Forest & Bird Magazine 351 Feb 2014

ISSUE 351 • FEBRUARY 2014 www.forestandbird.org.nz

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ISSUE 351

• February 2014

Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Inc. Chief Executive: Höne McGregor Advocacy Manager: Kevin Hackwell Business Manager: Julie Watson Conservation Manager: Chris Todd Communications Manager: Marina Skinner Central Office: Level 1, 90 Ghuznee St, Wellington.

PO Box 631, Wellington 6140.

Tel: (04) 385-7374, Fax: (04) 385-7373 Email: office@forestandbird.org.nz Web: www.forestandbird.org.nz Auckland Office: 34A Charlotte Street, Eden Tce, Auckland, PO Box 108 055, Symonds St, Auckland 1150.

Tel: (09) 302-0203, Fax: (09) 303-4548 Email: n.beveridge@forestandbird.org.nz Christchurch Office: Unit 4/Level 1, 245 St Asaph St, Christchurch.

PO Box 2516, Christchurch 8140.

Tel: (03) 940-5522 Email: c.todd@forestandbird.org.nz Forest & Bird is a registered charitable entity under the Charities Act 2005.

Registration No. CC26943.

Tiaki Taiao www.forestandbird.org.nz

Contents 2 Editorial 4 Letters 5 50 years ago 7 Conservation news

45

Amazing facts about …

46

Fungi

50

A tern’s story

52

Nature of tomorrow

56

In the field

58

Community conservation

64

Book reviews

68

Parting shot

Sandflies The forgotten achievers Facebook photo essay

Fairy terns, nature apps, Ruataniwha irrigation, South Island kökako, beech masting, Forest & Bird Executive nominations, EEZ regulations, shark finning, It’s in our nature website, Mäui’s dolphins, fundraising art auction, käkäbeak comeback, möhua wins Bird of the Year, Mackenzie Christmas gifts, conservation legacy, thank you for your support, defending nature

Living wild lives Fibonacci or fibs?

Hairini terns, Catlins birds, Ark in the Park, 90th celebrations, Upper Hutt award, Wairarapa planting, Ashburton photo contest, Canterbury penguin visit

22 Cover story

Hidden depths of the Ngaruroro

27 Our whio need you Freshwater appeal

28 Denniston legal battle closes

Part of the plateau permanently protected

30 A climate for change Deep sea oil dilemma

34 Our people

Kristina Arthur, Matt O’Neale, Don Lamont, David Medway, Eddie Bannister, Höne McGregor, Tiff Stewart, Mark Bellingham, Al Fleming

38 KCC grown-up

Francesca Cunninghame EDITOR: Marina Skinner

PO Box 631, Wellington.

T (04) 801-2761 F (04) 385-7373 E m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz ART DIRECTOR /DESIGNER:

Rob Di Leva, Dileva Design E rob@dileva.co.nz

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Going places

42

Buzzing about bats

45

Our partners

Bringing Back the Birdsong, Living in a Warmer World, Rivers: New Zealand’s shared legacy, Tühoe: Portrait of a Nation, Dolphins of Aotearoa, The Essential Audrey Eagle, Caring for our Coast

Great Barrier Island Auckland’s long-tailed bats

Eastern bar-tailed godwits by Roger Smith

Kiwi Camping

PREPRESS/PRINTING:

Printlink KEEP UP WITH NATURE

ADVERTISING:

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

Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/ ForestandBird

Watch us on YouTube www.youtube.com/ forestandbird

Sign up to Forest & Bird eNews Fresh conservation news delivered to your inbox. Go to www.forestandbird.org.nz COVER SHOT Whio, or blue duck by Craig McKenzie

Follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/ Forest_and_Bird

editorial

Grand plans Late last year I was lucky to spend time with members of the Society at meetings in Hokitika, Tauranga, Auckland and Waikanae.

The meetings were an opportunity to discuss work on local and regional projects and to consider broader issues like how to achieve ecologically sustainable economic growth and the impact of climate change on biodiversity. At the North Island meetings we were also able to give our new Chief Executive, Hone McGregor, a warm Forest & Bird welcome.

One topic that excited a lot of discussion was the Predator Free New Zealand concept that the Society is supporting along with partners like Landcare Research and the Department of Conservation. Since the idea was first proposed by the late Sir Paul Callaghan, Forest & Bird has been providing practical as well as moral support. In February 2012 we hosted a gathering at our Ruapehu lodge of 19 of the country’s top predator control scientists and practitioners to discuss the feasibility of the concept. The participants concluded that if the scope is limited to possums, rodents and mustelids (stoats, weasels and ferrets) then a predator free New Zealand is achievable.

Of course there are many technical, funding and political challenges to overcome but if we reflect on the progress made since the first island eradication in 1959 (1-hectare Maria Island in the Hauraki Gulf) to the recent successful clearance of 23,000ha on Resolution and Secretary Islands in Fiordland, then it’s clear we are making significant technical progress.

Beyond the technical issues, achieving broad social and community support will be essential to achieving a predator free New Zealand. This is where Forest & Bird’s support becomes crucial. Our network of branches, community links and history as New Zealand’s voice for nature will be needed to keep this project moving forward.

Predator Free New Zealand is an ambitious concept, but so are most things worth doing.

Ngä mihi nui

Andrew Cutler Forest & Bird President

Forest & Bird AGM The 2014 Annual General Meeting and Council meeting will be on 28-29 June at the Comfort Hotel, 213 Cuba Street, Wellington.

More information at 04 385 7374 or office@forestandbird.org.nz

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

PATRON: His Excellency

Lieutenant General the Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae, GovernorGeneral of New Zealand NATIONAL PRESIDENT:

Andrew Cutler DEPUTY PRESIDENT:

Mark Hanger NATIONAL TREASURER:

Graham Bellamy CONSERVATION AMBASSADORS:

Sir Alan Mark, Gerry McSweeney, Craig Potton EXECUTIVE COUNCILLORS:

Brent Barrett, Lindsey Britton, Tony Dunlop, Craig Potton, Ines Stager, Barry Wards, John Wenham DISTINGUISHED LIFE MEMBERS:

Bill Ballantine, Stan Butcher, Ken Catt, Linda Conning, Audrey Eagle, Alan Edmonds, Gordon Ell, Stewart Gray, Philip Hart, Joan Leckie, Hon. Sandra Lee-Vercoe, Carole Long, Peter Maddison, Sir Alan Mark, Gerry McSweeney, Margaret Peace, Eugenie Sage, Guy Salmon, Lesley Shand, Gordon Stephenson, David Underwood

Forest & Bird is published quarterly by the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society of New Zealand Inc. 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 elemental chlorine-free paper made from FSC® certified wood fibre and pulp sourced from responsibly managed forests.

Registered at PO Headquarters, Wellington, as a magazine.

ISSN 0015-7384. Copyright.

All rights reserved.

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www.forestandbird.org.nz

letters Forest & Bird welcomes your feedback on conservation topics. Please send letters up to 200 words, with your 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 next edition will win a copy of Bringing Back the Birdsong by Wade and Jan Doak (New Holland, $49.99).

Please send letters to Editor, Forest & Bird magazine, PO Box 631, Wellington 6140 or e-mail m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz by March 21.

Amazing cicadas

Yellowhead impersonator

In your November Forest & Bird there is a very nice article about cicadas by Michelle Harnett. The photograph of emerging Amphipsalta cicadas is particularly eye catching.

However, a few of the facts are not quite correct. The advent of genetic technology and the recording and analysis of male song shows there are nearly 60 species in our country. A lot of them still have not been scientifically described and so lack official names.

Michelle states that the females find the males by following the sound they make. This was indeed thought to be the case but recent work shows it is the reverse that happens. The male song has gaps in it at certain points and a receptive female clicks her wings in these response gaps within a 10th of a second. He follows her wing clicks to find her.

It is stated that summer-laid eggs hatch in autumn. Many eggs overwinter in the stem they are laid in and hatch the following spring. I have photographed them doing this recently.

I was inspired by the article, “Birdlife in the frame” (November Forest & Bird). I photographed this tüï in my garden and thought it was a little bit unusual. I believe the pollen is from flax as I have seen many tüï feeding from them around our area.

Living not too far from Zealandia in Wellington, we get a large number of tüï and other native birds and even the odd kingfisher.

Keith Flint, Wellington

Jim Esson, Palmerston North This letter is the winner of Birds & People by Mark Cocker.

Michelle Harnett replies: One of the things I enjoy most about writing the Amazing facts column is the opportunity to learn more about the animals and plants of New Zealand. I found it difficult to establish exactly when cicada eggs hatched so I appreciate Jim taking the time to share his personal observations. I am also intrigued by the fact that new species of our flora and fauna are constantly being discovered. I attempted to reconcile several reputable (and recent) sources that listed different numbers of cicada species, and it seems my approach was too conservative.

Jim also points out another amazing fact: that the males of some cicada species, after singing to let females know they are about, respond to female wing flicks and a courtship of song and flicks begins. Both male and female wing-flicking have been reported for many New Zealand cicada species. Somewhat oddly, this fascinating behaviour of native cicadas has not received much attention over the past 20 years and does not seem to have Photo: Bryce McQuillan permeated the popular literature.

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No love for balloons It was great to see people getting together in April in front of Parliament to protest against cuts to DOC funding (August Forest & Bird). But why the balloons?

An organisation that supports, saves, nurtures, provides habitat for and rehabilitation for birds and uses balloons to promote its cause? Join up the dots, please.

One of the saddest things I’ve seen recently was a bird swallowing a burst black balloon high up in a tree. All I could do was shout and try to get it to drop it.

My local beaches are popular spots for birthday parties.

But there are always balloons that blow away into the sea or burst and get left on the ground for birds and other wildlife to find.

If you need any more convincing that this is utterly irresponsible, have a look at this: http://balloonsblow.org/ Next time you promote an event or celebrate a special day, please do it without the balloons.

Alison Arnold, Waiheke Island The editor replies: You make a good point. We did take all balloons home from the Parliament event.

Driven to distraction

WIN A BOOK

Many New Zealanders have no concept of going anywhere other than in their motor cars. The statistics are frightening.

Sixty-eight per cent of cars, vans and utes in this country carry only their drivers. Most of the energy that these vehicles use is wasted in propelling their own steel, rubber and plastic, which for an average car weigh about 15 times as much as the driver.

Almost half our car journeys are shorter than six kilometres and could easily be made by cycling or walking.

In 2006 77 per cent of our workers commuted to work by driving and 90 per cent of those carried no passengers.

In bizarre conflict between individual rationality and collective irrationality, the few who value exercise load bikes on to cars and drive to where they feel safe to ride them because too many others are driving where they live.

What has this to do with Forest & Bird? An article about the excellent work of the Mackenzie Sustainable Futures Trust (August Forest & Bird) includes: “Anyone who has recently driven between Twizel and Ömarama will understand the threats to the Mackenzie.” An editor alert to the threats of the motor vehicle would, I suggest, substitute “travelled” for “driven”. Please leave open the possibility that a reader may pass through the Mackenzie Country by bicycle, by bus, on horseback or on foot.

Forest & Bird is giving away three copies of Rivers: New Zealand’s shared legacy by David Young, photographs by Aliscia Young.

To enter the draw, email your entry to draw@forestandbird. org.nz Please put Rivers in the subject line and include your name and address in the email. Or put your name and address on the back of an envelope and post to Rivers draw, Forest & Bird, PO Box 631, Wellington 6140. Entries close on March 21.

The winners of Birds of New Zealand: A photographic guide in the November edition of Forest & Bird are Frances Bell of Auckland and Julie Hamilton of Winton. Your books will be posted.

John Rhodes, Greytown

Creative energy solutions There is a need for alternative forms of energy and new forms of employment to make mining uneconomic and unnecessary.

As Forest & Bird is full of intelligent people it should be possible to use it as a forum for creative, useful solutions to the current problems that result in planetary damage. As an example, progress is being made using forest waste at the University of Illinois, where supercapacitors are being produced.

I suggest that instead of using coal to run dairy

50 years ago

production, excess electricity from Meridian Energy be used, and transfer the subsidy given to the foreign investors at Tïwai Point aluminium smelter. Perhaps Forest & Bird, instead of spending enormous amounts of money on court cases, could fund special scholarships into new, sustainable energy research. A thorough study of the West Coast and its potential for new forms of employment should also be made. Constructive solutions to our problems will do far more to protect the conservation estate.

Isabel Cookson, Oxford

Taranaki At a recent meeting of this Branch Mr. J. Paterson, who has had 77 years’ experience in the bush and back country, gave a most interesting talk on how bird life around Kaimiro has changed since the early 1890s.

Native pigeons, used by the first settlers as food, were present in thousands 70 years ago, and kakas, also used as food, were there in hundreds, but were last seen in 1922. The kakariki, very popular with the settlers and kept as a cagebird, has now disappeared.

Other birds which have now gone from the district are that wonderful songster the kokako, the white-breasted tit, the land rail, and the blue or mountain duck (last seen about 1925). The weka was last seen in 1910.

In Mr. Paterson’s opinion the most wonderful songster of the bush was the kokako, now regrettably no more. He had only five notes, which sounded like a bell and could be heard 30 chains away.

Forest & Bird, February 1964

Forest & Bird

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letters Kingfisher in the hand How many of us can say we’ve caught a kingfisher – not by camera lens but in our own hands?

Walking through the open door of our double garage up by the fields recently I spotted something bright blue in the shadows of a corner. Looking up at me was a nonplussed baby kingfisher. I have rescued grounded baby birds many times but never before a kingfisher.

After giving it a little water outside I held it up high in the palm of my hand. Away it flew.

It was a reminder to cherish the simple yet vulnerable wild beauty on our doorsteps that no TV documentary could ever replace. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!

Photo: Grahame Sydney

Wilding tree solutions

May Adams, Hokianga

“Running Wild” (November Forest & Bird) reports encouraging progress in killing weed trees. However, prevention is likely to be cheaper and more effective than cure. Re-infestation will be a problem as long as we use weed tree species for weed suppression (eg Nassella, broom and gorse), soil conservation, fuel, amenity plantings, timber, shelter and carbon sequestration.

We need fast-growing species that fulfill these purposes without a propensity to spread far and wide.

Some possibilities are various Eucalyptus species and improved cultivars of macrocarpa and other Cupressus species. Another possibility is the use of only male plants of dioecious (having only one sex on each tree) species. This could be developed further through vegetative methods of propagation such as tissue cultivation. GM techniques could be used to develop ecologically benign cultivars.

Photo: Craig McKenzie

Allen Cookson, Oxford

Camp memories Hazel Hipkins, of Auckland, sent her memories of attending several Forest & Bird camps during the 1960s and 1970s. “For a family of five youngsters, Forest & Bird camps were ideal and fitted my father Arthur Hipkins’ idea that we should see our own country before venturing further,” she writes. “They were physically and mentally challenging, with trips and exploration of historical and botanical interest during the day and lectures, illustrated talks and quizzes at night.”

One camp at Rüätoki, in the Bay of Plenty, was especially memorable for Hazel: “Our family joined many others at the marae at Rüätoki, which was marked off with street names where we could pitch our tent. We had meetings in the meeting house hearing lectures of the surrounding district’s history as well as the birdlife and plants at hand.

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“I attended a weaving class making a small flax (harakeke) food basket and kit (kete). The women gave careful instructions on the difficult parts, eg corners, edging and finishing neatly.

“Our parents modelled a deep respect for our Mäori hosts from the Arawa people and I am grateful for the experience.”

conservation

news

Lifeline for fairy terns Forest & Bird will be working to create a new nesting site north of Auckland for critically endangered fairy terns over the next three years. The march of development along Northland’s coastline has meant that fairy terns – of which 35 individuals remain – have just four breeding sites.

Many of the four pest-controlled sites are becoming increasingly unsuitable because of coastal developments, dogs and vehicle disturbance. Fairy terns are easily frightened and become stressed by beach-goers or their dogs, and they abandon their chicks or nests.

Former North Island Conservation Manager Mark Bellingham says Forest & Bird has spent the past eight years defending the existing nesting grounds from coastal developments at great cost. “Instead of dragging coastal developers through court, we decided to change tack and look at alternative, people-free breeding sites in the upper North Island,” he says.

A 15-hectare site on the Kaipara Harbour was a nesting site for fairy terns until the 1970s and a roosting site until 2000. “Fairy terns already spend much of their time in this area and it’s not over-run by people or coastal developments.

So if we clean out the weeds and pests and create a nice shellbank area hopefully they will return here,” Mark says.

“No one in the world has successfully lured terns on to a new nesting site so this is a whole new challenge but, given the imminent threat of extinction, this is one of our only options. There’s an artificial nesting site in eastern Northland being established by DOC at the moment and that’s showing promise so we’ll watch that closely.”

