place to propagate ferns. It’s a special house, so we need to find a role for it that really fits with its unique aesthetic and history,” Beveridge says.

Olive Davis House in South Auckland is being restored and could be used as a nature base.

Funding for the renovation came from Manukau City Council, Perry Foundation, Lotteries Environment and Heritage, Stout Trust and the Southern Trust.

Forest & Bird members are offered a special price for a biography of architect ChapmanTaylor, The Life and Times of James Walter Chapman-Taylor, by Judy Siers. Pay $120 (down from $145) and a donation of $20 will go to Forest & Bird. Send your cheque for $125 (which includes courier cost) to Judy Siers, Millwood Heritage Productions, PO Box 12246, Ahuriri, Napier 4144.

Weedbusters restore a forest F

orest & Bird Northern branch member Ina May is a weedbusting dynamo after almost a decade weeding a mature forest reserve in Whangarei. In March 2001, May and two others began weeding Maly Reserve on busy Hatea Drive on the fringe of Whangarei’s business heart. May is the only one of many weeders since then to continue, and she’s not finished yet.

Maly Reserve is part of the first European land purchase in Whangarei, and the 0.4-hectare reserve has been privately owned by the Maly family since 1980. In 1988 the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust considered it suitable for covenanting. However, the trust representative was concerned about the weed infestation and the ageing owners’ ability to remove them. She suggested that Forest & Bird’s Northern branch take on the weed control project.

Moth plants and 750 seed pods were the first to go.

Climbers such as jasmine and honeysuckle hung in curtains high up in mature totara and giant puriri, creating darkness on the forest floor. Over months, then years, May and helpers removed blackberry, gorse, ginger, tradescantia, climbing asparagus, datura, tobacco weed, privet, loquat and queenof-the-night. Car and van-loads went to the landfill, and 25 skips that the district council supplied for a while. Resprouting stumps were poisoned, and some dug out.

It took seven years to weed the covenanted area once over, at the same time re-weeding some areas. May worked

alone much of the time with her trusty hand-saw and hand tools, with only visiting kukupa (kereru) for company.

Today, birds feed and nest in the many native trees and shrubs. Long-suppressed pohutukawa are flowering again. There are very old totara, puriri, kohekohe, karaka and a mangeao. Planted trees include kauri, houhere, miro, pukatea, taraire and coprosma. The forest floor is alive with seedlings and ferns but weeds are rare. This is all due to the vigilance and care from May and, more recently, Lesley Jewell, who have pushed the weeding beyond the reserve boundaries to discourage new invaders.

This year their efforts earned them a Northland Weedbusting Award from the Department of Conservation, Northland Regional Council and NZ Landcare Trust.

May has kept a photographic and written journal throughout the project, cataloguing all the plants in the reserve. Looking ahead, there’s a need for regular weeders to keep this oasis green. n Diane Lee

Ina May, right, with willing worker Lesley Jewell under one of the giant puriri on the edge of Maly Reserve.

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community

conservation

People for penguins win awards T

hree years of hard work by Forest & Bird’s Wellington branch to help protect the little blue penguins nesting around the city’s coastline has been recognised in community awards.

The branch’s Places for Penguins team topped the environment and heritage section and took out the supreme award at the Wellington city section of the Wellington Airport Regional Community Awards.

“Over 200 volunteers have been involved in the project this year and it’s great to have their efforts rewarded and to celebrate our successes,” says Places for Penguins Coordinator Jenny Lynch, who attended the awards ceremony on August 24. “The volunteer work isn’t always glamorous, removing dead rats from traps in the height of summer or tackling the penguins’ distinct aroma, but the aims of the project appeal to people and we have volunteers aged 12 to 65 willing to get their hands dirty and help out.

“Without our fantastic volunteers and the help of Greater Wellington Regional Council and the Wellington Zoo, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve half as much

as we have so far. It’s definitely a case of many hands make light work.”

The Places for Penguins programme began in 2007 to stop the decline in numbers of little blue penguins, the smallest species of the flightless marine bird in the world.

Volunteers have created safe nesting sites, planting 3000 plants this year with the help of the regional council’s Take Care programme to restore coastal habitat at Tarakena Bay on Wellington’s South Coast.

With assistance from Wellington Zoo and local schools, more than 100 new wooden nest boxes were installed in areas safe from cars ahead of this year’s nesting season.

Wellington Forest & Bird volunteers have also helped control predators, such as stoats, through trapping and maintaining bait stations at Tarakena Bay and in neighbouring Rangitatau Reserve.

Education is also an important part of the programme, ensuring the local community understands penguin threats, including dogs, cars and marine pollution.

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1 From left, former Wellington mayor Kerry Prendergast, Places for Penguins volunteers Ryan McMaster, Joakim Liman and co-ordinator Jenny Lynch, and Community Trust of Wellington chair Dick Fernyhough at the community awards. Photo: Justine Hall/Wellington City Council.

2 Little blue penguin. Photo: Craig McKenzie

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Great leap forward F

orest & Bird South Auckland branch chair Dene Andre has designed a fish ladder to help native fish overcome manmade barriers to getting upstream and downstream.

His invention has been put to work near the Whangaparoa Pensinsula, north of Auckland.

“Fish need to travel to different parts of the river for a number of reasons. Some go upstream or downstream to breed, or forage for seasonal food. Others head upstream to cool off – many of our fish suffer from heat stress in our lowland streams where temperatures can reach the mid-20s.

This ladder means they can carry out their natural life cycle, and escape heat or pollution,” he says.