The project will be run over three years. Team members will first clear the site of invasive weed saltwater paspalum, stoats and rabbits. Shells will be trucked in and model fairy terns will be put out to attract prospecting birds. Signs will be put up to ensure people stay clear.

Mark says the project will use the technical expertise of DOC staff and the hands-on experience of Forest & Bird member Gwen Pulham, who has monitored fairy terns in the area for the past decade.

1 A fairy tern takes food to its chick in the sand. Photos:

davidhallett.co.nz

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2 A parent with its camouflaged chick.

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Forest & Bird

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conservation

news

Nature apps Smart phones are helping to bring nature closer to people and are helping with conservation.

Smart phones are super portable, internet connected and have a GPS function, which enables a user to see exactly where he or she is on a map. Smartphone applications, or apps, can be free or incur a small charge and are downloaded from online stores like iTunes or Google Play.

Giving people the ability to identify and learn about a bird, lizard or plant while outdoors with the subject in front of them is a powerful way to connect people with nature.

Forest & Bird and digital developers Resn (www.resn.co.nz), then Melby Ruarus and Simon Neveu developed the Best Fish Guide as a phone app. In two years it has been upgraded several times and it has been downloaded more than 4000 times: http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/what-we-do/publications/the-best-fish-guide Local developers have been quick to create apps about New Zealand’s nature. Part-time developer Ryan Ghisi has come up with two educational apps for native animals and plants: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwipedia.nzfauna2 https://play.google. com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwipedia.nzflora The Birds of New Zealand app is a mobile phone version of the book by Paul Scofield and Brent Stephenson: https://itunes.apple.com/app/birds-of-new-zealand/ id770495936?ls=1&mt=8 This bird gallery app lets you download a bird call as a ringtone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wbg.nzbirds Birding enthusiasts have a checklist to work through with this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.NZBirdingChecklist&hl=en Craig Sisson has developed a series of New Zealand nature apps covering birds, insects, marine life and reptiles: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=upsidekiwi.co.nz&c=apps Apps can also connect people with the past. In DOC’s Denniston Rose Trail app, the walk on the Denniston Plateau is illustrated with historical photos and audio extracts from books The Denniston Rose and Heart of Coal: https://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/denniston/id521632230 DOC also features in the New Zealand’s great walks app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mytoursapp.android.app285 The tour guide is a logical application for smartphones, and they can be local or national: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.a1349766594ffe0c8227a089a. a17287791a https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hummba.guide.mighty One of my favourites is Nest finder - a great and comprehensive app by Oliver Seiler that scans the net for you to show you lodges, huts and backpacker accommodation and their availability. A nature traveller could really use this app to plan as they go. Bit.Ly/nestfinder n Phil Bilbrough

ROTOROA ISLAND Cruise to Rotoroa Island and discover a place that’s rich in social history with beautiful beaches, walking trails, heritage buildings, art and an award winning exhibition centre which tells the story of the island’s history. Once off limits for 100 years to all except those going to the island for rehabilitation, it’s now open for all to enjoy and immerse themselves in it’s beautiful surroundings.

Book your cruise today. 360discovery.co.nz 09 307 8005

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RobeRt C bRuCe tRust 2014 Grants

Native kōaro fish could be threatened if the Ruataniwha water storage project goes ahead. Photo: Alton Perrie

Stand for nature at dam hearing Late last year Forest & Bird appeared before the Board of Inquiry appointed to weigh up changes that would allow the $600 million Ruataniwha water storage project to go ahead in Hawke’s Bay. The government-appointed board is considering Plan Change 6 to the Hawke’s Bay Regional Resource Plan and consents to build the Ruataniwha dam.

Plan Change 6 addresses the impact of land use on water quality and quantity for the Tukituki River catchment. It proposes limits for in-stream nutrients and land management techniques such as riparian planting. However, the limits proposed for nitrogen are hundreds of times higher than current levels. The dispute between environmental groups including Forest & Bird on one side and the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council and irrigators on the other centres on whether limiting phosphorus only is enough to control the growth of algae and safeguard river ecosystems.

The Ruataniwha dam is proposed by the council-owned Hawke’s Bay Regional Investment Company (HBRIC). The dam would enable irrigation to an additional 19,000 hectares in the Tukituki catchment, and the resulting farming intensification would impact on water quality, including in the significant habitat of the Tukituki estuary.

The in-stream dam would completely block the Makaroro River, an important tributary of the Tukituki, and flood 243ha of significant indigenous vegetation and habitat, including a very important long-tailed bat roost area. The braided riverbed habitat downstream was agreed to be “internationally important” by expert witnesses.

As part of his representation, Forest & Bird Hastings-Havelock North branch chair Vaughan Cooper presented the board with the “lost” DOC submission and drew the board’s attention to the high value the report attributes to wetlands and other habitats impacted by the dam.

Part of the inundation footprint is a conservation park under the Conservation Act. Forest & Bird cannot see how the Department of Conservation could legally permit inundation of the conservation park and we will be keeping a close eye on this separate process.

The board hearing ran until January and a decision is due in March. n Sally Gepp

Guardian Trust, as Trustee for the Robert C Bruce Trust is calling for applications for the 2014 Grants. The Trust provides grants for research work and projects relating to forests and afforestation on public land.

Applications will be considered from organisations and individuals.

Further information and application forms are available from the Trustee: Guardian Trust PO Box 628 Palmerston North 4440 Phone: 06 356 9208 Email: palmerstonnorth@nzgt.co.nz Closing date for applications is 31 March 2014.

THE TRUST COMPANY

www.guardiantrust.co.nz

conservation

news

Is the grey ghost still alive?

The South Island kökako – declared extinct in 2007 – could be alive. The Ornithological Society’s Records Appraisal Committee late last year shifted the species classification from “extinct” to “data deficient”. The change follows an apparent sighting in 2007 by Len Turner and Peter Rudolf, near Reefton, which the committee has officially accepted.

The committee also describes another 10 claimed sightings as all being “probable” or “possible”. These came from the Marlborough Sounds, north-west Nelson, the West Coast and the Catlins, and were made between 1990 and 2008.

“We can’t say that the South Island kökako is still alive.

But this is the best sign yet that it is,” says Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell.

On the release of the news, Forest & Bird’s Facebook site was flooded with comments from people who thought they had seen the “grey ghost”. These came from around the South Island, especially the West Coast.

Forest & Bird member Alec Milne runs the Grey Ghost project, partly funded by Forest & Bird, to find evidence of the South Island kökako. His quest was spurred by hearing a kökako calling in the Cobb Valley. The last accepted sighting of the South Island species was in 1967.

If you’re tramping in the South Island this summer, keep a camera handy. The South Island kökako has (or had) orange wattles. Its endangered North Island cousin has blue wattles.

A South Island kökako in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Bumper beech season bad for birds The Department of Conservation has warned that in many parts of New Zealand beech forests flowered heavily in spring. This mast flowering is the result of particularly warm temperatures in early autumn last year.

A beech flower produces a small seed that drops to the forest floor. After a mast season the number of rats

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and mice soars because of all the extra food. Numbers of stoats, which feed on rodents, climb proportionately. Stoats are fast breeders and the number of young they produce varies according to conditions. As the rats and mice run out of seeds and are eaten by the stoats, their numbers fall. The stoats go in search of other food and often go to the nearest tree hole, where they will find a möhua (yellowhead), käkäriki (parakeet) or käkä.

DOC says this summer’s masting will probably be even bigger than the masting of 2000. That led to the disappearance of a population of möhua in the Marlborough Sounds and reduced the number of möhua in another group in Fiordland from a few hundred to about a dozen.

DOC says it is looking at target areas for extra predator control to protect birds that could suffer as a result of stoat predation following the beech masting.

Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell says DOC has no choice but to increase the amount of landscape-scale pest control, including aerially applied 1080, particularly in the areas where endangered species like the möhua live. But he says DOC will struggle to adequately respond because of ongoing funding cuts. Forest & Bird will continue to advocate for those cuts to be reversed.

1 Beech flowers in Fiordland. Photos: DOC 2 Beech flowers in Tongariro National Park.

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Ulva Goodwillie

Your position is transmitted to the Rescue Co-ordination Centre within a few minutes and the search area is narrowed down to a few square metres.

For your local supplier or more information: www.brightideas.co.nz Ph: 09 238 5617 Forest & Bird

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conservation

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Step forward for nature Helping guide the future of New Zealand’s first, largest and most respected nature conservation organisation is a great challenge and a hugely rewarding experience.

Among the more than 80,000 voices for nature within Forest & Bird, a few capable leaders are needed to guide the Society forward. This small team is the National Executive and functions like an elected board, governing the Society’s business on behalf of members.

The main benefits of joining the team are networking with leading nature conservationists, experience in the

governance of a non-government organisation, and having the opportunity to learn about issues and contribute to decisions that affect the future of nature in New Zealand.

Because the team is often planning for the future, it helps to have a broad or strategic viewpoint. Being an active listener and good at teamwork is important. Legal or financial qualification or experience is helpful, but not essential. Scientific or practical ecological experience is also helpful. A passion for nature conservation is vital.

If you’ve got the skills, time and passion, please consider standing for election at this year’s Council meeting. Nominations are due on April 28.

More information at www. forestandbird.org.nz/about-us/ executive/standing-executive The current Executive that governs Forest & Bird, from left, Brent Barrett, Graham Bellamy, Barry Wards, Jon Wenham, Ines Stager, Craig Potton, Lindsey Britton, Tony Dunlop and Andrew Cutler.

EEZ regulations ‘unlawful’ Forest & Bird is working hard to keep the government honest on regulations to set the rules and conditions under which deep sea activities such as seabed mining and oil drilling are allowed in New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

In November Forest & Bird and Greenpeace told Parliament’s Regulations Review Committee that regulations recently created under the new EEZ Act are unlawful and should be disallowed. The regulations describe permitted activities for prospecting and exploration except oil drilling, which the operator has a right to carry out, subject only to the conditions in the regulations.

The conditions ask operators to say what they’re going to do and to tell the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) afterwards what they’ve done. Even the EPA had concerns about the limits of what it would be able to do, as official information obtained by Forest & Bird reveals.

Particular issues relate to the permitted status for seismic surveying activity and the regulations’ failure to protect sensitive environments as required by international law, in particular the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), or to take a precautionary approach.

Separately, changes to the Marine Legislation Bill hurried through Parliament without a select committee hearing in September provide for oil exploration to be made a new 14

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non-notified discretionary category of activity, meaning the public and groups such as Forest & Bird would not have a say on where and how it occurs.

Forest & Bird’s submission opposed this and reminded officials again of the need for them to be assessing and giving effect to New Zealand’s UNCLOS obligations.

A humpback whale calf breaches in Kermadec waters.

Photo: Karen Baird

conservation

news

Sun sets on shark finning Forest & Bird’s campaign, as part of the New Zealand Shark Alliance (NZSA), to end the practice of shark finning has succeeded in prompting the government’s new proposed National Plan of Action – Sharks (NPOA-S), which suggests a law change that would end this wasteful fishing method.

Fishing operators can inadvertently catch a shark, kill it, cut off its fins and dump the animal at sea. This allows boats to return to port with their holds full of fins. If the NPOA-S is adopted an operator would have to fully use the shark’s

From left, Forest & Bird Marine Conservation Advocate Katrina Subedar, Minister for Primary Industries Nathan Guy, Minister of Conservation Nick Smith, NZSA youth ambassador Taylor Finderup and WWF Marine Species Advocate Milena Palka outside Parliament in December. Photo: Brit Finucci

body, bring the body back to shore before removing its fins or return the animal to the sea alive. Fishing operators also have a host of ways to avoid catching sharks in the first place.

The proposed NPOA-S would phase in a rule change over the next three years. The NZSA is campaigning for the change to be implemented this year.

Many people have signed pledges in support of a ban, with more than 78,000 pledges collected by the NZSA, including 41,000 by Forest & Bird alone.

A representative number of pledges were presented to the Ministers of Primary Industries and Conservation at a small ceremony outside the Beehive in December. The NZSA was represented by its youth ambassador, Taylor Finderup, 14.

The NZPOA-S, which Forest & Bird helped to draft and review, doesn’t just concentrate on finning. Its overarching goal is to ensure the long-term viability of all shark species found in New Zealand waters by improving their management and conservation. The NPOA-S proposes a risk assessment for all species, a full stock assessment, setting research priorities and mechanisms that ensure landed sharks are treated respectfully and not dumped or otherwise wasted.

Submissions on the NPOA-S closed in December and Forest & Bird is waiting for a final decision from the ministers.

A decision to retain the status quo seems unlikely in the face of such strong support for a change. Politicians need votes, especially as they go into election year, and protecting sharks is one issue on which they would be unwise to swim against the tide of public opinion.

It’s in our nature At Forest & Bird we’ve been part of New Zealanders’ lives, telling New Zealand stories and dreaming Kiwi dreams, for 90 years. A very special new website to be launched in March asks you to join and support us – we want to hear your voices, we need your help and we want to say thanks.

New Zealand. It’s in our nature – and we’ll ask you to add your voice to ours. Tell us your thoughts and your stories – who we are, what you love about this place and what you want for New Zealand for the next 90 years.

Our nature, our values … these will build our future, make us rich and bring our people home.

This site wouldn’t be possible without generous sponsorship from The Cooperative Bank and digital creatives Touch/Cast, who are working to develop the site. The site will be live from March 20. www.nznature.org.nz

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WIN A POSTER Forest & Bird is giving away three copies of a native birds of New Zealand poster (Te Papa Press, $24.99), which accompanies the Buller’s Birds of New Zealand book.

The poster is for sale at www.tepapastore. co.nz

More protection is needed to save the Māui’s dolphin from extinction. Photo: DOC

To enter the draw, email your entry to draw@forestandbird. org.nz Please put Poster in the subject line and include your name and address in the email. Or put your name and address on the back of an envelope and post to Poster draw, Forest & Bird, PO Box 631, Wellington 6140. Entries close on March 21.

Too little help for Mäui’s dolphins The adoption of nylon monofilament fishing nets in the 1970s is blamed for the virtual disappearance of the Mäui’s dolphin. Only 55 dolphins over a year old were estimated to be alive in 2012. So in December, when Conservation Minister Nick Smith announced only a small extension to the area in which gill nets are banned, there was little celebration, especially given that the government’s Threat Management Plan for the Mäui’s dolphin may be the last chance for the animal.

Dr Smith has responded to the Mäui’s crisis by extending the area in which gill nets are banned by a mere 350 square kilometres. Conservationists and academics are united in calling for the area to be extended to incorporate the dolphin’s entire habitat. That is all harbours between Maunganui Bluff and Whanganui, and the coastline between those points, out to the 100-metre-depth contour.

Gill nets are not the only threat to the Mäui’s dolphin.

Forest & Bird is working towards the creation of a marine mammal sanctuary in which trawling, seismic surveying, mining and gill nets would all be banned throughout the Mäui’s dolphin’s habitat. These measures would allow other forms of fishing, such as dolphin-friendly drop long-lining, to continue and are considered the minimum for ensuring that the key native species does not become extinct.

The Mäui’s dolphin is a sub-species of the Hector’s dolphin. It is found off the north-west coast of the North Island.

Forest & Bird

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Generous artists and art lovers Forest & Bird held a series of fundraising art auctions entitled Wild Perspective in October. The live auction on October 10 was followed by a three-week online auction.

The auction at Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery was attended by supporters who viewed and bid on 51 individual pieces, including paintings, sculptures and other artwork donated by artists such as Dick Frizzell, Ray Ching and Shane Hansen.

The live auction raised more than $50,000 and the online auction raised $12,000 for Forest & Bird. Forest & Bird Supporter Relations Manager Rebecca Scelly said: “It was a magical night with plenty of bidding and support for the work of Forest & Bird.” Guests enjoyed the evening of bidding and socialising, with drinks from Simply Pure, a new Forest & Bird partner.

The online auction, hosted by Trade Me, featured 29 works by Kiwi artists, including limited-edition prints, original paintings and an installation piece. After running for three weeks it was exciting to follow the online flurry of activity in the final days and hours before the individual auctions closed.

The funds raised by the art auctions will go directly back into Forest & Bird’s work as a voice for nature. The online auction is likely to be held again in August.

Forest & Bird would like to thank the artists who

generously donated their artwork and the supporters who placed bids. They have contributed to our work protecting and restoring New Zealand nature.

Forest & Bird member Fenella Dennis, left, and an art auction organiser, Belinda Brown, hold one of Shane Hansen’s paintings during the live auction. Photo: Holly Willing

Käkäbeak making a comeback Conservationists have boosted by a third the number of endangered käkäbeak plants known to exist in the wild.