The baffled ladder – which contains a series of tiered pools – was a joint effort between Andre, retired hydraulic engineer Nick Rogers and Rodney District Council stormwater engineer Chris Stone. It was initiated by Forest & Bird’s Hibiscus Coast branch, and it will help redfin bullies, long and shortfin eels and banded kokopu mount the threemetre wall in Stanmore Stream.

“Some banded kokopu may be able to mount this wall when they’re young because they’ve been known to hurdle seemingly impregnable structures, including waterfalls and vertical walls. Their young are fitted with fins that have incredible suction power, so they’re able to scale structures many times their height,” Andre says.

“Often they gather at the foot of such structures waiting for the best opportunity to climb and this puts them at great risk of predation. Then there are those that don’t make it to

Forest & Bird’s Hibiscus Coast branch initiated a fish ladder to help fish get up and down Stanmore Stream, north of Auckland.

the top and fall and die. So they have a much higher survival rate with a proper fish pass. And, of course, adults can’t climb at all so they too need help to get over barriers.”

New Zealand freshwater fish have leather skins and are slimy (whereas most other fish have scales that act as protective body armour), so our fish passages need to have rounded edges to prevent injury. On top of this, our fish have a unique way of climbing and swimming, so they need tailormade fish ladders.

Andre says although installing fish passages like this is cause for celebration, there are many more barriers within the Stanmore catchment area, and throughout our lowland streams.

“In this case, the Hibiscus coast branch of Forest & Bird took the initiative to have me evaluate the streams for fish passage and riparian planting needs. Often councils won’t do anything off their own bat – especially if their purse strings are being pulled tight,” he says.

Bushy Park on new course W

hanganui’s Bushy Park trust board has set up a working party to set a new direction for the sanctuary.

The Bushy Park Futures Working Party is reviewing governance and management, and developing a long-term strategic plan.

“Bushy Park is a much-loved regional asset, with saddlebacks and North Island robins,” working party chair Richard Thompson says. “Its facilities, including the $1 million predator excluder fence, have been established with the help of local and national funders and an awe-inspiring level of voluntary work.”

The working party is creating a sustainable future for the Forest & Bird-owned park and building on the strong foundations laid down over decades. “We needed to rethink the park’s future after the loss of the Ministry of Education-funded Learning Outside the Classroom programme last year and high costs that forced the park to end the kiwi crèche,” Thompson says.

“We have many exciting ideas to improve Bushy Park, including developing a strong volunteer group to help manage the reserve.”

Members of the working party include senior managers from Horizons Regional Council, the Department of Conservation’s Wanganui office and Forest & Bird’s national leaders. Involvement of the organisations at this level demonstrates the regional significance of the park and provides a huge vote of confidence in its future.

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1 A North Island robin at Bushy Park. Photo: Aalbert Rebergen 2 Bushy Park’s Ratanui, believed to be the largest rata. Photo: Aalbert Rebergen

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About 120 mostly excellent colour photos (a few published before) illustrate the book, and some of the hundreds of kakapo minders may find themselves in this book, pictured or by name.

I am no great fan of naming birds (I’m more a “red over green, orange over yellow” person) but Appendix One lists all 200 named kakapo and gives a short life history for each of them. It’s a fascinating read.

Kakapo Rescue comes from the United States. Photographer (and author) Nic Bishop published several well-known New Zealand natural history books in the 1990s. Now based in the US, he has again provided us with a great selection of photos for this latest publication, aimed at older children.

Bishop and Sy Montgomery spent 10 days on Codfish Island (Whenua Hou) in 2008. Their book shows beautiful kakapo, pristine forest habitat and the people who work with the birds – the kakapo rangers, scientists and minders/volunteers. With a single excellent photographer, this book has a more consistent visual quality than Ballance’s.

Everyone with an interest in kakapo will find all they’ve ever wanted to know about our flightless night parrot in these two books – and they may even spot a picture of themselves!

Maori and the Environment: Kaitiaki

book Kakapo have sturdy legs and strong feet, and an endearing habit of freezing when they feel threatened. Photo: Malcolm Rutherford

Kakapo: Rescued from the Brink of Extinction

By Alison Ballance Craig Potton Publishing, $49.99

Kakapo Rescue: Saving the world’s strangest parrot

By Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop Houghton Mifflin, $24.95 Reviewed by Aalbert Rebergen The kakapo has received lots of attention in the past decade or so, which is hardly surprising. It’s a stunningly beautiful bird and its story of survival despite the odds speaks to everybody’s imagination.

When Douglas Adams researched his book Last Chance to See in 1989, he compared the kakapo with the British motorbike industry: “It had things its own way for so long that it simply became eccentric.” Adams’ co-author, Mark Carwardine, who re-did the Last Chance to See book in 2009 (with Stephen Fry), and who famously got his hair “done over” in front of the camera by Sirocco, has written the introduction to Alison Ballance’s detailed book.

The book covers many aspects of kakapo history. Current management, including the clever, high-tech and labourintensive approach, has caused the (relatively) spectacular turnaround in kakapo fortunes over the past 15 or so years.

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Edited by Rachael Selby, Paataka Moore and Malcolm Mulholland Huia Publishers, $55 Reviewed by Debs Martin With noted Maori academics such as Margaret Mutu, Angeline Greensill, Mason Durie and others, Maori and the Environment: Kaitiaki promised to be an informative and challenging read for people, like myself, embedded in a western conservation ethic.

With 19 essays covering topics including Tuhoe’s evolving relationship with the environment, the parlous state of waterbodies in the Manawatu and Horowhenua, and the intricacies of the 1080 debates, this 359-page paperback traverses territories not often visited by Pakeha readers of conservation.