Staff at the Forest Lifeforce Restoration (FLR) Trust have dug 35 of the plants with the spectacular curved, crimson flowers into bluffs in Te Urewera National Park, overlooking the Maungataniwha Native Forest in inland Hawke’s Bay. Until recently just 110 käkäbeak (Clianthis maximus or ngutukäkä) were known to exist in the wild. Five of those are on the Waiau Bluffs, where they have been joined by the 35 transplants.

Work is under way to stop wild käkäbeak plants heading towards extinction.

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Wild-grown käkäbeak have been decimated by goats, deer and other exotic browsers to the extent that the species now holds New Zealand’s highest possible threatened plant ranking of nationally critical. They are grown widely in gardens but these domestic plants are all derivatives of a few wild plants. They have been interbred and have little or no genetic value.

Hawke’s Bay-based FLR Trust runs the largest käkäbeak propagation and restoration programme in New Zealand and has five seed nurseries, four in Hawke’s Bay and one in the Bay of Islands. These have produced hundreds of juvenile käkäbeak plants, which staff have started planting on conservation land.

Trust staff are perfecting a ground-breaking technique to propagate the plants by blasting seeds from a shotgun into likely nursery sites. These are frequently on bluffs or cliff faces and are as inaccessible to humans as they are to browsers. Helicopters are often the only way to reach them.

Staffer Barry Crene developed the technique using reloaded shotgun shells packed with regular shotgun pellets, a pulp medium and käkäbeak seed. It creates the potential for an aerial propagation effort on a scale that hasn’t yet been possible.

The käkäbeak once ranged widely across the North Island. Its distribution is believed to have been expanded

by Mäori, who valued it for its decorative appeal. n Peter Heath

Monorail möhua wins Bird of the Year The endangered möhua, or yellowhead, won Forest & Bird’s ninth annual Bird of the Year poll. Nearly 13,000 votes were cast in the fiercely contested poll, with the ruru and the southern rockhopper penguin coming second and third.

Möhua supporter and Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei’s feverish social media campaign and catch-cry “vote möhua, not monorail” helped to catapult it into the lead with 2473 votes.

Several celebrities lined up to support their favourite bird, including Hayley Holt (fairy tern), Te Radar (New Zealand bittern), Peter Dunne (bellbird), Barnaby Weir (kererü) and Jacinda Ardern (black petrel).

The bellbird and the fairy tern managed to secure top spots thanks to their high-profile backers but the möhua’s plight drove voters to the polls. The controversial 41-kilometre Fiordland monorail would threaten one of the möhua’s last remaining lowland habitats. Once widespread throughout the South Island, the möhua is now found mainly in forest patches in Southland and Otago.

Its population decline has been put down to predation and habitat loss. Climate change is also pushing it closer to extinction. “The möhua is a climate change canary,” says Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell.

“Populations have suffered recently because a series of warm summers has caused beech trees to mast more frequently. In mast years beech trees produce a vast amount of seed. In these years you see a spike in rat numbers, which eat the beech seed. This in turn causes a spike in the number of stoats, which eat the rats. Once the rats are eaten, the stoats go looking for alternative food, such as möhua and other native birds.”

Wasps also compete for food in beech forests, and it’s thought that booming wasp populations may have helped drive möhua from beech forests in the northern South Island.

Several projects are helping to turn around the fate of the möhua, including a DOC-run 1080 rat control programme in the Catlins, which Forest & Bird’s southern branches were instrumental in kick-starting. Möhua in the area are now thriving and the area hosts one of the largest populations of the species.

For final results of the poll, go to www.birdoftheyear.org.nz

The endangered möhua got the sympathy vote in the 2013 Bird of the Year poll. Photo: Craig McKenzie

Mackenzie Christmas gift thank you Thank you for supporting nature by donating so generously to save the South Island’s treasured Mackenzie Country.

More than $70,000 was donated in our Mackenzie Country Christmas Appeal and we’re so grateful for your support. Your donation is helping to save the rolling tussock grasslands, majestic lakes and vibrant wetlands of the Mackenzie Country.

We’d like to share with you a couple of comments from donors like you who are passionate about saving the Mackenzie: “The Mackenzie Country. My favourite part of New Zealand. Needs all the protection you can give it and hopefully with your help it will become a drylands park very soon!”

“I enclose a cheque for $50 and hope fervently that your efforts to save the area are successful. Go for it!”

“I wanted to add my heartfelt support of the work you are doing in the Mackenzie Basin. Our family have farmed close to this area for 130-plus years.”

Forest & Bird will continue to turn up the volume on behalf of all New Zealanders as threats to the Mackenzie

continue. Large areas of the Mackenzie Basin have already been developed for intensive farming. Forest & Bird is speaking up for what remains of the natural values and distinctive landscapes of this much-valued part of New Zealand.

Part of that is representing nature with the Mackenzie Agreement, which includes creating a drylands part in the northern part of the basin.

Thank you for giving the Mackenzie Country your helping hand to survive.

Wrybills breed in the Mackenzie Country.

Photo: davidhallett.co.nz Forest & Bird

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Thank you from Forest & Bird

Create a conservation legacy

We’d like to thank you for supporting Forest & Bird during the past year. Your generous contributions of time and money have enabled Forest & Bird to:

Forest & Bird is blessed with passionate members and supporters who help fund our work, volunteer as part of our national branch network and advocate for all that we do. Forest & Bird recognises that our work to protect New Zealand is not something that can be achieved in a single lifetime. Instead, it’s a journey towards a future where the intrinsic value of our natural heritage is recognised.

Much of our work is future focussed – whether educating and engaging children about nature or the long-term commitment of restoring the ecosystems of a reserve.

There is perhaps no more profound a way to support Forest & Bird on our journey than to honour our work in your will.

Leaving a bequest, or a gift in your will, demonstrates a desire to make a difference even after you are no longer here, to make an enduring impact on the world and an investment in future generations.

Many generous members have already helped create a conservation legacy by leaving Forest & Bird a gift and others have made a commitment to do so in the future. Much of the work that we do today is only possible through the generosity of those in the past. Our members’ passion for nature stretches back through our 90 years of history and still resonates today. It will continue to make a real difference well into the future.

If you would like to discuss how you can create your own conservation legacy by leaving a gift in your will, please contact legacy@forestandbird.org.nz or call 0800 200 064.

CARING FOR OUR COAST

Publication Award es ou rce

*R

An EDS Guide to managing coastal development

W INNER 2013 RMLA tion Ma nagem ocia ent Law Ass

CaRing foR ouR Coast

CARING FOR OUR COAST: An EDS Guide to managing coastal development includes extensive use of photographs and practical examples.

This guide identifies how the strengthened provisions of the New Zealand Coastal Policy Statement 2010 can be proactively implemented to achieve better outcomes for the coast. The guide describes the valuable lessons learnt over the past decade in the planning and design of coastal developments.

It is an invaluable resource for coastal developers, coastal managers, professional advisors, students, people living in t Coas g foR ouR CaRin coastal communities and An EDS Guide to managing coastal development everyone else concerned with better managing and protecting New Zealand’s coastal environment.

*

n

Take a stand for nature at hundreds of local forums around New Zealand.

n

Plant trees, weed and kill pests at hundreds of sites overseen by 50 Forest & Bird branches.

n

Grow and give away thousands of native plants.

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Achieve permanent protection of part of the Denniston Plateau.

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Help secure an extra $20 million funding for the Department of Conservation.

n

Maintain pressure to preserve the Resource Management Act.

n

Achieve a milestone agreement to protect part of the Mackenzie Country.

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Contribute to improved ways to stop seabirds dying in commercial fishing.

n

Update the Best Fish Guide to include aquaculture.

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Contribute through national and local forums to improve the state of our rivers.

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Advocate for greater protection of critically endangered Maui’s dolphins.

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Bring about a proposal to ban shark finning in New Zealand waters.

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Take thousands of children on Kiwi Conservation Club nature trips.

DOLPHINS OF

AOTEAROA

Living with New Zealand Dolphins Living with New Zealand Dolphins

Lucy Brake and Raewyn Peart

DOLPHINS OF AOTEAROA: Living with RAEWYN PEART RAEWYN PEART New Zealand dolphins explores the ongoing relationship between humans and dolphins in New Zealand. For many, encountering dolphins has been a profound and lifechanging experience.

It features all the famous dolphins, such as Pelorus Jack, Opo, Maui and more recently Moko.

Extensively researched and lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, and incorporating a guide to all of the dolphins of New Zealand, this book will have huge appeal.

To purchase either publication, visit the EDS website www.eds.org.nz or order via email manager@eds.org.nz.

Lucy Brake and Raewyn Peart

If you mention this advertisement when ordering, you can purchase these books at the EDS member rate.

Defending nature Forest & Bird has been the voice for nature in resource management cases throughout New Zealand. Several cases have recently concluded with good results, thanks to Forest & Bird lawyers Peter Anderson, Sally Gepp and Erika Toleman, other staff and branch members.

Upper Hurunui damming The August edition of Forest & Bird magazine reported that independent commissioners had prohibited damming in the Upper Hurunui. However, irrigation interests appealed to the High Court. Fish and Game also appealed on water quality, and Forest & Bird joined the irrigation appeal, mainly to support the prohibition of damming but asking that the water quality standards imposed by the independent commissioners be upheld. The appeals have been resolved and the prohibition on damming is confirmed.

Other planning appeals Forest & Bird has also been involved in other appeals, including: n Ashburton District Plan – Forest & Bird joined an appeal by an irrigation company that sought to weaken the provisions to protect biodiversity. This was resolved by negotiation, with the biodiversity provisions unchanged after the appeal on that issue was dropped. n Kawarau District Plan – Forest & Bird appealed the landscape provisions. This appeal was also resolved by negotiation, with the landscape provisions strengthened. n New Plymouth District Plan – Forest & Bird has joined an appeal on a plan change to a significant natural area.

The appeal will have significant precedent value in the district because it is likely to determine the rules for other significant natural areas. This appeal is ongoing.

Rena claim Forest & Bird spent more than $10,000 on the clean-up after the Rena ran aground in the Bay of Plenty in 2011.

Reimbursement of these costs is governed by international law, which allows for the total liability of the ship’s owners to be capped and for those affected to make claims on that sum. The cap was set by the High Court at $11.7 million. Forest & Bird, along with many others involved in the clean-up or whose businesses were affected, sought compensation through the High Court. The claims process is continuing.

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Otago water quality Forest & Bird lodged a submission on Plan Change 6A to the Otago Regional Council’s Otago Water Plan for water quality throughout Otago. The key concern was that effects on the coastal marine area were not considered.

Forest & Bird appealed the council decision when this concern was not addressed. Several other parties joined the Forest & Bird appeal, including irrigation interests and Fish and Game.

The substance of the appeal has been resolved, with agreement to include effects on the coastal marine area in the plan as sought by Forest & Bird. However, a legal issue has been raised by irrigators, which may need to be resolved by the Environment Court.

Forest & Bird also joined several other appeals. After seven days of mediation most of these appeals appear likely to settle without a hearing.

2 1 The Upper Hurunui River is safe from damming, despite

appeals against the Environment Court’s decision to protect it. Photo: Chris Todd

2 Forest & Bird is still trying to claim reimbursement for costs

related to the Rena oil spill in 2011. Photo: Kim Westerskov Forest & Bird

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TO SAVE OUR ENVIRONMENT YOU COULD STRUGGLE THROUGH DENSE BUSH IN APPALLING WEATHER, CLEARING THE ROTTING CARCASSES OF STOATS, RATS AND POSSUMS FROM TRAPS, AND DISPOSING OF THEIR PUTRID DECOMPOSING CORPSES

Photo: DOC

Or you could spend $25 a month and become a member of Forest & Bird Our volunteer pest control teams are hard at work in our forests, getting rid of pests that eat our native birds, chicks and eggs, and destroy habitats and food sources. We’re also advocating to local and central government for better pest control. By becoming a member of Forest & Bird you’ll be helping us achieve our goal of a 100% pest-free New Zealand. Please help us help nature with monthly contributions.

Find out about our range of memberships, and join by visiting forestandbird.org.nz/joinus

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An Eco-Retreat

Forest & Bird’s fabulous Ruapehu Lodge is a wonderful spot for a summer weekend. The Tongariro Crossing is nearby, as well as many other spectacular day walks in Tongariro National Park. Summer off-peak rates now apply.

Check out www.forestandbird.org. nz/ruapehulodge for more information.

There & back since 1973.

macpac.co.nz Forest & Bird

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COVER STORY

The Ngaruroro River isn’t the usual poster child for a specially protected river, writes Jay Harkness.

Hidden depths H

awke’s Bay’s Ngaruroro River hardly fits the bill for a pristine waterway. The top portion of the river is pretty much untouched but most of the river is edged by willows, not köwhai, and surrounded by farmland.

The Ngaruroro’s former outlet to the sea, now known as the Clive River, is filthy and was used as an industrial sewer.

Fresh blood once flowed into it from a freezing works. Its water is too dangerous for people to come into contact

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with, let alone swim in or collect kai from. Enormous clumps of cow cress line its banks. In summer the river’s stench reaches far and wide.

All the same, Forest & Bird, Fish & Game, Ngäti Hori ki Kohupatiki, Jetboating New Zealand and Whitewater New Zealand are applying for a water conservation order (WCO) on the Ngaruroro.

Why? Forest & Bird Hastings-Havelock North branch

1 chair Vaughan Cooper says it’s simple. If organisations like Forest & Bird only concentrated on saving the untouched rivers, there wouldn’t be enough habitat left for our remaining native species to survive.

“The Ngaruroro is one of only a few braided rivers in the North Island,” he says. “Our native plants and animals can’t just restrict themselves to the ‘pretty’ parts of the country or the parts that show no signs of humans having been there.”

2 1 The water quality of the Ngaruroro River’s upper reaches

is relatively good because the farmland in the catchment is mostly used for sheep and beef farming or for horticulture.

Photo: Peter Scott

2 Whio, or blue ducks. Photo: Bill Norris

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The WCO application process represents our best chance of saving the Ngaruroro for what it is right now ... a great habitat for our native species, a really valuable natural resource for the Hawke’s Bay region and for the country.

Vaughan Cooper

3

Three of the birds living in the Ngaruroro’s catchment are listed as nationally critical – the kötuku (white heron), pärera (grey duck) and the tuturuatu (shore plover). Another three are nationally vulnerable – the pohowera (banded dotterel), weiweia (New Zealand dabchick) and the whio (blue duck). The river hosts 93 bird species altogether. Eight of the 18 endemic or native fish species in the Ngaruroro catchment are classed as being “at risk – declining”, including the köura (freshwater crayfish), tuna (longfin eel) and piharau (lamprey).

Because the farmland in the catchment is still mostly used for sheep and beef farming or for horticulture – rather than for dairying – the levels of phosphorous and nitrogen in the river aren’t unhealthy. The levels of ammonia and faecal matter are also low.

The aim of the planned WCO application is not about clawing back what has been lost but maintaining the

4

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current standards of water quality and levels of flow. If the application is successful life on and around the river won’t change. Farmers will still be able to take water for stock to drink and current irrigation permits would be unaffected.

New irrigation dams couldn’t be built on the river’s main stem. Directly discharging pollutants into the water, for instance, from a new dairy farm, would be controlled through a new catchment plan and would not be allowed.

In the river’s lower reaches, where it is called the Clive River, the WCO would do a lot more. Vaughan says most people in Hawke’s Bay agree the Clive is a basket case and needs a clean-up, which would happen under a WCO. The application for the WCO, which is expected to be lodged this year, reflects the hard work of many people, all of whom have been working closely together for the sake of the river. Vaughan is just one of those who have made a huge contribution. His Havelock North living room looks more like a lawyer’s office than a retirement den – not that Vaughan describes himself as retired. He says his work on branch matters, the Ngaruroro WCO, the Ruataniwha irrigation dam and in representing the environmental lobby on local water consultation groups doesn’t leave time for paid work.

Vaughan says that the quality and flow levels of the Ngaruroro are more than just of benefit to fish, birds and recreational users. The enormous Watties and McCain plants take water from an aquifer fed by the Ngaruroro to process fruit and vegetables. Hastings District Council takes water from the same aquifer, adds fluoride and pipes it to the homes of its residents. Is the water clean enough to drink? The local district health board wouldn’t have it any other way.

COVER STORY

5

Even though 4000 litres of water disappear beneath the bed of the Ngaruroro and into the aquifer every second, the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council says not enough of that water is exiting the aquifer at its other end, 20 kilometres out to sea. Vaughan warns that if the water levels in the aquifer drop too low, the living organisms that keep its arteries from clogging will die, which would have serious repercussions.

“The Hawke’s Bay is no different to most of the rest of the country,” he says. “No one wants to see our rivers die but it’s also very hard to get an agreement on what needs to be done to save our rivers.

“But the consultative forum I have been a part of has made good progress in reaching agreements that, among other things, will ensure water is used efficiently. This will go a long way to ameliorating some of the problems we have in the region and will result in a new Catchment Plan.” Vaughan says groups in other areas are looking at adopting the collaborative approach to catchment forums.