It is worth it. Although academic, it is easily accessible.

While gaining a greater appreciation of how kaitiakitanga can be expressed at whanau, hapu and iwi levels, I was humbled by those who had fought for decades to protect streams and wetlands from a culture of industrial pollution. Malcolm Mullholland’s The Death of the Manawatu River is a riveting history of failures to protect this important source of mahinga kai – food gathering – from sewage and dairy discharges.

Authors don’t investigate issues at a superficial level. A critical chapter by Jessica Hutchings and Angeline Greensill, explores the path of colonialism and the results of neoliberalism and free trade, which threaten Maori capacities to uphold their obligations of kaitiakitanga (loosely translated as guardianship). These arguments about the failures of legislation to protect our natural environment echo throughout the book, and will draw a knowing nod from those who have seen death by a thousand cuts under current law.

After many chapters outlining the destruction of the coast, wetlands, forests and rivers, it becomes even more apparent that we, as Forest & Bird, can build and strengthen our relationships with iwi, having conversations about our values, which though culturally different, share a common goal – restoration of our indigenous biodiversity.

The relationship Maori have with their natural environment permeates the pages. “Toituu te whenua, whatungarongaro te taangata” (The land remains, but the people pass on).

Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border

By Gavin McLean and Tim Shoebridge Otago University Press, $45 Reviewed by Marina Skinner Until Polynesians reached a couple of islands at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean about 800 years ago, the only newcomers that got past New Zealand borders were the odd wind-blown bird, insect and seed. The impact of kiore and kuri (and people) on New Zealand’s biodiversity was small compared with what Europeans unleashed a few centuries later.

It’s at this point that Quarantine picks up the story, tracing the efforts to stop the entry of unwanted plants, animals and diseases. In the 19th century, the focus was on diseases that affected humans, livestock and crops. Sick ship passengers were quarantined in dismal accommodation on offshore islands until they died or recovered, and infested or diseased produce was fumigated in a hit and miss manner in port sheds. Nobody worried too much about the weeds and even reptiles that arrived in ship ballast dumped on land and at sea.

It’s no wonder that New Zealand and our native wildlife have been overrun with rats. Before World War II, the average coal-burning ship deratted at Wellington offered up 500-600 corpses, with a record 873 on one ship. Unfortunately, not all rats were so efficiently stopped from leaving their ships.

The aviation age tossed up new challenges, with pests and diseases less likely to die on short flights than during long sea voyages. From 1956 aircraft from overseas were sprayed with pyrethrum and DDT – after passengers got off.

For the past 30 years, the idea of quarantine to protect agriculture has broadened into biosecurity and the protection of New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals.

Quarantine is a very readable history that draws together science, politics, the economy and society. Fascinating short panels focus on more recent biosecurity topics such as didymo, the rabbit calicivirus release, fruit fly and the trade in endangered animals.

Classic Tramping in New Zealand

By Shaun Barnett and Rob Brown Craig Potton Publishing, $39.99 Reviewed by Quentin Duthie

The new edition updates the 1999 original, adding tramps in the underappreciated Ruahine Range and the West Coast’s vast Hokitika catchment. This edition is enhanced by new photos (not just their own) and the likeable Bird’s Eye maps from Geographx. I am surprised that the authors didn’t add the Pyke-Big Bay loop on to the Hollyford route – without it the tramp is tame compared with the others.

The authors agonise with mixed feelings about the impact of an attractive guidebook in increasing the popularity – to which the 1999 edition has contributed – of places treasured for their fragility and quietness. To my mind this is inevitable, generally manageable on classic tramping routes, and somewhat mitigated by the countless variations possible on every route described.

None of my trips to the places described – my wanderings have included all but one tramp – have actually followed the authors’ route. Nonetheless, the text and images ring true, restoring memories and inspiring return visits in a way my own patchy photo and notebook records do not. Moreover, the skeletons of geographical detail are fleshed out with personal stories, natural and human history, and a pervasive – but not preachy – presentation of the classic Kiwi tradition of recreational tramping.

Classic Tramping celebrates the beauty that is readily found in the New Zealand mountains.

The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme

By Geoff Bertram and Simon Terry Bridget Williams Books, $39.99 Reviewed by Quentin Duthie Most climate change books are depressing – climate change is a gargantuan global challenge. The challenge described in this book is even more depressing because it was created by two governments in just two years and may mean a billion dollar bill very soon that we could have avoided.

The Carbon Challenge, in essense, describes the ins and outs of the Emissions Trading Scheme created by Labour in 2008 and significantly altered by National in 2009. It is a story of the perversion of an economic instrument – cap-andtrade, which should in theory provide an incentive for efficient reduction of New Zealand’s emissions – to the point that it is hopelessly compromised. The ETS, the authors argue, will cause a massive transfer of wealth from consumers and future taxpayers (who can do least to avoid it) but only marginally reduce emissions.

The book is not pretty nor easy bed-time reading, but it tells a story that this country will come to learn the hard way in years to come. It is thoroughly researched, and the authors have managed to make complex economics relatively understandable, most of the time.

However, it’s not all depressing. Geoff Bertram and Simon Terry argue that New Zealand has considerable options to reduce emissions, and that it is only a matter of time before we’re forced to. Because the ETS cannot help us (indeed it causes delay and obligations that will hinder), we will need new economic tools and political direction to lead us to a lowcarbon economy. We won’t have a choice.

Two of New Zealand’s top wilderness photographers have produced a quality revision of a now-classic coffee-table guidebook They cleverly provide sufficient logistical information to guide initial trip planning accompanied by evocative prose and beautiful images to inspire the armchair tramper.