“The WCO application process represents our best chance of saving the Ngaruroro for what it is right now ... a great habitat for our native species, a really valuable natural resource for the Hawke’s Bay region and for the country.

If this WCO isn’t approved by the Environment Minister, a whole lot of people are going to be putting up their hands to use the river in a different way. That will mean the end of the Ngaruroro as we know it.”

The Ngaruroro is an important part of what makes the Hawke’s Bay such a great place, says Vaughan. “It’s got the landscape, the seascape and the riverscape. I want to leave this a better place than I found it. And what better place to do that.”

6 KAWEKA RANGE

TUTAEKURI RIVER • NAPIER

NGARURORO RIVER

HASTINGS •

CLIVE RIVER

3 Forest & Bird Hastings-Havelock North branch chair

Vaughan Cooper beside the estuary into which the Ngaruroro drains. Photo: Jay Harkness

4 Kōtuku, or white herons, are visitors to the Ngaruroro.

Photo: davidhallett.co.nz

5 Tuna, or longfin eels, are in the Ngaruroro River. Photo:

Alton Perrie

6 Ngaruroro River. Photo: Peter Scott

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COVER STORY

A tale of two rivers First, a lesson in geography. The Clive River – so named because it runs past the small town of Clive – is the remains of the bottom few kilometres of the Ngaruroro. In 1969 the Ngaruroro was diverted into a canal, leaving the former waterway to merely drain the Karamü Stream.

The change, to reduce the risk of flooding, was just one in the long and sad history of human modification of the river.

Aki Paipper and her sister Margie McGuire, from the Kohupätiki Marae, which has stood on the banks of the Clive for more than 100 years, remember the old Ngaruroro from the early 1950s when they were young. They say children from the marae swam in the river, which no one would consider doing now. The sisters also speak of the river teeming with fish. A marae catering party once caught 80 to 90 pätiki (freshwater flounder) from a 400-metre section of the river in one night. It was also filled with tuna (longfin eels), kahawai, mullet and köura.

The Ngaruroro’s name (which means waves from the upokororo, or grayling, an extinct freshwater fish) came about after a dog belonging to the explorer Mähü Tapoanui waded into the river and disturbed so many of the fish that they created waves as they leapt away in fright. The name of the marae – Kohupätiki – translates as “mist of the flounder”.

The river, unsurprisingly, means everything to Aki and Margie. They belong to the hapü Ngäti Hori. Margie’s husband, Tom McGuire, of Tüwhakairiora, came to the area in the 1960s and learnt about the region’s history from one of the last kaitiaki of the Ngaruroro and Tukituki rivers, Charlie Hart.

Ngäti Hori has struggled to protect the river from what at times has amounted to serious abuse. Fresh blood used to be pumped into the river from the nearby Whakatü meatworks. Tom says even today eels die en masse on average twice a year from what he suspects are accidental chemical spills from industrial sites, road runoff and pollutants from farming and orchard operations. The eels have worms in their guts, which Tom says is a sure sign they

are unhealthy. Clumps of “cow cress”, a large watercresslike plant, grow so big they trap carp. When the fish die, the stench is revolting.

It was evident to the hapü that their appeals for the Clive to be better looked after were falling on deaf ears. So the hapü formed an action group – Operation Pätiki – and a management strategy with DOC, the regional council and NGOs. Being signatories to the application for the Ngaruroro water conservation order (WCO) is part of that strategy.

The first focus of Operation Pätiki was to plant a massive riparian strip along the river bank. Tom estimates that thousands of trees have been planted by Ngäti Hori and Forest & Bird’s Hastings-Havelock North branch, among others. This has transformed a wasteland with car wrecks and a wild pig (which Tom shot and roasted) into a haven for native birds. Tom says that in 10 years the planting will look “marvellous”.

Margie says it is time for the whole Hawke’s Bay community to stand up for their waterways. “It’s up to us to not let the Ngaruroro go on to the forever gone list,” she says. “The Heretaunga Plains are being used to the hilt,” Aki says. “The awa cannot sustain this current pressure. We need a new paradigm – a collaborative approach – if we are to move forward. The river is asked to take a lot. We know that we need economic growth but we cannot have that at the expense of our water. Water is our homeland security.”

Besides the cultural and environmental benefits of cleaning up the Clive, there could be another upside. The day before I visited the marae, a seven-year-old boy and his uncle drowned at Wairoa, in northern Hawke’s Bay, while trying to rescue the boy’s sister. The exact circumstances are unknown but Margie says that because so many lowland rivers are polluted children in rural areas don’t have as many opportunities to learn to swim. Cleaning up the Clive and other lowland rivers could help reduce the high number of children who drown every year. n Jay Harkness

It's up to us to not let the Ngaruroro go on to the forever gone list.

Margie McGuire Aki Paipper, left, Ani Ramarihitakotoawanga McGuire and Margie McGuire from Kohupātiki Marae beside the Clive River.

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Our whio need you Fewer than 1000 breeding pairs of the native whio remain. Photo: davidhallett.co.nz

A

growing assault on our freshwater is threatening many of our native birds and fish, and the whio, or blue duck, is no exception. Habitat loss, reduced water quality and hydro development have dramatically reduced the clear, fast-flowing river habitats they rely on.

Fewer than 1000 breeding pairs of whio remain and we need to take action to protect these precious native birds.

The whio is vanishing from many areas where it was once common. One of its remaining habitats is the Ngaruroro River in Hawke’s Bay. Forest & Bird has banded together with Fish & Game and other groups to apply for a water conservation order to protect this special river.

Leading ecologist Dr Mike Joy endorses Forest & Bird’s work as the voice for nature on freshwater. “Water conservation orders are one way that Forest & Bird can make a real difference on behalf of nature,” he says.

As well as being rare and precious to New Zealanders, whio are unique on the world stage. Of the world’s 150 waterfowl species, the whio is one of just four that live permanently in fast-flowing rivers. A torrent duck, whio have several unique characteristics. To help them survive in fast flowing rivers, they have webbed feet that collapse like a folded umbrella to create less drag. A special soft lip on the end of the whio’s bill acts like a head on a vacuum cleaner, allowing it to scrape off insect larvae clinging to rocks .

Growing intensification of farming and industry pose a major threat to New Zealand’s freshwater. As the voice for nature, Forest & Bird is at the forefront of ensuring checks and balances are put in place to project what remains of our freshwater and clawing back what we can.

Forest & Bird is keeping freshwater at the top of the

agenda for decision makers. Your donation to our freshwater appeal will help us send a clear message to councils, industry and the farming community about how imperative it is that we protect and preserve our freshwater, and it will help us advocate for more sustainable work practices.

Just 10 per cent of our lowland freshwater rivers and streams remain unpolluted. Ninety per cent of New Zealand’s original wetlands have been drained to make way for farming and other development.

How you can help You may have received a letter from Forest & Bird in January about the plight of the unique and vulnerable whio and our work to protect freshwater.

Please give generously to help Forest & Bird protect what’s left of our freshwater.

To read more about the whio and Forest & Bird’s work on freshwater and to make a donation, please visit www.forestandbird.org.nz/FreshwaterAppeal.

With your help, Forest & Bird can continue to work hard lobbying for legislation to safeguard our national treasures. Together we can turn around the decline in New Zealand’s freshwater and ensure that the voice of nature is heard.

Your donation will help Forest & Bird send a clear message on behalf of nature about protecting and preserving freshwater now and for future generations of New Zealanders.

Forest & Bird

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Denniston legal

battle closes

Forest & Bird has helped to permanently protect a part of the Denniston Plateau but was unable to stop an open-cast coal mine. By Jay Harkness.

Bulldozers might have started eating into one of the most precious parts of New Zealand’s conservation estate, the delicate and unique Denniston Plateau. How could this be allowed when so much of New Zealand’s natural heritage has already been destroyed?

Forest & Bird, our donors, volunteers, members and the Society’s West Coast branch have all worked extraordinarily hard and donated thousands of hours and dollars to stop Bathurst Resource’s open-cast mine going ahead. We thank you for your contributions.

After three years, Forest & Bird decided in November that its legal fight to stop the mine had gone as far as it could. The Environment Court decision to grant Bathurst its consents could have been appealed on points of law but a win would only have delayed the mine, not stopped it. So Forest & Bird opted not to appeal, in exchange for the company signing a watertight contract to permanently protect 745 hectares of the plateau. The Environment Court had directed Bathurst to create a reserve, but only to undertake its “best endeavours” to do so. That obviously wasn’t good enough, with no guarantee it would be achieved.

Forest & Bird Top of the South Field Officer Debs Martin says that taking on a mining company in the courts was a real challenge for a community group like Forest & Bird.

But she says Forest & Bird only takes court cases when there is a compelling reason to do so. “With DOC designating the Denniston Plateau as one of the 50 most ecologically valuable sites on the mainland, this was obviously one of those cases where we had to draw a line in the sand.”

DOC was largely missing in action from the legal effort to save the plateau. So if Forest & Bird had not been involved, Debs says Bathurst would not have had to commit to the reserve and the plateau would have been mined long ago, with many New Zealanders being none the wiser. Furthermore, Forest & Bird’s three-day BioBlitz on

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In September Debs Martin led a Forest & Bird field trip to the parts of Denniston Plateau that will become an open-cast mine. Photo: Andy Dennis

Denniston Pleateau in March 2012 revealed several species new to science.

“The fight to save Denniston has definitely been worth it,” says Debs. “The plateau is so important that we had no choice but to stand up for it. Parts of the Denniston Plateau have historically been mined underground but an opencast coal mine has no place on what is such a precious part of New Zealand, belonging to all New Zealanders.”

Now that the Denniston is firmly on everyone’s radar and this is election year, Forest & Bird will be asking representatives from all major political parties to state whether they support the creation of a reserve covering the most important remaining parts of the Denniston Plateau and the southern extent and valleys of the Stockton Plateau.

Debs says the question of a reserve is a good test of how committed a political party is to conservation. She also says Forest & Bird will continue to campaign against coal mining more generally, given that coal is one of the key drivers of climate change.

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A CLIMATE FOR CHANGE

A new era of oil exploration is beginning in New Zealand. A ship contracted by United States energy giant Anadarko is drilling an exploratory deep sea well in 1500 metres of water off the west coast of the North Island and another off the Otago coast.

Jay Harkness explores the links between the depth of water above a wellhead, conservation and climate change.

Deep sea dil

W

e all know the world needs to stop using fossil fuels, given that the emissions from their use are a major contributor to climate change. But there’s little consensus on when phasing out their use should begin.

Many politicians – mindful of the need to reduce debt, fund essential services and get re-elected – say New Zealand should be a fast follower and wait for others to cut their emissions before we cut ours.

David Robinson from the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand concedes that oil is a transitional fuel but he isn’t advocating for that transition to begin anytime soon.

Most climate scientists say the world is about to lose the chance to limit climate change to a two degree Celsius average global increase. The “Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets” report, produced in part by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is unequivocal.

It says that if global warming is to be kept at two degrees, half of all the proven reserves of fossil fuels will have to stay in the ground. That means we shouldn’t even be thinking about the unproven reserves of the sort Anadarko is searching for off New Zealand’s coasts.

When people talk about climate change, they understandably talk about the likely impacts on our way of life. An increasing body of work also points to its many impacts on nature. Some of these impacts are described in the book Living in a Warmer World edited by New Zealand climate scientist Jim Salinger. It describes how a fungus, linked to climate change, has killed off species of frogs and toads in Costa Rica and how mass coral bleaching was first noticed in the Florida Keys in 1980.

It says other species are coming under pressure as their habitat shrinks. The lowest elevation limits of 16 butterfly species in the Sierra de Guadarrama, in Spain, rose an average 212 metres in 30 years as the average temperature at the previous lowest extent increased by 1.3 degrees Celsius. This has translated into a 33 per cent reduction in habitat. In Canada the pine-bark beetle, which has been moving north as temperatures have risen, is killing huge swathes of boreal forest. The subsequent increase in bush fires is reducing the habitat of the woodland caribou.

New Zealand’s native plants and animals are, of course, not immune to the threats posed by climate change. For instance, the gender of a baby tuatara is determined by the temperature while eggs incubate in the soil. If it’s too warm, a breeding season could result in only males.

Alarmingly, biologist Terry Root, from California’s Stanford University, advocates for a type of ecological triage in response to climate change in her essay “Biodiversity: How will wildlife fare as the globe warms”, published in Living in a Warmer World. She says the species that are essential to the lives of others, such as those that help pollinate crops, must be saved at the expense of the nice-to-haves as the planet warms.

lemma

1 A ship shields an oil rig from the heat of a gas flare above

1

where the Deepwater Horizon sank into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The rig, called the Q4000, was sent to burn off some of the hydrocarbons leaking from the Macondo Well as engineers struggled to plug it. Photo: Daniel Beltra/ Greenpeace Forest & Bird

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Opening up new, deep sea oil frontiers off New Zealand’s coasts will lead to a small but undeniable increase in the chances that global warming will break the two degree mark. However, for many voters – whose taxes aren’t covering the costs of superannuation, roads and health – turning their backs on the potential royalties from drilling “just” for the sake of the climate is a bridge too far.

Even from a purely economic perspective, the deep sea equation is not straightforward. A serious spill has the potential to cost a lot more than it could ever make New Zealand in royalties both directly, through the costs of a clean-up attempt, and indirectly, by damaging the clean green image on which New Zealand markets itself and many of its products to the world.

The chances of a major blow-out are not high. But if a problem develops the chances are that it will be far more significant than if the well was in water less than 200 metres deep. It took engineers almost three months to successfully design and build a cap for the well beneath the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. BP will have to pay US$90 billion if all claims for compensation and fines are met – more than Iraq had to pay in today’s money for its invasion of Kuwait. By contrast, companies drilling in New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone are only required to carry NZ$30 million worth of liability cover to meet the terms of their licences.

Anadarko says things have moved on a long way since 2010. Anadarko’s ship is carrying a capping stack on board so there wouldn’t be delays while a cap was designed and built.

But there’s no denying that New Zealand is remote. If a relief well was needed to stop a blow-out (this is what finally plugged the Macondo Well beneath the Deepwater Horizon), a second rig would probably have to travel from as far away as Singapore to drill it.

In November Forest & Bird made a submission with Greenpeace to Parliament’s Regulations Review Committee, arguing the regulations created under the new

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| Forest & Bird

Exclusive Economic Zone Act (which sets the conditions for oil exploration in the EEZ) were meaningless, given they didn’t comply with international environmental law. At the time of writing the committee had not made a ruling.

In October Greenpeace released an independent study that modelled where the oil from a deep sea blow-out in either the Romney or Caravel basins – west of the North Island and east of the South Island – would end up. The results were dramatic. The Prime Minister immediately described the report as an attempt at scaremongering but the government refused to release Anadarko’s spill modelling, which the company had to submit to get its licence.

It later emerged that the flow estimates Greenpeace’s consultants used were lower than those used by Anadarko.

Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell says deep sea drilling undeniably poses a major threat in the short and long term to New Zealand’s natural heritage as does the wider “drill, dam and dig” approach to economic development.

“We should make no mistake. Taking a short-term, she’ll be right approach to climate change is the wrong thing to do by New Zealand’s flora and fauna.”

Living in a Warmer World: How a changing climate will affect our lives edited by Jim Salinger is reviewed on page 64.

“Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets” report is at http://bit.ly/1iwvGpR

2 A pelican on the Louisiana coast covered in oil from

the Deepwater Horizon spill. Photo: Jose-Luis Magana/ Greenpeace

3 The SV Vega occupies prohibited area around an Anadarko-

contracted ship as it prepares to drill a deep-sea well in November 2013. Photo: Nick Tapp/Greenpeace

Could we ever go oil-free?

1000m

The advocates of deep sea oil are always quick to point out everyone relies on fossil fuels to some extent. Indeed, it is impossible not to. But if the adoption of clean energies were incorporated in a systemic way, what sort of an alternative would they provide?

Using today’s technologies, it is certainly possible to substitute a large portion of our fossil fuel-derived energy needs with renewable alternatives. Indeed, 75 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity comes from renewable sources – mainly hydro. And one summer’s day in 2012 half of Germany’s electricity came from renewable sources.

The proponents of clean energy point out that fossil fuels are heavily subsidised actively and through a lack of pricing penalties for the carbon costs of their use, whereas clean energy alternatives don’t enjoy the same level of assistance. They say with a level playing field, wind, tidal, solar, geothermal, biomass (for instance from forestry off-cuts) and hydro energy sources could and should replace fossil fuels to cap the global average temperature rise at two degrees Celsius.

Forest & Bird Advocacy Manager Kevin Hackwell agrees. He says as long as wind farms, hydro stations and tidal generators are appropriately sited and set up in consultation with the communities around them they lead to far better long-term conservation outcomes than the pursuit of fossil fuels ever will.

1500m

Cost of a major oil spill

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125m Current deepest production well

Drilling depths in New Zealand

Planned drilling depths

500m

How far can we go with CO2 emissions

2795 GIGATONNES CO2 565 GIGATONNES CO2 We can afford to create only a further 565 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions if we are to keep within an average global 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise. Burning the proven reserves of oil, gas and coal would create 2795 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions.

Proven reserves of oil, gas and coal

2° of warming Man-made CO2 in atmosphere now

Global CO2 in 1750

Two experts from Forest & Bird contributed to Greenpeace’s report on the effects of a deep sea oil blowout. Forest & Bird seabird contractor Chris Gaskin wrote a fact file on which species would suffer, and how. The results make for grim reading.

The types of birds that would be affected by a spill wouldn’t be restricted just to those that live on the coasts where oil would wash up. For instance, the Cook’s petrel (classed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “vulnerable”) breeds on Little Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf but feeds in the Tasman Sea in an area that would be likely to be covered in oil in the event of a major blow-out in the Romney Prospect.

Marine biologist Anton van Helden, who works part time for Forest & Bird, also prepared evidence on the potential effects on marine mammals. Readers will be well aware of the plight of the critically endangered Mäui’s dolphin. The Greenpeace report showed 80 per cent of the narrow range of the critically endangered Mäui’s dolphin could be affected by a major oil spill.

Chris’s seabird fact file is on Forest & Bird’s website at www.forestandbird.org.nz Greenpeace’s report is at www.oilspillmap.org.nz

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our people

Racing for Forest & Bird A

ucklander Kristina Arthur last September ran a gruelling 250-kilometre race in Iceland and raised $1151 for Forest & Bird. She completed the race in seven days, averaging a marathon a day and carrying a 10-kilogram pack of gear.

Day five was the longest, at 63km, and covered a beach, lava cliffs, off road and road terrain. “The lava cliff section wasn’t long, but it involved a combination of high winds, rain, large waves, very slippery ground and rock hopping, all with a 9 to 10kg pack, which made it very slow for me,” Kristina says. “I finished the stage just before 11pm. The best news, considering it was still raining, was that the organisers had found a school gym for us all to sleep in, instead of wet tents. Solid roof, four walls and showers never felt so good.”

The camaraderie among competitors was a highlight.

“Everyone was looking out for everyone else, which made it an incredibly friendly experience.”

Kristina walked (and ran a small amount) 250km in 59 hours and 30 minutes. “I ran across the finish line with a smile on my face and only had relatively minor aches, pains and blisters. It was an amazing and challenging experience that really helped to push my boundaries.”

Forest & Bird was Kristina’s charity recipient because she learnt about conservation and the environment when a primary school teacher signed up her class to the Kiwi Conservation Club. She’s remained interested in the environment, and she values Forest & Bird’s work for nature.

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or Matt O’Neale, running the Auckland Marathon in November allowed him to indulge in a love of exploring and experiencing the environment and give back by raising funds for Forest & Bird.

“We live in a spectacular country but it’s difficult to get out and immerse yourself in it while attending to everyday life.

Endurance training and racing is one way to do so,” he says.

On the day of the marathon and after a steady training programme, Matt was worried – he felt his body was falling to pieces. “Running is high impact and before the race I’d accumulated all these niggling injuries – a sore ankle here, a pulled hamstring there. Some of these injuries had been threatening to stop me altogether.”

Matt joined a group of 20 all aiming to finish in three hours, and the runners supported each other to the finish line.

Matt’s goals were to raise funds for Forest & Bird, beat or meet his goal time and relax and enjoy it. He finished in 3:06 hours and exceeded his fundraising target to raise nearly $500 for Forest & Bird.

“I care very much about the environment and how it can be responsibly managed and preserved. These concerns are aligned with the aims of Forest & Bird so I was eager to contribute,” he says.

“There have been a number of recent challenges to the stewardship of New Zealand’s environment and the legislation that governs this. Forest & Bird has spearheaded opposition to many of these challenges. Campaigns and legal proceedings aren’t cheap, and I was happy to raise what I could through the donations of many generous supporters. Thanks to all these people!”

Forest & Bird thanks Kristina and Matt for the huge effort they put in to fundraise for nature.

1 Kristina Arthur crosses the finish line. Photo: Edward Zhang

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2 Matt O’Neale during the Auckland Marathon last year.

| Forest & Bird

Environmental stalwarts We pay tribute to three long-standing Forest & Bird members who died late last year.

Don Lamont The death of Forest & Bird’s former Southland branch chair, Don Lamont, on September 29 ended several decades of activism, influence and passion for the environment.

Don helped set up and served on committees for Men of the Trees, Idea Services in Gore (IHC), Farm Forestry and Coal Action Murihiku. He wrote submissions and letters to the editor, persuading by discussion rather than confrontation, and he opposed mining lignite in the Mataura Valley.

“Don was a friend who had a substantial influence on many lives as a man of great principle which manifested itself very strongly in his concern and work to protect our environment,” long-time Forest & Bird friend Fergus Sutherland said. “This ranged from his pioneering farm forest legacy to his courageous and unwavering advocacy for nature in many forums, particularly in his leadership role as chair of Southland Forest & Bird.”

Don was also outstanding in his practical support, digging holes, planting, weeding and doing maintenance on many conservation projects, including Te Rere yellow-eyed penguin reserve in the Catlins and the Lenz Reserve at Tautuku.

He received a special award for 60 years of commitment, service and dedicated action in Southland at the 2012 Environment and Conservation Awards. n Jenny Campbell

David Medway Founding Taranaki branch member David Medway died suddenly at home on October 3. He was one of the first Taranaki chairs after helping to establish the branch in 1953 and he was an active member until his death.

David also founded the Taranaki branch of the Ornithological Society in the 1950s and was an avid ornithologist. He was the author of several books and scientific papers about birds.

Eddie Bannister A long-time member of Forest & Bird’s Wairarapa branch, Eddie Bannister died on November 12 aged 88. Eddie was a farmer who practised conservation values on his farm. He was one of four members who in 1978 started to get the Forest & Bird reserve known as Fensham into the shape it is now. He worked tirelessly with the other members at Fensham and their hard work won the group a Forest & Bird Old Blue award in 2000.

Eddie was one of the pest eradicators until he started to lose his eyesight. He passed on his knowledge of wildlife and plant propagation to his children and grandchildren.

At his last Fensham Reserve barbecue he brought along a large hanging basket in which he had grown two Earina orchids – the Christmas (E. mucronata) on one side and the Easter (E. autumnalis) on the other. n Jenny Doring

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Forest & Bird

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our people

Höne McGregor takes the helm Höne McGregor is Forest & Bird’s new Chief Executive. He joined Forest & Bird in November after more than a decade as chief executive of PINZ, an international export services consultancy owned by the university and polytechnic sector.

He is a director of the Wakatü Incorporation, one of the most established Mäori trusts, and he is of Ngäti Kere, Ngäti Kahungunu, Ngäti Raukawa, Whänau-ä-Apanui, Ätiawa and Ngäti Rärua descent.

Hōne McGregor became Forest & Bird’s CEO in November.

Forest & Bird President Andrew Cutler says Höne brings to the Society an exceptional record of organisational and commercial leadership. “The Executive and I are looking forward to working with Höne as the Society develops and grows.”

Höne has spent his first months at Forest & Bird meeting members and Forest & Bird’s other stakeholders. “Forest & Bird has an outstanding reputation as the leading conservation NGO in New Zealand,” he says. “For more than 90 years Forest & Bird has worked to preserve and protect the native wildlife, ecosystems and landscapes of Aotearoa/New Zealand. I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this work.

“I am especially pleased to be working for an organisation whose values I share and which plays such an important role in communities across this country,” he says.

“My mother and grandmother have been active members of Forest & Bird for six decades and I have worked on wetland restoration projects between my hapü, DOC and regional councils.

“I believe the native wildlife, ecosystems and landscapes are a taonga, a treasure, that all New Zealanders share and which we have a duty to protect and preserve. I am conscious of the challenges we face and the heritage we must live up to.”

Höne is looking forward to meeting more members and working with members, staff and supporters to build a stronger and even more successful Society. From March he will lead a review of Forest & Bird’s staff structure.

New leader for kids’ club Tiff Stewart joined Forest & Bird as the new part-time Kiwi Conservation Club (KCC) Manager in October. Tiff, who lives in Dunedin, has been a teacher and environmental educator for several years and she was the temporary KCC Officer from May. Tiff is also the volunteer KCC co-ordinator for Dunedin.

Her first priority has been working with Forest & Bird staff, KCC co-ordinators, KCC members and parents to create a Forest & Bird youth strategy to guide KCC into the future.

KCC is Forest & Bird’s nature club for children, and includes Wild Things magazine, the KCC website and nationwide KCC groups run by volunteer co-ordinators, who organise regular nature trips and activities.

“KCC members are the conservationists and Forest & Bird members of the future,” Tiff says. “Giving children the chance to explore and form a love for our natural world is so important. Our KCC co-ordinators, website and magazine help kids to learn about nature in fun, engaging and memorable ways.”

Tiff Stewart with her daughters Monica, left, and Ella.

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New horizons for NI manager North Island Conservation Manager Mark Bellingham stepped down in November after nine years at Forest & Bird. His links with Forest & Bird go back to 1984, when he was the Auckland field officer, before he moved to Wellington as the field director until 1990 and oversaw the recovery of 600,000 hectares of public conservation land from the newly formed state owned enterprises. He also served on the Forest & Bird Executive in 2004.

During Mark’s break from working at Forest & Bird he taught environmental planning at Auckland and Massey universities and he was a consultant, which included working on the Chatham Islands. He was a councillor on Auckland Regional Council in the 1990s.

Mark was involved in the early days of the Ark in the Park project in the Waitäkere Ranges and he has worked on better protecting New Zealand fairy terns, of which fewer than 40 birds survive. Mark continued over summer the work he initiated to protect the fairy terns. “If New Zealand fairy terns are going to survive it will only be because of Forest & Bird’s project establishing a new nesting area for them on the Kaipara, where there is minimal development,” he says.

Mark will also continue his Forest & Bird work with iwi to establish a rähui tapu (marine reserve) at Mimiwhangata

in Northland. “I’ve tried to get Forest & Bird more aligned and more aware of Mäori conservation initiatives, so we are working together and are a more potent force.”

Among other work, he will continue with Forest & Bird’s input to the submission on the Auckland Unitary Plan on coastal issues.

Mark says he has enjoyed supporting individual Forest & Bird members and branch committee members. “We’ve got lots of members doing excellent work and I wish them well with their projects. Throughout my time at Forest & Bird our best conservation gains have come when members and staff are working together.”

Mark has taken a position as a planner and ecologist at Terra Nova Planning.

South Island Conservation Manager Chris Todd is the interim manager of Forest & Bird conservation staff in both islands.

Wildlife fellowship completed The completion of a fellowship awarded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to Central North Island Field Officer Al Fleming was marked at a ceremony late last year presided over by the Governor General Lieutenant General the Rt Hon Sir Jerry Mateparae.

The fellowship enabled Al to travel to Victoria, Brisbane, Alice Springs and Western Australia to study a Land for Wildlife scheme that Forest & Bird is now delivering as a pilot project in the central North Island. It is hoped that the Kaimai Connection, which Al and others are working on, will eventually restore birdsong and native wildlife to a corridor of protection linking Tauranga Harbour to Waihou River in the Waikato.

Participating landowners receive a property assessment report, which includes a detailed conservation action plan, and ongoing support, including the chance to take part in field trips. Their properties are identified with a sign that goes on display outside the property.

Farms, orchards, lifestyle blocks, school grounds, sport clubs and fields, business estates and public land such as council reserves are all good candidates for the scheme.

The Australian version of the Land for Wildlife programme involves about 15,500 properties. Al says the Land for Wildlife concept could be adopted elsewhere in New Zealand, which would provide a huge boost in protecting our native species and their habitats.

Central North Island Field Officer Al Fleming at Government House after completing a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust fellowship. Photo: Jay Harkness Forest & Bird

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GROWN-UP

Global birdwatcher A childhood love of birds has inspired a former KCC kid to cross the Pacific to help critically endangered finches on the Galapagos Islands. By Marina Skinner.

Francesca Cunninghame, 33, lives on the remote Galapagos Islands, 1000 kilometres from the coast of Ecuador, working to save the planet’s few remaining mangrove finches from extinction. It’s a long journey from her hometown of Dunedin, where she developed the love for wildlife that has inspired her career.

Franny, as she is known, is the field manager for the Mangrove Finch Project, which is leading the battle to save the rarest of Darwin’s finches. No more than 80 birds remain in a small area of mangroves on the north-west of Isabela Island, and they are threatened by introduced rats and an introduced parasitic fly Philornis downsi, which lays its eggs in bird nests. The larvae suck the blood of nestlings and they often die.

Kiwi Conservation Club (KCC) trips were childhood highlights for the nature-loving Franny, who went with her mother Rose and sister Allie. “Ken Mason was the Otago leader during our years in KCC and he led a range of different expeditions, all of them brilliant,” Franny says. “I remember a particularly exciting one walking around the rocky headland of Blackhead during fairly high seas and a rising tide.”

1

Quarantine Island in Otago Harbour was another favourite KCC destination, where the children planted trees, explored the rock pools and watched penguins. “It makes me really happy now that my nephew is in KCC and he has just been on a weekend trip to Quarantine Island with his mum. I wonder how big the trees are that she and I planted when we were young KCCers, and it’s great to know the next generation of our family is out there enjoying the same activities.”

When Franny was 13 she joined the Ornithological Society of New Zealand and learned from knowledgeable leaders on expeditions. She fitted in DOC contracts and volunteering while studying ecology, wildlife management and zoology at Otago University. “Volunteering with DOC has taken me to great places – Maud Island, Codfish Island, 40

| Forest & Bird

whio in Fiordland, möhua in the Dart Valley, lizards, little blue penguins in Otago,” she says. “I’ve also volunteered overseas, from the humid Amazonian grasslands of Bolivia to the Antarctic, and I have learnt so much from these experiences that I feel it makes me better in my current job.”

Franny has worked on the Galapagos Mangrove Finch Project at the Charles Darwin Foundation for the past four years. “Our goal is to halt the decline of the species and increase its range,” she says. “We have made ongoing field studies to determine population size and nesting success.

Introduced rats were the biggest threat but they are now controlled through bait stations.

“The Philornis fly causes very high mortality of the finches and other birds, and we have found up to 180 larvae in one single nest. The tiny chicks just don’t have a chance.

This year there were only 14 breeding pairs of mangrove finches and 37 per cent of the chicks that hatched were killed by Philornis. It is a huge problem, and really scary as we don’t know how to control them.

“Mangrove finch nests are up to 20 metres high in the trees. Even though we climb the trees the nests are far out on the end of spindly branches so we can’t access the nests to treat them in a manner safe for the chicks.”

Franny also works on other projects to protect local wildlife, including the Galapagos hawk. She enjoys living on the islands, and is based in the small town of Puerto Ayora. “Along the main street there are marine iguanas sun bathing on the footpath and yesterday no cars could get into the entrance of the national park as a young sea lion was asleep across the entrance. The garden where I live is full of Darwin’s finches and lava lizards.”

She is keen to return to New Zealand but not before prospects improve for her beloved mangrove finches. “We can all make a difference on a small scale,” she observes.

“Whether you are conserving something in your back garden or on the other side of the world, it’s equally valuable. Just do what you can.”

1 Francesca Cunninghame

holding a newly banded mangrove finch. Photo: Sue Maturin

2 Francesca Cunninghame

with Galapagos hawks.

Photo: Patricia Jaramillo

2

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Say “Yes!” to joining Forest & Bird

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going places

Leaving it

for the birds

1

Just 100 kilometres from Auckland and generously covered in native forest that will form a proposed new conservation park, Great Barrier Island (Aotea) is perhaps the ultimate conservationist’s getaway. By Mandy Herrick.

M

ore than half of Great Barrier Island (Aotea) is in the conservation estate. Two large private sanctuaries on the 27,400-hectare island also help to support the wildlife spill-over: Glenfern and Windy Hill.

The island’s hills are home to secretive colonies of threatened seabirds, its remaining wetlands teem with endangered päteke (brown teal) and its waters are alive with small pods of Bryde’s whales and, come summer, large schools of hammerhead sharks.

Living among this wildlife is a hardy bunch of 800 souls who all seem ingrained with a duty of care for the land and a gung-ho attitude that’s wonderfully infectious.

One such place that’s been transformed in the past few decades is Glenfern Sanctuary, a 260ha wildlife haven.