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Discover your own backyard

Join the Kiwi Conservation Club Kiwi kids learning about and exploring New Zealand’s wild life and wild places.

Get five issues of our magazine Wild Things from just $19 a year.

Join us at www.kcc.org.nz

If you love nature Join Us. Your support will make a difference Be part of 100,000 voices for New Zealand’s natural environment.

In addition to receiving this world class quarterly conservation magazine and access to our 9 lodges, your support will help Forest & Bird continue to advocate for increased protection of our wild places and treasured native plants and animals. It will help our nationwide branch network to continue to protect and restore important areas close to you, providing ecosystems for native species and wonderful places for you to explore. As an independent, not-for-profit organisation, we need your support to continue to give nature a voice.

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Forest & Bird

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Advertise to Forest & Bird readers here 1

Biodiversity the winner F

orest & Bird partnered with the Department of Conservation, UNESCO and NIWA to promote the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity through a photo competition. The overall winner was Mandy Hague of Whakatane for her shot of a white-faced heron feeding at a salt marsh in Whakatane. Mandy, an artist, most days spends an hour looking at the wildlife on the marsh.

“Most people don’t stop to look, but it’s a wonderful place and it’s so close to town,” she says. She used to just take photos as references for her art but now photography is a big part of her life.

One of the stars of the night was Merryn Giblin,10, a Kiwi Conservation Club member of Wellington. Merryn, who took the photos when she was aged nine, won prizes in two categories. She took a photo of two ducks taking off from water and a close-up of a piwakawaka.

She took both photos on the same day on Mana Island, near Wellington.

Merryn’s dad, Ross, is a photographer for Wellington’s Dominion Post, but she has no plans to become a professional photographer. Instead, she wants to work with kakapo on Codfish Island.

Photographers Craig Potton, Kim Westerskov and Norman Heke judged the 350 entries. The winners were announced on 20 September at Zealandia (Karori Sanctuary) in Wellington, where the photos are on display until 26 November. Or see www.doc.govt.nz

1 Overall winner – a white-faced heron catching shrimp. Photo: Mandy Hague 2 Youth winner – a piwakawaka, or fantail. Photo: Merryn Giblin 3 Merryn Giblin at the awards presentation.

2

Please contact Vanessa Clegg Or PHONE 0275 420 337 EMAIL vanclegg@xtra.co.nz

Bush & Beyond Guided Walks

The Original Kahurangi Guides From Comfortable Lodge stay to Off track wilderness backpacking.

Including: Heaphy and Cobb Valley and much more!

Conservation values PO Box 376, Motueka 7143 T/F: 03 528 9054 E: info@bushandbeyond.co.nz

www.bushandbeyond.co.nz

New Zealand Birdsong Clock

3

Mature and regenerating native bush (2 acres–.8 ha) in Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area, bordering Regional Park, near Scenic Drive. Small modern cottage (1987) with good access.

45 minutes from Auckland City.

Ph (09) 845 1561. email lewisoj@xtra.co.nz

EXCITING 2011 ESCORTED TOURS Borneo Wildlife Expedition North Vietnam China Walking Tour

Active Travel Co. 0800 326 228

www.activetravelco.com

Go on....

TAKE A WALK

12 NZ bird calls

Special Forest&Bird reader price $10 plus $3 p&p from www. accessiblewalks.co.nz or anna-j@ihug.co.nz

Auto off in the dark

Light wood surround with glass face 3xAAA batteries Price $89 inc GST and Postage Send cheque and delivery details to Mercury Pots Plus PO Box 72042 Papakura 2244, Auckland Tel 09 298 0955 Fax 09 298 0950 email: mercurypots@xtra.co.nz

Banks Peninsula Track www.bankstrack.co.nz

| Forest & Bird

FOR A Bush Retreat SALE to nurture

New Improved, now in stock

During October, November and December there is a wonderful opportunity to observe the activity of the largest colony of little blue penguins on the mainland. The interpretive talk is one of the highlights of your experience at Pohatu, Flea Bay.

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Karen Condon PHONE 0275 420 338 EMAIL mack.cons@xtra.co.nz

Southern Scenic Reserve Gore Camping Dolamore Park Stay enjoy 95ha Native Croydon Bush in Hokonui ranges. Experience moreporks owls, pigeons, glow-worms etc. Walks 30m/4hr on tracks, exotic gardens, streams, ponds. Recreational playground. Mt bike track & golf nearby. Biodiversity rich rural location, hub pathway to regional tourist hot spots. Kitchen/barbeques rate of $6 rate ea. Gore Southland Capital Brown Trout Fishing NZ www.gorenz.com

Walk the West of Ireland

Peru Galapagos Adventure 24 days of Wildlife, Inca ruins and stunning scenery Departs May 25th 2011

“immerse yourself in the landscape, culture, cuisine & character of Ireland

Fully escorted small group walking tours June and July 2011 Rachel Ryan 03 545 1071 www.walkthewestofireland.com

CALL SILVANA 0800 804 737 sil@southernexposuretours.co.nz www.southernexposuretours.co.nz

OKARITO COTTAGE

South America

Well appointed cottage. Sleeps 3 but room for more in the attic.

Close to West Coast beach, bush walks and lagoon. Southern Alps form a backdrop and Franz Josef approx.

30 kilometres on tarsealed road.

Cost $70 PER FAMILY Extra Adults $10 per night Further enquiries contact Elspeth Scott, Okarito 03-753-4058 Otorohanga 07 873 6995 email: ElspethScott@xtra.co.nz

www.latinlink.co.nz

BIORESEARCHES

Pohatu Penguins & Marine Reserve Banks Peninsula Scenic nature tours with local volunteers conserving Banks Peninsula’s biodiversity.