Visitors can stay in one of two turn of the last century homesteads and rewind the clock 1000 years to a time when New Zealand was a land without teeth.

Since 1995 more than 15,000 native trees have been planted and a predator-proof fence has been erected across the peninsula to stop the tide of ship rats, cats, pigs, rabbits and kiore.

Fortunately, I arrived in springtime, when the avian world starts dancing. I became a happy bystander to the courtship performances of the käkä, kererü and kötare (kingfisher) that flit around the sanctuary.

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The team behind the project – Scott and Emma Cronin – unwittingly took on the task of transforming this bare farmland under the guidance of its owner, the late Tony Bouzaid. Schooled in marine eco-physiology (she has a PhD), Emma is a quiet powerhouse and data-head behind many of the sanctuary’s projects, such as pest and bird monitoring. She’s just completed a black petrel education project, including a game that will be translated into Spanish, and distributed to schools in Ecuador and Peru where the birds migrate each year.

Husband Scott is also a powerhouse – with muscle, know-how and an unending curiosity to solve practical, knotty conservation problems. He’s a trap fanatic and a self-confessed ratter. So far, team rat consists of Scott and his Jack Russell terrier Milly, a pup who bounces along at his heels wherever he goes. Milly has a fine nose for rats and Scott hopes to enrol her in the Department of Conservation’s conservation dog programme so she can become a fully fledged ratter to help deal to the kiore that slip around the fence’s edges.

As we stroll around the property, it is clear that Glenfern has become quite the sanctuary. It’s like entering an avian orchestral pit as you wind your way up from the grassy banks to the forested hilltop – each step is rewarded with a growing earful of birdsong.

During our walk we peer under gnarled püriri roots to discover nesting black petrels, stare skywards to watch käkä in full screech and climb into the arms of an 800-yearold kauri tree that cradles a viewing platform. It is one of a handful of 2-3-hour walks that weave through the sanctuary.

Glenfern is a stronghold for several imperilled species: Cook’s petrels, black petrels, chevron skinks and päteke.

As we return to the house I’m treated to the sight of several päteke mothers parading great lines of fluff-balls behind them.

Under this forested landscape lies silver and gold.

It’s heartening to know that locals have fiercely resisted government-led proposals to strip its trees to uncover these minerals and instead have filled the trees with birds.

Stewart Island will probably take the title of New Zealand’s first populated pest-free island but Great Barrier Island’s legion of pest-busting locals is helping to take the vision of pest-free New Zealand one step closer.

GLENFERN • SANCTUARY

WARKWORTH

5

GREAT BARRIER ISLAND

Glenfern Sanctuary (80ha) is for sale to anyone interested in taking guardianship of this land. Contact Scott (scott@ glenfern.org.nz) for more information.

AUCKLAND

Getting there Directions: 2

Take a half-hour flight from Auckland or catch a passenger or car-ferry (2½–4 hours).

It is recommended you hire a car to get to Glenfern.

Staying there: A homestead sleeps 8-plus and a cottage accommodates six people. Prices range from $200-$750 a night. See www.glenfern. org.nz as prices vary.

Walking there: Guided walks cost $40 each (minimum 6 people). Bookings are essential.

4 3 1 The waters surrounding Great Barrier Island are filled with

dolphins, Bryde’s whales and other marine life.

2 Endangered päteke (brown teal). Photo: Mandy Herrick 3 Cook’s petrels breed on the island.

4 Chevron skinks – one of New Zealand’s rarest skinks – are on

the island.

5 Kim Herrick and her daughter Jessy explore some of the

tracks around the Glenfern property. Photo: Mandy Herrick

6 Scott Cronin’s Jack Russell terrier, Milly, has a nose for rats.

Photo: Mandy Herrick

6 Forest & Bird

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Buzzing about

1

When Aucklanders turn out at dusk to scan the sky, it’s possible they have contracted a case of bat fever, writes Mandy Herrick.

L

ong-tailed bats (pekapeka) have recently been found in suburban Auckland and, fortunately for these threatened creatures, Aucklanders are bat mad.

Ben Paris, aka Batman, has been charged with creating a little bat fever, so he takes me to the semi-industrial site where it all began, a handkerchief of grass overlooking native bush.

Here in Swanson Reserve, 20 minutes from Auckland City, long-tailed bats were discovered last year, and a Bat Fun Day was held to welcome these furry thumb-sized citizens into the neighbourhood.

“We thought that we would get 50 people. Instead over 400 people turned up. This place was humming. We had bat face-painting, bat kite-making and lots of stalls and displays telling people about how they could care for their new neighbours,” he says.

Ben is Auckland Council’s senior biodiversity officer and, among the 30 ecologists who work at the council, he has found his niche as bat protector. He hosts a Batman Facebook page, gives talks and bat walks, attends conferences and organises suites of bat hotels.

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So far, bats have been found in two suburban areas in Auckland – Henderson Valley and Swanson Reserve.

We strain our necks and look up at an old pine supporting two home-made wooden “kent boxes” which are in the bats’ flight-line four to five metres up.

“In Geraldine, they took three years to move in, so we’re not holding our breath. Arborists check them every few months and apparently a few spiders have taken up residency there.”

These boxes are a snug fit for the bats and the tree is ringed with a possum guard, so it is hoped predators will stay away from the roosts.

Typically, long-tailed bats move between roost sites regularly (the pups hang on to their mothers by their nipples) so once these key sites are identified, reinforced predator control for ship rats, possums, stoats and feral cats can be put in place.

The bats can’t be tracked for long distances by radio tracking systems because they’re too small to carry large battery devices, so finding the roosts, or getting them to move into safe bat hotels, can be hit or miss.

It’s this experimental new territory that Ben seems to enjoy; he’s veritably buzzing with new ideas about all things bat related.

He wants to start a citizen science bat map, enlist primary schools to make bat hotels and have whole neighbourhoods erecting backyard, predator-proof, pole-mount boxes.

The Swanson Reserve lies along the North-West Wildlink, a 40-kilometre wildlife corridor of backyard sanctuaries, so no doubt his ideas will be well received in these parts.

Forest & Bird has been actively working with homeowners in the area to protect their patch, and join the green dots between Tiritiri Matangi to the Ark in the Park in the Waitäkere Ranges, so birds, insects and bats can spill out from these wildlife havens.

In this belt lie 176 households that regularly carry out pest control in their backyards, so it’ll be easy work finding the bat lovers. Or if that fails, there are always mosquito haters.

“In the US, people have these bat boxes stuck to the side of their houses as an insect control device. One bat will gobble up to 1000 mosquitoes in a night, so they’re pretty handy to have around,” he says.

Unlike US and Australian bats that check into bat boxes overnight, New Zealand bats are more elusive.

Long-tailed bats typically have three real-estate requirements: a big gnarly tree with loose bark for roosting, a corridor of water that acts as a flight path and open areas to feed on insects such as golf courses, school fields and parks.

Like many Aucklanders, bats are feeling the squeeze of the housing shortage. Hole-riddled gnarly püriri trees or big, old kauri are becoming harder and harder to find.

And though they’ve adapted to take up residence in pine, macrocarpa, gum trees and willows, kauri dieback and dismantling of tree protection laws under the Resource Management Act are threatening their existence.

Fortunately, one of the best spots to get a glimpse of these creatures is in the 2100-hectare pest-controlled Forest & Bird-Auckland Council Ark in the Park, in the Waitäkere Ranges.

So as the light begins to fade, we leap into our cars, drive 15 minutes up windy, gravel roads and reach a clearing where flocks of bats are known to come alive at twilight.

I clutch a bat detector – one of 10 the council owns – that can be lent to anyone who suspects bats may be hiding out in their garden or neighbourhood reserve.

I set the dial to 40 kilohertz, and wait patiently for my bat detector to click and buzz to alert me to the fact that bats are within 20 metres.

Nothing happens. I wait. Still nothing happens. I arch my head back and look into the gloaming for the black-winged figures with their staccato, erratic flight patterns.

I’m told these minuscule bats, which weigh less than a couple of 20-cent coins, can fly 25 kilometres in one night.

Impatient, I ask Ben what they’ll be doing on this chilly mid-November evening. “The temperature is sitting at 11 degrees, so they might be out and about. If it drops below 10 degrees, they’ll go into a state of torpor so they’ll be especially drowsy.”

Although this built-in energy-saving device can work well, it also puts the bats at the mercy of predators.

And it’s not just predators. Unwitting arborists can also

fell whole roosts of dozy bats, causing them to spill out of their warm burrows, get cold and die. Arborists have been very receptive to Ben’s messages, and, because arborists spend their lives suspended in trees, they are the most likely to spot a bat roost.

Despite all these initiatives, I can’t help thinking that these bats have the odds stacked against them. The Department of Conservation estimates long-tailed bat numbers will fall by about 90 per cent by 2050, so time is of the essence.

Ben and his bat colleagues have successfully installed about 20 bat boxes in Hamilton and bat love down there has reached fever pitch, so it may catch on in a big way.

Ben is even hatching a plan with a team of bat researchers to transfer some of the bats’ rarer cousins, lesser short-tailed bats, from Little Barrier Island to the mainland in 2016.

2

• SWANSON RESERVE

AUCKLAND

• HENDERSON VALLEY

1 Bats are easy prey for cats, rats, possums, stoats and other

predators. Photo: Colin O’Donnell

2 Auckland Batman Ben Paris on the lookout for bats. Photo:

Mandy Herrick

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However, a bat translocation has never been successful because of their hard-wired homing instinct and their ability to fly over long distances. If such a plan succeeded, it could open up a whole new swathe of bat territories – and help spawn more bat-care groups.

As we scan the night sky, disappointment slowly replaces excitement. The bats are not coming out. Ben says perhaps it’s too cold or the moon is too full, making them easy prey for ruru.

Bat-spotting season starts in earnest in January when it’s warm, so I eagerly sign up for one of the park ranger summer bat walks at Ark in the Park. The early symptoms of bat fever are evident.

Long and short of it Long-tailed bat Chalinolobus tuberculatus • Weighs 8-11 grams • Small ears • Long tail • Chestnut brown

• Eats insects • Catches prey in the air • Roosts in tree hollows and caves

Short-tailed bat Mystacina tuberculata • Weighs 12-15 grams • Large pointed ears • Short tail • Mousy grey

• Eats nectar, fruit and insects • Catches prey on the forest floor • Roosts in tree hollows and caves

Brian Lloyd and Julie McLintock with a bat harp trap at Pelorus River during a survey.

Going batty Forest & Bird and Te Hoiere/Pelorus Bridge Bat Recovery Project are hosting a New Zealand bat conference from March 16-19 in Rai Valley, within the Pelorus River catchment, in the heartland of Marlborough’s remaining long-tailed bat population.

The theme of the conference is working together to achieve better outcomes for New Zealand’s bats.

Forest & Bird has just completed five years of bat surveys in the top of the South Island and the results and recommendations will be presented at the conference.

Forest & Bird’s Te Hoiere/Pelorus Bridge Bat Recovery Project has been underway in nearby Pelorus Bridge Scenic Reserve since 2010. The reserve is crucial to the bat population’s survival as it includes one of the few remaining stands of the towering podocarp forests that covered the area’s alluvial lowlands before logging began 100 years ago.

A two-day post-conference field trip to D’Urville Island is being considered. D’Urville Island is the eighth-largest island in New Zealand and bat surveys undertaken a year ago indicate that it is home to one of the largest bat populations in the South Island. The island includes an extensive area of relatively unmodified low-altitude forest, and is free of possums, rats, weasels and ferrets. It might provide the best prospects for long-term conservation of South Island long-tailed bats.

More information at batconference@forestandbird.org.nz To register go to www.forestandbird.org.nz/batconference or write to Bat Conference, PO Box 266, Nelson 7040. Registrations close on March 1.

Please indicate if you are interested in joining a field trip to D’Urville Island.

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Our partners

Kiwi Camping sponsors KCC Forest & Bird is delighted to announce Kiwi Camping is the exclusive sponsor of the Kiwi Conservation Club (KCC), our children’s conservation club.

Kiwi Camping is recognised as one of the most trusted outdoor brands in New Zealand, with its range of family tents dominating the New Zealand camping landscape for almost 25 years.

KCC is all about nurturing the next generation of conservationists. Our partnership with Kiwi Camping will provide important financial support for our work with children and young people, and equipment for KCC clubs to use.

An important part of developing the connection with our amazing native plants and animals and wild places is being able to get out and experience them first hand. Kiwi Camping is supporting this by providing tents and camping equipment to enable more children and young people to go camping and on field trips. Kiwi Camping is also providing packs of equipment for our intrepid field officers to use when they spend time in the bush as part of their work.

“It is great when New Zealand companies really get behind the work of Forest & Bird and especially support us to develop those next generations of passionate Kiwi conservationists,” says Forest & Bird Development Manager Dave Bellamy.

Gregg Brown from Kiwi Camping says: “Our decision to partner with Forest & Bird was an easy one. It’s a natural fit and a seamless reflection of our brand. We are about allowing Kiwis to experience our diverse and incredible outdoors in the best possible way. As a father myself, I believe strongly that we need to instil in our children the wonders of our great outdoors, and camping gives our kids a true taste of New Zealand.”

For more information about Kiwi Camping and to find your nearest stockist, go to www.kiwicamping.co.nz

Amazing facts about…

SANDFLIES

Photo: George Novak

By Michelle Harnett

S

ummer in New Zealand: slip, slop, SLAP! The smear of red and black on your arm, leg or foot is blood and the remains of a sandfly (namu in Mäori). Only three of the 19 Austrosimilium species identified to date bite humans but they cover the country from the far north to Bluff, avoiding only very dry areas of the South Island’s east coast.

A red smear means it’s too late, you have been bitten and the wound has been injected with anticoagulants to keep the blood flowing and agglutinins to start the digestion process. The familiar redness, swelling and itchiness of a sandfly bite is caused by an allergic reaction to these foreign substances.

Sandflies find their prey by detecting dark colours, changes in carbon dioxide concentration and odour.

To the West Coast sandfly the smell of humans is as enticing as that of moulting penguins, prompting the question, what did sandflies bite before humans arrived? The answer is birds, seals and bats, which were present in far greater numbers than today. Feeding on humans is opportunistic behaviour.

Only the females bite, seeking nutrients to produce eggs, which are laid on rocks in and around running water. On hatching, the larvae spit out a silk that they use to stick themselves to stones. Safely attached, they extend fine fans around their mouths to filter food particles from the flowing water. The larvae are in almost every waterway in New Zealand, providing a food source for birds, insects like the caddisfly and native fish – bullies, galaxiids, eels and mudfish.

Liberal use of insect repellent is the best way to avoid being bitten. Mäori are reported to have smeared their bodies with clay and fat to avoid bites.

Early settlers also favoured fat, sometimes mixed with kerosene or disinfectant. A chemical-free alternative is to cover up exposed skin with light-coloured clothes and keep moving, especially on cloudy, humid days.

Or stay inside and only come out after dark, but that is hardly the way to enjoy summer.

Kiwi Camping helps New Zealanders get outdoors to enjoy our unique environment.

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Fungi

the forgotten achievers 1

Fungi are the life of our forests, as the recyclers of all dead things and the symbiotic partners to 90 per cent of all plants. So, Anna Chinn asks, what’s the story with fungal conservation?

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P

eter Johnston and Peter Buchanan are talking about a thing called Fischer’s egg. We are driving through the countryside of the Gisborne region, during the 27th New Zealand Fungal Foray. This annual event is when most of our mycologists congregate in one area to gather mushrooms for study, and to discuss all corners of kingdom fungi.

The Peters, who have been attending the forays since the 1980s, are scientists with Landcare Research in Auckland. I have come from Wellington to ask them about fungal conservation.

“You know,” says Dr Buchanan, “fungal conservation could become better recognised if some countries show the way and document things that have gone extinct or are particularly rare. We need those fungal icons to help with publicity.”

Dr Buchanan, who is also the membership secretary for the International Society for Fungal Conservation, wants to see Fischer’s egg assume icon status.

Fischer’s egg is not an egg. It’s a mushroom, the fruiting body of the native fungus Claustula fischeri. A mature one looks like a small hard-boiled egg busting out of a brown shell. It’s not your regular cap-and-gill kind of mushroom.

It is a fungal weirdo, the lone species in its genus, which is in turn alone in the family, Claustulaceae. What’s it doing here? Why did it decide to look like an egg? I always think the mushrooms must have a plan, but the scientists shun such talk. The egg is what they call a truffleoid fungus; like a truffle but not a truffle. They theorise (without ever implying fungal intent) it may have evolved so our flightless native birds would eat it, the tasty ovoid morsel, and carry the spores away in their guts for dispersal via dung. The usual method is straightforward wind dispersal.

Fischer’s egg has been found in both New Zealand and Tasmania, and in this country, it is listed in the highest threat category of “nationally critical”. Of just five records in Landcare Research’s national fungarium, four were at Fringed Hill, Nelson.