• Coastal Retreat • Sea Kayaking www.pohatu.co.nz email: tours@pohatu.co.nz phone: 03 304 8600

European Mountain Treks & Tours arranged by the Benecke Family since 1991 2011 Tours: 20th Anniversary Cycle Tour Germany, Italy & Austria

HIGH PLACES mountain travel www.highplaces.co.nz 0800 305 306 Cerro Fitzroy Patagonia

Antique maps of NZ and the rest of the World Bird and botanical prints Hand coloured antique prints

Private trips for all ages & both genders also available

TREKS FOR WOMEN 40+YEARS

Ph: 06 356 7043 E: ann@trekking4women.co.nz W: www.trekking4women.co.nz

Property has 2 streams, one 130m high peak with views of Kaitoke beach and valley. Two boundaries back onto 100’s of hectares of D.O.C. reserve.

Approximately 8 hectares of virgin forest with numerous gigantic Puriri, remaining 8 hectares old re-growth Kanuka and Manuka. Has good northfacing house site, uncleared, 200m from a newly refurbished private road.

Shops, airport, doctors, beach, library, art gallery and cafe all 5 minutes drive.

Also on property is a 2 storey ply and batten hut with a colourful history. Hut has good water supply and is a 10 minute walk to end of Kaitoke Lane wth primary school and playcentre.

Sold with legal easement for access on private road. First time on market for 10 years. Rates $467.23 p.a.

See Trademe listing #282787501 for photos or phone 027 270 7422

WE SHIP WORLDWIDE

White Heron Sanctuary Tours

Come with us, RAINFOREST, NATURE and JETBOATING TOURS, all year round. Viewing of nesting colony from September to March. Ph. 0800 52 34 56

www.whiteherontours.co.nz

Explore the naturally & culturally rich waters of the Bay of Islands, experienced local guide, all levels catered for.

Alpine walking tour

Turkey - Land of Legends History, walks and Gulet cruise

www.eurotreks.co.nz

NZ$500 + US$1,250 Departing March 11 & Sept 11

16 Hectares (40 acres) $420,000 ono

Highlights of the Alps

Contact Katrina P.O. Box 2609, Wakatipu 9349 info@eurotreks.co.nz | Ph: 03 4424455

Vietnam, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Egypt, Oman, New Zealand Mt Everest Base Camp – 19 days

Bush Block Great Barrier Island

ESTABLISHED 1972

bioresearches@bioresearches.co.nz www.bioresearches.co.nz P.O Box 2828 Auckland PH: AUCKLAND 379 9417 Fax (09) 307 6409

Greencane toilet paper is made from re-using fibrous residue, leftover when sugarcane is crushed to extract sugar, making it 100% eco-friendly and fully biodegradable.

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Small Groups + Independent travellers CALL NOW FOR FREE 2011 BROCHURE Latin Link Adventure The South American Specialists 0800 528 465 / info@latinlink.co.nz

CONSULTING BIOLOGISTS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS Environmental Impact Studies Surveys of Marine, Freshwater & Terrestrial Habitats Pollution Investigations Resource Consent procedures Archaeological; Historic Places Appraisal

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Booking essential Contact Adriana 027 290 2180 info@bayofislandskayaking.co.nz www.bayofislandskayaking.co.nz

Kapiti Island Alive

Nature & Heritage Tours & Kapiti Nature Lodge Visit Kapiti Island Nature Lodge and experience …….

• One of NZ’s BEST natural attractions • Guided bush walks • Great meals and hospitality • Unsurpassed NZ native birdlife • The most reliable wild Kiwi spotting opportunity • Day tours and overnight stay options available

Experience the best of natural New Zealand For bookings/enquiries: Ph: 021 126 7525 or 06 362 6606

Email: minnie@kapitiislandalive.co.nz www.kapitiislandalive.co.nz

Forest & Bird

| 67

2010 index A

Albatrosses May 68, Aug 12 Antarctica May 38 Arapawa Island May 36 Ark in the Park Feb 52 Australia Feb 50

B

Backyard conservation Aug 24, Nov 28 Bain, Helen Feb 7, Aug 61 Ballance, Peter Feb 59 Bats May 58, Aug 27 Beever, Ross Aug 57 Bellamy, David Feb 48 Bellbirds Aug 56 Best Fish Guide Aug 40 Bindon, Chris Aug 58 Binoculars Feb 57 Biodiversity Aug 19, Nov 49, 66 BirdLife Feb 10, Aug 10, Nov 9 Black stilts Feb 27 Blue Wellington May 60 Braggins, Percy Feb 59 Bryant, Beth and Tony Aug 60 Burns, Catherine Nov 54 Bushy Park Nov 59 Butcher, Stan Aug 54 Butterflies Aug 24

C

Cameron, Anna May 46 Canterbury Aug 11, 55, Nov 11 Carbon farming Nov 32 Chatham Islands Aug 52 Cleverdon, Steve Nov 11 Conservation estate Feb 6, Aug 36, 38, Nov 34 Cook Islands Feb 56 Cook’s petrels Nov 16

D

DOC Feb 6 Dolphins Nov 14

E

Eels, Aug 51

F

Facebook Aug 11 Fiordland Feb 40 Fishing Aug 40, Nov 8 Fish ladder Nov 59 Flax Nov 44 Forest & Bird AGM Aug 62 Forest & Bird annual report Aug 9 Forest & Bird Executive Aug 62 Forest & Bird history Nov 34 Forestry Feb 30 Future of conservation Nov 34

G

Gannet, May 19 Garden Bird Survey May 10, 33 Geckos Aug 68 Godwit Feb 68 Golden Spade Aug 60

H

Hay, Tom Aug 59 Hayes, Margaret May 59 Henderson Island, May 64, Aug 11 Hill, Graeme Aug 24 Ho, Melissa Nov 54 Honda Aug 10, Nov 12

68

| Forest & Bird

I

Irrigation Aug 6

J

Jewell, Lesley Nov 57 JS Watson Trust May 13

K

Kaimai Mamaku Feb 60, Aug 57 Kaipara Aug 60 Kaka May 26, Nov 24 Kakapo Feb 40 Kakerori Feb 56 Kanuka Aug 46 Katipo Feb 19 Kauri dieback Feb 52 Kea Nov 11 Kent, Dave Aug 58 Kearns, Michael May 61 Kermadec Islands Feb 44, Nov 20 Kiwi Feb 30, May 9, Aug 43 Knobbled weevil Nov 12 Knowles, Kirstie Feb 62 Kokako Feb 52

L

Land and Water Forum Nov 14 Logan, Steve Aug 42 London forest Feb 38 Lord Howe Island May 54

M

Mackenzie Country Feb 27, May 6, 7, Aug 22, Nov 11, 32 Maloney, Andy Aug 11, Nov 11 Manuka Aug 46 Manganuiateao River Feb 11 Marine BioBlitz May 11 Marine reserves Feb 8 Marlborough Sounds May 36 Mathers, Bethany Feb 54 May, Ina Nov 57 Mining Feb 12, May14, Aug 9, 15, 28 Mokihinui River Aug 8, Nov 5, 10 Morgan, Isabel Aug 59 Morris, Jim Nov 32

N

Nettles, Aug 24 Ngati Whare Feb 48 Northland Feb 30, May 42

O

Olive Davis Reserve Nov 57 Orsulich, Eddie Aug 59 Otira May 25

P

Pacific Feb 56, Nov 46 Paparoa National Park Aug 28 Parr, Timothy Nov 55 Penguins May 61, Nov 55, 58 Peripatus Nov 41 Pestbusters Aug 60 Pests Feb 40, May 22, 64, Aug 32, Nov 24, 46, 52 Photo competitions Feb 61, May 28, Nov 66 Piha Aug 44 Planting Feb 9, Aug 10 Pohutukawa May 42 Pollen Island Feb 58 Powelliphanta snails Feb 13, Aug 14 Puketi Aug 32

R

Ragworms Aug 50 Reel Earth Film Festival May 12 Resetting trap Nov 52 Robinson, Chelsea May 53 Ross Sea, May 38 Ruapehu lodge Feb 59, May 12, Aug 11, Nov 42 Ryder, Colin Aug 58

S

Saul, Ed Feb 56 Seabirds Feb 44, Nov 46 Sea lions Feb 9, Aug 12 Shags May 50 Sinbad Gully Feb 40 Skinks Nov 28 Stockton mine Aug 15 Sub-Antarctic islands Feb 23 Swamp maire Feb 60

T

Tararua Ranges May 26 Tasmania Nov 9 Tata Beach May 50 Teen Greens Feb 54 Te Puke mine May 16 Thompson, Isobel May 17 Toleman, Erika May 46 Topliff, John Aug 59 Trade Me May 48, Nov 14 Tuatara May 48 Tui Aug 52

V

Valder conservation grants Aug 9 Vanuatu Feb 63, May 12, Nov 13

W

Wairarapa coast Feb 18 Waitutu Forest Nov 24 Walking group Nov 38 Waru, Morgan Aug 55 Water threats May 8, Aug 6, 11, 55, Nov 14 Wells, Maiya and Sophia Aug 12 West Coast Nov 8 Wetlands Nov 8 Whales Feb 22 Whirinaki Feb 48 Wild rivers Feb 61, May 8, 28, Nov 10 Wilding pines Feb 29

branch directory

Upper North Island Central Auckland Branch: Chairperson, Anne Fenn; Secretary, Isabel Still, PO Box 1118, Shortland Street, Auckland 1140.

Tel: (09) 528-3986.

Far North Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Michael Winch, 66 Rarere Terrace, Kerikeri 0230. Tel: (09) 401-7401.

Franklin Branch: Chairperson, Keith Gardner, Secretary, Vacant, 5 Stembridge Avenue, Pukekohe 2120. Tel: (09) 238-9928 Hauraki Islands Branch: Chairperson, Brian Griffiths; Secretary, Sue Fitchett, 125 The Strand, Onetangi, Waiheke Island 1081.

Tel: (09) 372-7600.

Hibiscus Coast Branch: Chairperson, Pauline Smith; Secretary, Katie Lucas, PO Box 310, Orewa 0946. Tel: (09) 427-5186.

Kaipara Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Vacant; Deputy Chairperson, Dave Allen, PO Box 187, Helensville 0840. Tel: (09) 411-8314 Mercury Bay Branch: Chairperson, Eve McCarthy; Secretary, Vanessa Ford PO Box 205, Whitianga 3542, Tel: (07) 866-4355.

Mid North Branch: Chairperson, Warwick Massey; Secretary, Raewyn Morrison, PO Box 552, Warkworth 0941. Tel: (09) 422-9123.

North Shore Branch: Chairperson, Alan Emmerson; Secretary, Jocelyn Sanders, PO Box 33873, Takapuna, North Shore City 0740.

Tel: (09) 479-2107.