“I’d better let them know that could be an area where they should keep bikes away,” says Dr Buchanan. The Nelson City Council has recently sponsored a feasibility study for a gondola to shuttle downhill mountain-bikers to the top of Fringed Hill.

Dr Johnston was present when the fifth collection of Fischer’s egg was found, in Southland in 2008.

“We went to a small reserve near Gore, and up at the top of the hill, there were just a few really old känuka, just kinda hanging on. They had almost disappeared, basically, as the forest grew up around them.

“We found some of the Fischer’s egg in there, growing on the ground around the trees. But they’re mycorrhizal on the känuka, so when those trees die, that population will disappear.”

Ah, the mycorrhizal relationship. The secret everlasting love affair of the biosphere. In which 90 per cent of terrestrial plants – trees, shrubs, beanstalks, the lot – exist in symbiotic relationship with at least one fungus, and potentially hundreds of fungi.

Most plants seemingly cannot uptake enough soil nutrients, including water, without fungal assistance. All mycorrhizal fungi live either on or in plant roots, most

2

3 forming sheaths of mycelial threads that effectively increase the surface area of the roots, delivering vital nutrients.

In exchange, the plants provide carbohydrates they’ve produced through photosynthesis, a process the fungi can’t do for themselves.

Terrestrial plants and mycorrhizal fungi have co-evolved to nurture each other in this way. And so, that Fischer’s egg population in Southland will die when those old känuka go.

It’s really very romantic.

But back to conservation. What to do to preserve and increase healthy populations of indigenous fungi? And not only the mycorrhizal ones that have direct relationships with plants, but also the independent decomposers that serve forests by returning dead matter to soil.

“I can’t think of a single thing that’s been done that has resulted in more fungi,” says roving mycologist Pat Leonard.

That’s not a good start, and he is speaking in world terms.

Globally, the fungal conservation movement is in its infancy: the IUCN Red List, which aims to catalogue the survival status of all biological species, logs only one fungus and two lichens (fungal-algal life partners). The fungus is Pleurotus nebrodensis, the critically endangered white ferula mushroom of Sicily, which people have almost eaten to extinction.

1 A native saprobe known as a coral fungus. Photos: Anna

Chinn

2 Landcare Research’s Peter Johnston inspects a native

Agrocybe parasitica mushroom growing on a tree trunk.

A. parasitica, which has the Māori name tawaka, is an edible species with distinctive rusty-brown skirts beneath its caps.

Its ecological niche is to rot the heart wood of old trees and help usher them to their death.

3 A less-famous cousin of the blue Entoloma.

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We need to start talking about flora, fauna and fungi. Fungi is the missing F-word.

Landcare Research scientist Peter Buchanan 4

5

The International Society for Fungal Conservation was only formed in 2010, and held its third congress in November at Akyaka, Turkey. Among the issues discussed were the harm done by fertilisers to beneficial fungi in agriculture, the large-scale harvesting of wild mushrooms for food, climate change, habitat pressure and how to make signatory countries to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity realise they have signed up to protect fungi as well as animals and plants.

That they do not already realise this, given the fungal kingdom comprises at least a million species, making it easily more diverse than both flora and vertebrate fauna, is to the chagrin of many mycologists.

Dr Buchanan puts it simply: “We need to start talking about flora, fauna and fungi. Fungi is the missing F-word.”

Signatories to the biodiversity convention have to report at intervals on their domestic conservation efforts. The International Society for Fungal Conservation has surveyed the results. Like most countries, New Zealand gets a fail for conservation reports in which fungi are “not consistently treated as separate from plants”. Oh, dear.

Perhaps even before iconic species are asserted, raising awareness of fungal life has to be the starting point for any sort of conservation conversation in New Zealand.

It shouldn’t be too hard: mushrooms have some of the best stories in our forests. We have giant edible ones that grow on tree trunks and flash their rust-coloured skirts beneath burger-bun caps, purple ones pretending to be berries that lie at the feet of beech trees, and even concave mushrooms that wait for the rain to splash their spores out into the world. The rain-splash reproduction method! It’s poetic.

Reproduction, in terms of fungi, has a couple of meanings. A spore can germinate on its own and form a living mycelium, a vegetative mass of threads in the substrate. But in most cases, this organism will be unable to produce fruiting bodies until new DNA comes along.

That happens when it meets and fuses with a compatible 50

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mycelium of the same species from a different parent organism. (Additionally, in the case of mycorrhizal species, this has to happen near a companion plant.) When fused mycelia produce the spore-bearing structures we call mushrooms, sexual recombination has occurred and biodiversity gains some ground.

It’s just as well mushrooms produce millions of spores or the fungi would never stand a chance within these reproductive parameters, coupled with pressures such as habitat loss. Some species evidently don’t stand a chance anyway.

Claustula fischeri may be on the way out, though the scientists say they would gladly be proved wrong about that. “A useful thing to do would be to find more places where it’s growing,” says Dr Johnston.

Mycologists have certainly searched for the eggs but at the same time they are trying to get their heads around perhaps 25,000 species of fungi that live here, most of them undescribed. The discovery and the conservation of our fungal wildlife are going to have to co-evolve.

Anna Chinn is a Wellington-based journalist and mushroom enthusiast.

For the curious n

The Fungal Network of New Zealand runs the annual fungal foray. The next one will be in Täkaka, in May. See www.funnz.org.nz. Non-scientists can take part in specimen collection and learn about and how to identify fungi. n The International Society for Fungal Conservation allows free membership at this early stage in its development. www.fungal-conservation.org n Eugenia Bone’s book, Mycophilia (Rodale, 2011), is a sweeping and entertaining entry to the weird world of mushrooms.

4 The native Crucibulum

laeve, known as a bird’s nest fungus. Packets of spores in its ‘splash cups’ resemble eggs, and these are dispersed by falling raindrops. It is a saprobic fungus, living on and breaking down dead plant matter. Photo: Anna Chinn

5 Peter Buchanan with

Ganoderma applanatum.

6 New Zealand’s famous bright-

blue mushroom, Entoloma hochstetteri. Scientists at Auckland University have managed to grow this saprobe from a culture in the lab, and recently announced they will be extensively testing it for edibility. Photo: Anna Chinn

6

In search of a conk One of New Zealand’s native fungi was last seen in 1972.

It is possibly extinct, though Peter Buchanan, of Landcare Research, is still optimistic about seeing it again – and he hopes Forest & Birders will keep an eye out for it.

With its shiny cap up to 50 centimetres wide, the grand Ganoderma species known as ‘Awaroa’ should be easy to spot, if it still exists.

Anyone who has ever walked in the bush will have probably seen one of the two common Ganoderma native to New Zealand. These fungi live in, break down and devour the dead parts of trees. Their fruiting structures are conks: those woody knobs and shelves that grow on tree trunks.

Because it looks like wood, a Ganoderma conk could be mistaken for part of the tree. But if you take your nose to one, you will smell the pungency of a mushroom.

Ganoderma conks, however, tend to dwell for months to years, far longer than your average, fleeting mushroom. Its habit of lingering is another factor that gives Dr Buchanan hope of finding the missing species ‘Awaroa’.

Just three Ganoderma ‘Awaroa’ specimens have been collected, all between 1969 and 1972, and all from the trunks of pukatea trees, all in or near Awaroa Valley in the Waikato.

The valley has given its name to the species, which has not been formally described and so has no Latin name.

It might only ever have occurred in the valley but rumours – as rumours will do with elusive species – place it elsewhere in the country too.

Dr Buchanan explains how an ‘Awaroa’ conk can be distinguished from the two common types. “It doesn’t harden to be woody hard. You can make an indentation with the sharp edge of your fingernail. The other difference between the common Ganoderma, which are woody hard, and this rare one is that the ‘Awaroa’ has a shiny cap

whereas the common ones have a dull cap.”

How it has come to be seriously endangered, if not extinct, is a mycological mystery. Dr Buchanan says pukatea, the apparent host tree of choice, is not scarce in the Waikato. Climatic and pollutant factors are two unknowns. Sheer genetic bad luck is pretty much ruled out.

“You’ve survived until now. You’ve survived a few million years probably, so why die out now? The argument is really we should get off our backsides – I should get off my backside, and go find it! We’ve looked two or three times, but not really intensively enough.”

He plans to search again this summer for that shiny redto-brown shelf, possibly lurking on an old pukatea trunk somewhere in the Waikato.

The common New Zealand native bracket fungus, Ganoderma applanatum. The missing species, Ganoderma ‘Awaroa’ is distinguished from G. applanatum by its shiny brown cap and ability to be indented with the sharp edge of a fingernail.

Photo: Anna Chinn Forest & Bird

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A tern’s story B

rooke Connolly, 27, of Auckland won the Forest & Bird Facebook photo essay competition last year with a series of photos capturing the life of a white tern from conception to flight. The photographs were taken on Raoul Island in the Kermadecs, where Brooke worked for DOC clearing weeds. “In my spare time I would go out to Boat Cove to document the white terns’ life cycle. I was lucky enough to watch three tern chicks grow up, Terry, Tommy and Tulah,” she says.

Forest & Bird Marketing Manager Phil Bilbrough, who ran the competition late last year, says: “The story is very familiar but the execution and quality of the photographs made this photo essay a winner.”

In second place was Martin Tonks’ ultra-close-up study of copper butterflies. Maryann Ewers and Amanda Rogers also submitted high-quality photo assignments.

The photo essay by 2012 Old Blue winner Maryann took us on a snowy trapping trip into the high country, telling a story of camaraderie in a beautiful but cold land.

Amanda told a story of the Heaphy Track’s beautiful landscape and her memories of a lost friend.

All the essays are at https://www.facebook.com/ notes/forest-bird/forest-bird-facebook-photo-essaycompetition-update/10151691537402633

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Forest & Bird

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Living

wild lives

1

In New Zealand, the land without teeth, where large, browsing moa are gone forever, what does ‘rewilding’ mean? Living landscapes, suggests Claire Browning – making New Zealand a land for wild life.

M

ost recently given prominence by English ecojournalist, best-selling author and campaigner George Monbiot, “rewilding” is a new word for a vision where rich forests, their birdlife and other living systems thrive and we live among them.

Monbiot says it’s the subject he loves more than any other and to which he will give much of the rest of his working life. He is firing shots across the heather at English conservation, tweedily defending bare, grazed, “sheep-wrecked” upland and heather-covered moorland in perpetuity – land that should be covered in trees, once roamed by elephants.

In Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding – called by one reviewer “three-quarters exhilarating environmental manifesto, one-quarter midlife crisis”– he lays out his ecological case.

The book explores and argues for the fulfilment of rewilding potential in England and the rest of Europe.

In other words, the mass restoration of living systems, including the possibility of welcoming home species that were indigenous just “a few ecological seconds ago”, which are already spreading back through Europe: big browsing and hunting species such as wolves, lynxes,

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beavers, boars, moose, bison and the elephant.

And, while we won’t recover the ancient megafauna – the mythical-sounding aurochs, the sabre-toothed tigers, the woolly mammoths – the chance is not lost for changes capable of profound effects on both ecology and the more metaphorical landscape of our lives and minds.

Rewilding is a theory of trophic cascades – an “ecological process that tumbles from top to bottom of an ecosystem”, like the reintroduction of wolves to America’s Yellowstone National Park.

The wolves control the deer by keeping their numbers down but also by engineering, in the most natural and primitive way, changes in deer behaviour. The deer learn to avoid risky places, giving nature enough breathing space in those places to bounce back. Sinking down their roots, regenerating trees hold fast the banks of rivers and make homes for returning beavers – and the beavers are engineers of whole landscapes, shaping the rivers’ paths.

Over time – even time on a human scale – the reengineering of ecosystems re-engineers the physical landscape, nature’s way.

There’s no doubt George Monbiot is not seized only by the conservation and restoration possibilities. He’s

NATURE OF TOMORROW carried away by the romance and the adventure of it – the possibility of us all living wilder, more magical lives.

Further east, in the Netherlands, rewilding is already creeping across the landscape – “great nature in a small country” (grote natuur in een klein land) as new documentary De nieuwe Wildernis describes it.

Oostvaardersplassen, the first example, is a man-made ecology, built on rewilding ideas: a permanent reserve of wild, free-ranging grazing herds, flocks of birds and wetlands that recently saw an otter arrive, though other animals – European bison and top-level predators like wolves – have yet to arrive or be introduced.

It has given birth to a vision for Rewilding Europe, an initiative co-led by WWF-Netherlands, which aims to rewild at least one million hectares of Europe’s land by 2020, “creating ten magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas”.

These are very different ecologies from our own.

Britain and the rest of Europe had a megafauna similar to Africa’s. In a world where elephants and mammoths once dominated everywhere else, Australasia was the exception.

Our own, infamous Acclimatisation Society was the last to have attempted the “Serengeti on our doorstep”, as Monbiot has called his new world.

Our own big browsers – the different types of moa and their predator the Haast’s eagle – are gone. Recent Landcare Research work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, considered moa’s ecological role and legacy effects of their extinction. It had been wondered whether the emu and ostrich might carry out the same ecological role that moa used to.

However, this recent study concludes that moa extinction caused “irreplaceable loss of ecological function in New Zealand’s ecosystems”, which big browsers such as the emu or ostrich will never match. No herbivore could replace the broad range of feeding ecologies shown by different sizes and species of moa as shown in their fossilised faeces.

It describes how the big birds’ extinction forever changed the face of our forests by reducing seed dispersal of herbs and forest plants, creating more dense forest understoreys as previously browsed species flourished, inhibiting podocarp regeneration and altering fire frequency.

As for the “ten magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas” Rewilding Europe aspires to, you might say New Zealand already has this in our vast national parks and public conservation lands spread out across the wild, rugged (and largely uninhabitable) third of New Zealand.

Oostvaardersplassen, though, is not the Netherlands’ wildest idea. It enjoys a government-led, governmentfunded commitment to give 17.5 per cent of land back to nature, this in one of Europe’s most densely populated countries. In a country one-sixth the size of New Zealand with four times our population this is a vision that seems to have sold politically.

Secondly – and the reason why the Netherlands’ 17.5 per cent leaves our one-third in the shade – there’s a commitment to establish a Dutch National Ecological Network, joined up by wildlife corridors and crossings. It’s the ecology, stupid.

Here, I suggest, is New Zealand’s rewilding model – the next major step for our terrestrial conservation, alongside

defending what we’ve already won and a parallel vision for a predator-free New Zealand. It’s a vision of hope and restoration, bringing to life three of Forest & Bird’s strategic priorities: conservation beyond protected areas, an ecologically sustainable economy and bringing nature back to town.

How odd, or perhaps appropriate, that in New Zealand rewilding should be more about the browsers and predators we remove than reintroduce. But we need the other half of the story: habitat restoration. Neither habitat restoration nor a predator-free New Zealand can succeed in making living landscapes without the other.

Mine is a gentler vision than Monbiot’s but it is in some ways even bolder than that tried by the Europeans. There are no wolves in our story. It’s working with communities to find and build spaces for nature in the interstices of their lives.

Whereas Rewilding Europe’s vision is built on land abandonment – in the forests springing back around Chernobyl, for example – this is a conservation vision integrated with land occupation that takes in farms,

2 1 Schoolchildren and other volunteers restoring the margins

of Forest & Bird’s Fensham Reserve in the Wairarapa. Photo: Aalbert Rebergen

2 Several species of native bird have been reintroduced to Ark

in the Park in the Waitākere Ranges.

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Forest & Bird has local projects like this with ecological integrity and massive ambition of their own. For example, the North-West Wildlink, which spans Auckland west to east, establishing wildlife corridors to join up habitats and communities from the Waitakere Ranges to the islands of the Hauraki Gulf.

Konik horses now roam Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands’ massive nature reserve. Photo: Luc Hoogenstein gardens and marginal lands to make whole living landscapes wildlife-rich and ecologically alive.

Forest & Bird has local projects like this with ecological integrity and massive ambition of their own. For example, the North-West Wildlink, which spans Auckland west to east, establishing wildlife corridors to join up habitats and communities from the Waitäkere Ranges to the islands of the Hauraki Gulf.

Or the Kaimai Connection project, which links the Tauranga Harbour all the way across the Kaimai Ranges and the forest park to the middle Waihou in the Waikato.

Described as a “rich mosiac of interconnected and overlapping projects”, it aims for a “connection of protection”, bringing back birdsong and native wildlife. It includes the Aongatete Forest Restoration project and pilot Land for Wildlife project.

Recently I joined a workshop where local authorities and others talked about Land for Wildlife’s possibilities. Land for Wildlife helps private landowners, in a wholly voluntary way, to make their land and gardens living places. Starting in Victoria 30 years ago and picked up in New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory, Western Australia and Tasmania 15 years ago, maps now show a mosaic of spreading green Land for Wildlife dots across Australia beginning to cluster in ways that make sense, fanning out from forested areas, across formerly bare ground.