Northern Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Beverly Woods, PO Box 1375, Whangarei 0140. Tel: (09) 432-7122.

South Auckland Branch: Chairperson, Dene Andre; Secretary, Brian Gidley, PO Box 23602, Hunters Corner, Manukau 2155.

Tel: (09) 278-0185.

Thames-Hauraki Branch: Chairperson, Marcia Sowman; Secretary, Hazel Genner, PO Box 312, Thames 3540. Tel: (07) 868-9057.

Upper Coromandel Branch: Chairperson, Tina Morgan; Secretary, Vacant, PO Box 108, Coromandel 3543. Tel. (07) 866-6720.

Waitakere Branch: Chairperson, John Staniland; Secretary, Janie Vaughan, PO Box 60655, Titirangi, Waitakere 0642. Tel: (09) 817-9262.

Central North Island Eastern Bay of Plenty Branch: Chairperson, Mark Fort; Secretary, Lesley Swindells, 130A King Street, Whakatane 3120. Tel: (07) 307-0846.

Gisborne Branch: Chairperson, Grant Vincent; Secretary, Wendy McLean, 1 Dominey Street, Inner Kaiti, Gisborne 4010. Tel: (06) 868-8236.

lodge accommodation

Arethusa Cottage An ideal place from which to explore the Far North. Near Pukenui in wetland reserve. 6 bunks, fully equipped kitchen, separate bathroom outside. For information and bookings, contact: John Dawn, Doves Bay Road, RD1, Kerikeri.

Tel: (09) 407-8658. Email: johnfd@xnet.co.nz.

Tai Haruru Lodge, Piha, West Auckland A seaside haven set in a large sheltered garden on the rugged West Coast, 38km on sealed roads from central Auckland. Close to store, bush reserves and tracks in the beautiful Waitakere Ranges. Sleeps up to 6 in 1 dble brm, 1 brm and lounge, Lounge has wood burner, dining area and kitchen. Self-contained unit has 4 single beds. Bring food, linen and fuel for fire and BBQ. Off peak rates apply. Booking: Jean and Peter King, 10 La Trobe Track, Karekare, Waitakere City. Tel: (09) 812 8064. Email: hop0018@slingshot.co.nz

Waiheke Island Cottage Located next to our 49ha Wildlife Reserve, 10 mins walk to Onetangi Beach, general stores etc. Sleeps up to 8 in two bedrooms. Lounge, well-equipped kitchen, separate toilet, bathroom, shower, laundry. Pillows, blankets provided. No pets. Ferries 35 minutes from Auckland. Enquiries with stamped addressed envelope to: Robin Griffiths, 125 The Strand, Onetangi, Waiheke Island. Tel: (09) 372-7662.

Rotorua Branch: Chairperson, Chair rotates among committee members; Secretaries, Margaret Dick, Tel: (07) 357-2024 or Delight Gartlein Tel: (07) 357-2575. PO Box 1489, Rotorua 3040.

South Waikato Branch: Chairperson, Anne Groos; Secretary, Jack Groos, 37 Waianawa Place, Tokoroa 3420. Tel: (07) 886-7456.

Taupo Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Vacant, PO Box 1105, Taupo 3351.

Tauranga Branch: Chairperson, David Dowrick; Secretary, Liz Cole, PO Box 15638, Tauranga 3144. Tel: (07) 577-6412.

Upper Hutt Branch: Chairperson, Barry Wards; Secretary, Fred Fowler, PO Box 40875, Upper Hutt 5140. Tel: (04) 569-7187.

Wairarapa Branch: Chairperson, Geoff Doring; Secretary, Roger Greenslade, PO Box 163, Masterton 5840. Tel: (06) 377-5255.

Wanganui Branch: Chairperson, Esther Williams; Secretary, Ray Hutchison, PO Box 4229, Wellington Branch: Chairperson, Peter Hunt; Secretary, Janet Coburn, PO Box 4183, Wellington 6140. Tel: (04) 971-8200.

South Island

Te Puke Branch: Chairperson Cathy Reid; Secretary, Bev Nairn, PO Box 237, Te Puke 3153.

Tel: (07) 533-4247

Ashburton Branch: Chairperson, Edith Smith; Secretary, Val Clemens, PO Box 460, Ashburton 7740. Tel: (03) 308-5620.

Waihi Section: Chairperson, Ian Bradshaw; Secretary, Krishna Buckman, 17 Reservoir Road, Waihi 3610. Tel: (07) 863-8455.

Central Otago-Lakes Branch: Chairperson, Mark Ayre; Secretary, Denise Bruns, 4 Stonebrook Drive, Wanaka 9305. Tel: (03) 443-5462.

Waikato Branch: Chairperson, Philip Hart; Secretary, Jim Macdiarmid, PO Box 11092, Hillcrest, Hamilton 3251. Tel: (07) 849-3438.

Dunedin Branch: Chairperson, Janet Ledingham; Secretary, Mark Hanger, PO Box 5793, Moray Place, Dunedin 9058. Tel: (03) 489-3233.

Lower North Island

Golden Bay Branch: Chairperson, Jenny Treloar; Secretary, Jo-Anne Vaughan, 20 Hiawatha Lane, Takaka 7110. Tel: (03) 525-6031.

Central Hawkes Bay Branch: Chairperson, Dan Elderkamp; Secretary, Barrie & Judith Bayliss, PO Box 189, Waipukurau 4242. Tel: (06) 858-8765.

Hastings-Havelock North Branch: Chairperson, Ian Noble; Secretary, Lorna Templeton, 11/15 Devonshire Place, Taradale, Napier 4112.

Tel: (06) 845-4155.

Horowhenua Branch: Chairperson, Debbie Waldin; Secretary, Belinda McLean, 47 Te Manuao Road, Otaki 5512. Tel: (06) 364-5573.

Kapiti-Mana Branch: Chairperson, Tony Ward; Secretary, John McLachlan, 78 Langdale Avenue, Paraparaumu 5032. Tel: (04) 904-0027.

Lower Hutt Branch: Chairperson, Russell Bell; Secretary, Stan Butcher, PO Box 31194, Lower Hutt 5040. Tel: (04) 567-7271.

Manawatu Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Nina Mercer, PO Box 961, Palmerston North Central, Palmerston North 4440.

Tel: (06) 355-0496.

Napier Branch: Chairperson, Neil Eagles; Secretary, Barbara McPherson 6 Alamein Crescent, Onekawa, Napier 4110. Tel: (06) 843-3625.

North Taranaki Branch: Chairperson, Carolyn Brough; Secretary, Murray Duke, PO Box 1029, Taranaki Mail Centre, New Plymouth 4340.

Tel: (06) 751-2759.

Rangitikei Branch: Chairperson, Diana Stewart; Secretary, Dot Mattocks, 35 Tutaenui Road, Marton 4710. Tel: (06) 327-8790.

Kaikoura Branch: Chairperson, Ailsa Howard; Secretary, Barry Dunnett, Pooles Road, RD 1, Kaikoura 7371. Tel: (03) 319-5086.

Marlborough Branch: Chairperson, Andrew John; Secretary, Lynda Neame, PO Box 896, Blenheim 7240. Tel: (03) 578-2013.

Nelson-Tasman Branch: Chairperson, Helen Campbell; Secretary, Jocelyn Bieleski, PO Box 7126, Nelson Mail Centre, Nelson 7042.

Tel: (03) 548-6803.

North Canterbury Branch: Chairperson, Bruce Coleman; Secretary, Paul Mosley, PO Box 2389, Christchurch Mail Centre, Christchurch 8140. Tel: (03) 329-6242.

South Canterbury Branch: Chairperson, Vacant; Secretary, Margaret McPherson, 29 Mountain View Road, Glenwood, Timaru 7910.

Tel: (03) 686-1494.

South Otago Branch: Chairperson, Roy Johnstone; Secretary, Jane Young, PO Box 32, Owaka 9546. Tel: (03) 415-8532.

Southland Branch: Chairperson, Craig Carson; Secretary, Jenny Campbell, PO Box 1155, Invercargill 9840. Tel: (03) 248-6398.

West Coast Branch: Chairperson, Kathy Gilbert; Secretary, Jane Marshall, 115 Hoffman Street, Hokitika 7810.

South Taranaki Branch: Chairperson, Dave Digby; Secretary, Carol Digby, 103 Miranda Street, Stratford 4332. Tel: (06) 765 7482.

William Hartree Memorial Lodge, Hawke’s Bay Situated 48km from Napier, 8km past Patoka on the Puketitiri Rd (sealed). The lodge is set amid a 14ha scenic reserve and close to many walks, eg: Kaweka Range, Balls Clearing, hot springs and museum. The lodge accommodates up to 10 people. It has a fully equipped kitchen including stove, refrigerator and microwave plus tile fire, hot showers. Supply your own pillows, linen, sleeping bags etc. For information and bookings please send a stamped addressed envelope to Mike and Linda Hay, 172 Guppy Road, Taradale, Napier 4112. Tel: (06) 8444651.

Email: hayhouse@clear.net.nz.

Ruapehu lodge, Tongariro National Park The newly built lodge is 600 metres from Whakapapa Village. It sleeps 32 people – three bunkrooms sleep 4 each, one sleeps 6 and two upstairs sleeping areas sleep 14. Supply your own bedding and food. Bookings and inquiries to Forest & Bird, PO Box 631, Wellington. Tel: (04) 385-7374. Email: office@forestandbird.org.nz

Matiu/Somes Island, Wellington Harbour Joint venture accommodation by Lower Hutt Forest and Bird with DOC. A modern family home with kitchen, 3 bedrooms, large lounge and dining room, just 20 mins sailing by ferry

from the centre of Wellington or 10 mins from Days Bay. Ideal place to relax in beautiful surroundings, with accommodation for 8.

Bring your own food and bedding and a torch.

Smoking is banned everywhere on the island, including the house. Forest & Bird members get a 25% discount. For more information, visit www. doc.govt.nz and for bookings, contact the DOC Wellington Visitors Centre at wellingtonvc@doc. govt.nz, ph (04) 384-7770 or mail to PO Box 10420, The Terrace, Wellington 6143.

Mangarakau Swamp Field Centre, North West Nelson Borders Kahurangi National Park and Te Tai Tapu Marine Reserve. New, 10 bed lodge with two bathrooms, fully equipped kitchen. Sleeping bags, towels and food required. Contact Jo-Anne Vaughan – Golden Bay Branch Secretary for details: javn@xtra.co.nz or phone (03) 5248072.

Tautuku Lodge, Otago State Highway 92, Southeast Otago. Situated on Forest and Bird’s 550ha Lenz Reserve 32km south of Owaka. A bush setting, and many lovely beaches nearby provide a wonderful base for exploring the Catlins. The cottage, the cabin and an A-frame sleep 10, 4 and 2 respectively. No animals. For information and rates please send a stamped addressed envelope to the caretaker: Diana Noonan, Mirren St, Papatowai, Owaka, RD2. Tel: (03) 415-8024, fax (03) 415-8244.

Email: diana.keith@ruralinzone.net

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