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Sometimes communities will do it for themselves, in a way begun in south Wairarapa by the Aorangi Restoration Trust, which runs from the mountains and the Aorangi Forest Park to the sea.

I’d like to think that in 50 years, piece by piece, Forest & Bird might have championed, led and supported projects of this kind joining all parts of New Zealand. I’d like to think we might start to plan where they ought to be, taking joined-up thinking within regions and catchments and spreading out from public conservation land and from region to region to make parts of a whole.

George Monbiot has named his vision. He’s telling it as a story, with a beginning (the aurochs and megafauna), a middle (heavy on suspense) and an end in which, he hopes, we’re living wild lives. In a way, the bigger the picture and the bolder the story the easier for people – and a government – to grasp it, to lend support, for example, through the missing Biodiversity Strategy.

One of our dubious New Zealand distinctions is to have managed a mass extinction more swiftly and viciously than any other country before. I suggest that we can come (not quite) full circle and that we already do have a vision for the (partial) mass restoration of our own ecosystem. It’s just a matter of starting to join up the dots.

Claire Browning is a Forest & Bird Conservation Advocate.

Things Welcome

Birds to your garden

Heaps of puzzles & activities

WoIoNl c zes pri

KCC is Forest & Bird’s kids’ club. Each KCC kid gets 5 Wild Things magazines a year and in some areas can join KCC group trips. KCC is fun and has been inspiring kids for over 20 years.

Join your kids up at www.forestandbird.org.nz/kcc now.

In the field ANN GRAEME

Fibonacci or fibs?

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We can all play a numbers game with nature.

F

ibonacci numbers are fascinating. From the numbers and their sequence can be derived patterns, spirals and the so-called golden number.

The sequence is created in steps by adding each number to its predecessor. It goes like this: 0+1=1, 1+1= 2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, 8+13=21.

So the Fibonacci numbers are 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 and so on. If you divide each number into the number that comes after it, the answer will settle to a constant value of 1¡618. That is the golden number.

Fibonacci numbers are often applied to nature, but is there any truth in this?

The classic example is the pine cone. It is said to always have its seed-bearing scales in two sets of spirals, one set of eight spirals and the other of 13, both Fibonacci numbers.

It is easy enough to see the two sets of spirals arising from the base of the pictured pine cone but can you count them? There are 13 spirals in one direction but it is difficult to count those going the other way. Maybe there are eight, maybe not.

2 But this neither proves nor disproves the theory for the pine tree is at the mercy of its environment. While its cone

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was growing there may have been drought or storm or lack of pollinating wind, any of which could have distorted the number and symmetry of the developing spirals.

For clearly there are spirals, and there is a reason for them. They provide an efficient pattern for growth. A cone that grows its seeds in spirals can maximise the number of seeds it carries and so has more chances of having seedlings than a cone with fewer seeds. And mathematical models show that the most efficient packaging would be spirals based on Fibonacci numbers.

Opposing spirals, sometimes much compressed, can be seen in the leaves of succulents and cabbages, in cauliflower florets and in pineapple fruit. Many stems grow with their leaves arranged in spirals which gives each leaf space and sunlight and maximises the food it can produce.

Recurring and statistically measurable patterns often emerge in nature. One such is the number of flower parts in the two great groups of flowering plants, the dicotyledons and the monocotyledons. The dicotyledons have their flower parts arranged in fives or, less often, in fours. The monocotyledon flower parts are arranged in threes. Three and five are Fibonacci numbers – but four is not.

From the Fibonacci sequence a rectangle can be built out of squares, each square having as its side a Fibonacci number. Within the squares a spiral can be drawn.

Mollusc shells show Fibonacci spirals. Where they stray from the Fibonacci model, the shells may be showing the influence of environmental factors distorting the perfect spiral. Or maybe not. Maybe they have simply evolved tapered spiral shells as a practical way of building a strong exoskeleton with room for the animal to grow.

People like symmetry. It pleases the eye and brings order to an untidy world. And the magic of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden number has led to them being attributed to phenomena that do not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Fibonacci spirals are drawn on pictures of cyclones, on galaxies and even on breaking waves. Fibonacci proportions are ascribed to the faces and forms of people and animals. Some punters even use Fibonacci numbers to buy and sell on the stock market.

It is fun to find patterns in nature, regardless of whether or not they are based on Fibonacci numbers. There are petals to count, proportions to observe and spirals to find.

Seeing the patterns of nature sharpens our eyes and adds another pleasure to walking in the forest, weeding the garden or strolling along the seaside.

5

Flowering groups Dicotyledon plants grow from seeds that have two cotyledons or seed leaves, like bean seeds.

They tend to have broad leaves. Monocotyledon plants grow from seeds that have one cotyledon, like maize. They tend to have strap-like leaves.

Where it started The Fibonacci sequence is named after Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, who was called Fibonacci. In 1202 he introduced the sequence to the Western World, having learnt about it during his travels in the Middle East. The sequence had been noted by Indian mathematicians some six centuries earlier.

Fibonacci also introduced to Europe from India the decimal system based on the new number, zero.

3 1 From left, at back, helmet shell and paper nautilus and, at

4

front, ostrich foot shell, pāua and tropical sea shell.

Photos: Gary Ware

2 The pine cone is said to always have its seed-bearing scales

in two sets of spirals, one set of eight spirals and the other of 13, both Fibonacci numbers.

3 These are all flowers of dicotyledonous plants, clockwise

from top left, mānuka, kānuka, putaputawētā, violet, forgetme-not and buttercup.

4 The Fibonacci spiral.

5 This rengarenga lily is a monocotyledon. Its flower has two

whorls, each of three petals, and six stamens. Later the seed pod will split, revealing three carpels filled with seeds.

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community

conservation

A tern for the better As you drive over Hairini Bridge into Tauranga, glance to your left and you might spot a white-fronted tern, or tara, on the old, unused bridge. If you walk across the new bridge you can see the small colony of terns that has taken up residence on the struts of the old bridge.

It is unusual to find a nesting colony on an artificial structure so close to human activity. The birds seem completely oblivious to the constant roar of traffic and barely acknowledge your presence if you stop quietly to observe them.

This tern colony returns reliably to the bridge every year, and is probably the most accessible nesting colony of the species, which is ranked at risk (declining).

Over the years birds have made nests on the old concrete piles and wooden trestles/sleepers, and fledglings can be observed in early summer. In the last two years there have been about 13 nests each season, with about half the birds re-nesting after early nest failure.

In the springs of 2011 and 2012 most nests (and all successful nests) were on just two structures – the one remaining tall wooden sleeper, and the adjacent low concrete foundation to the south with wooden sleeper surfacing. The birds like to nest in the drained hollows

of the wooden sleepers.

Last summer the main wooden trestle/sleeper developed a significant lean and was in danger of collapsing. Local birders, including Tauranga Forest & Bird members, lobbied the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to use material from the old wooden trestle to resurface the concrete piles and create new nest sites.

NZTA engineer Terry Boyle obtained internal funding and got the restoration project approved.

NZTA restored the main wooden trestle, and the concrete platforms without wooden tops had hollows jack hammered in them with drainage channels to stop them flooding. Despite the construction of drained nesting sites on concrete piles, the birds are choosing to nest only on the wooden beams.

It was pleasing to see the terns return in large numbers in late October last year, with 16 nests (and one abandoned). The birds appear to appreciate their new nesting sites.

The outcome was a win-win because, had it collapsed, the old trestle would have been a navigation hazard in the harbour. n Tauranga Forest & Bird and ornithologist Dr Ian McLean

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1 1 White-fronted terns, or tara, on their nests on

the old Hairini Bridge in Tauranga. Photos: Gary Ware

2 The terns prefer to nest in the old wooden

sleepers, which have well-drained hollows.

3 Last spring the old bridge hosted 16 tern nests.

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2

Pocket guide to Catlins birds Late last year Forest & Bird’s South Otago branch published Catlins Birds – a pocket guide. It was envisaged as a simple information sheet for visitors to Forest & Bird’s Lenz Reserve on the Catlins coast. But once editor Jane Young saw Craig McKenzie’s brilliant photographs, Richard Schofield’s painstaking first-hand observations and Fergus Sutherland’s detailed knowledge of the Catlins it quickly became obvious that the project would have a wider scope.

Jane was surprised when Richard produced a list of more than 100 bird species – from albatrosses to yellowheads – that can be seen in Catlins bush, beach or open ocean.

The project was completed for the beginning of the summer tourist season. Locals and visitors have been impressed by the quality of the photographs and the depth of information in the booklet. The four contributors are all Forest & Bird members, and proceeds will support Catlins environmental projects such as weed control in Otanomomo Scientific Reserve’s lowland forest and restoration of seabird habitat at Long Point.

The launch for Catlins Birds was at the Öwaka Museum where an audience of 50–60 people admired Craig’s photographs on the big screen.

Many of the species featured in the booklet are common throughout New Zealand.

Catlins Birds production team, from left, Fergus Sutherland, Craig McKenzie, Jane Young and Richard Schofield.

Catlins Birds is $10 and can be ordered from South Otago Forest & Bird, PO Box 32, Öwaka 9546, phone 03 415 8532 or from https://secure.forestandbird.org.nz/shop/shop.asp

Ark in the Park aids seedfall study Staff and volunteers at Auckland’s Ark in the Park are participating in a nationwide multi-year seedfall study that will give the Department of Conservation better strategies to deal with pest outbreaks during masting years.

In a masting year, trees produce large volumes of seed, and these food pulses lead to vastly increased populations of pest species such as mice, rats and stoats – with catastrophic effects on our native wildlife.

“We have been monitoring seedfall data from southern beech forests for the past few decades because this is where we see predator plagues following masting years,” says DOC technical adviser Laurence Smith. “Other forest types, namely mixed broadleaf podocarp and kauri, were poorly represented in the national monitoring network so we have expanded the study to include these forest types.

The goal is to develop better understanding of forest dynamics and the climatic cues that precede masting.”

By finding out the relationship between climate and masting years, DOC hopes to predict masting events as early as possible so it has sufficient pest control to deal with the spike in predator numbers.

Ark in the Park, which is managed by Forest & Bird, is one of 57 sites surveyed for the project. More than 80 active volunteers help with tasks from pest control to bird monitoring in the kauri forest. Last spring staff and volunteers began collecting seeds at 75 monitoring

locations across the 2100-hectare pest-controlled regional park and they will continue to do so.

“It’s great that Ark in the Park can be involved in this important nationwide study as the research findings will be directly applicable to our pest control programme,” says Ark in the Park Manager Gillian Wadams. n Mandy Herrick

Ark in the Park Volunteer Co-ordinator Laurence Bechet collects seeds from one of the 75 monitoring sites at Ark in the Park. Photo: Gillian Wadams Forest & Bird

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Branches celebrate 90th birthday Most Forest & Bird branches marked the Society’s 90th birthday in 2013 with celebrations that often centred on local milestones, long-standing branch members – and cake.

North and South Taranaki branches of Forest & Bird jointly celebrated the 90th anniversary and took the opportunity to look back at the beginnings of Forest & Bird in Taranaki. Founding Taranaki branch member David Medway described the first meeting in May 1956, when the section (a branch with trainer wheels) had 98 adult and 23 junior members.

It became a branch in 1957 and 12 years later had grown to 192 adults and 56 juniors. In 1978 a separate South Taranaki branch was formed to enable more people to join branch activities.

Last October both branches held a commemorative planting of a köwhai followed the next day by high tea in the tea rooms at New Plymouth’s Pukekura Park. Fifteen members from both branches watched North Taranaki chair Carolyn Brough and South Taranaki chair Dave Digby plant the köwhai in the park.

In September the northern branch also celebrated the birthday with a quiz night and cake, and South Taranaki branch members marked the anniversary with a walk to Hardwick-Smith hut on private land in the hills behind Eltham. It was built and is maintained by the branch, which controls predators in the area.

Birthday cake was, of course, on the lunch menu.

The Napier and Hastings-Havelock North branches celebrated the 90th together with a dinner attended by 74 people in July. A tree planting in July also marked the milestone.

In Auckland the North Shore branch 1

3

held a celebration afternoon tea in September at Takapuna.

The Horowhenua and Kapiti-Mana branches marked the occasion with events in September, and Upper Hutt branch celebrated with a dinner in November. Manawatü branch closed the year with a dinner in December.

In the South Island, the North Canterbury branch celebrated with a planting 4 morning and barbecue at Travis Wetland in November. Members planted 15 kahikatea to add to the 75 planted to celebrate the 75th anniversary in 1998.

Ashburton branch’s oldest member, Val McElrea, was a special guest at the birthday lunch in November held at Hakatere Heritage buildings in the Hakatere Conservation Park. n Marina Skinner 1 North Taranaki chair Carolyn Brough and South Taranaki

chair Dave Digby plant a kōwhai to mark the 90th birthday.

2 Nelson-Tasman branch chair Julie McLintock talks to

visitors to a stall in October to mark the 90th. Photo: Andy Dennis

3 From left, Colette Morrison, Muriel Clark and branch

secretary Jocelyn Sanders cut the cake at the North Shore celebration. Photo: Philip Moll

4 Ashburton members Val McElrea and Peter Howden cut the

90th birthday cake.

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River project honoured Forest & Bird’s Upper Hutt branch in December won a New Zealand River Award for its project to restore the banks of Hull’s Creek, north of Wellington.

The branch joined forces with Silver Stream Railway in 2003 to improve the stream for native fish and insects and to create a corridor for birds.

The group, led by Sue Millar, has cleared weeds and planted 12,000 native plants along a two-kilometre band beside the stream. Seedlings are grown at Upper

Hutt branch’s nursery.

A fish pass near the stream’s entry to the Hutt River was built, and sampling has shown that more fish are now in the stream’s upper reaches.

More than 80 community groups have helped with the project, which has been supported by Greater Wellington Regional Council, DOC and the Ministry for the Environment. The Morgan Foundation sponsored the inaugural New Zealand River Awards.

Team effort for farm It was all hands to the spade last spring when Forest & Bird’s Wairarapa branch members helped a local farming family plant a riparian stream margin and a retired bush block on their arable farm. The farm’s owners, Karen and Mick Williams, were last year’s supreme winners of the Greater Wellington Ballance Farm Environment Award.

Other community members joined the Forest & Bird crew, all keen on supporting the Williamses to run a successful farming operation but not at the expense of the environment.

The farm in Gladstone, east of Carterton, is a 224-hectare cereal and seed growing, plus drystock, venture. The Ruamähanga River borders the farm and the 2.8-kilometre river margin has been fenced off to exclude stock, as have other waterways running through

the property. Some of these riparian margins have already been planted with native trees and the planting group completed another one.

A great planting effort was also made in the 2ha bush remnant, home to mature mataï, tötara, tïtoki, kahikatea and köwhai. Karen and Mick said the bush and stream restoration task was daunting for them to tackle alone but with willing hands, their vision was taking shape quickly.

That vision is to create a mosaic of native bush to create corridors for native birds and enhance habitat for beneficial insects that help pollinate crops.

Since the planting day the bush block has been permanently protected by a QEII covenant. Branch members are keen to continue helping maintain and enhance this special piece of bush.

Ashburton photo contest Forest & Bird’s Ashburton branch is running a photographic competition to celebrate the endemic species of plants and animals in Ashburton district. Photographs must be taken between the Rakaia and Rangitätä rivers and from the Southern Alps to the Pacific Ocean.

Entries close on April 30 and the winner will be announced on May 23.

Natural history photographic judges will select up to 40 images, which will be framed and exhibited. It is hoped that the first exhibition will be in the new Ashburton Gallery which will be opened this year. A DVD will be made of the exhibition and donated to the schools of mid-Canterbury.

At the end of the year the exhibition will be presented to the Ashburton Museum as a permanent record of the rich biodiversity of the Ashburton district.

For information and entry forms, contact Warren Jowett, Staveley, RD 1, Ashburton 7771, phone 03 303 0880 or e-mail ecotour@nature.net.nz

The wrybill, one of the endemic species found in Ashburton district. Photo: Warren Jowett Forest & Bird

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KCC kids flock to penguin chicks The opportunity to get close to Banks Peninsula’s fabled white-flippered penguins drew about 75 Kiwi Conservation Club children, parents and supporters on the trek to Harris Bay near Taylor’s Mistake, Christchurch, in November.

The group broke into three tours to give the penguins (and host Dr Chris Challies) a break. The penguin colony has been growing under his care, with support from local authorities and other volunteers since 1976. Chris estimates the bay has more than 70 nests this season. He visits about twice a week during the breeding season, monitoring nests, installing new nest boxes and doing predator control. The colony has in more recent times been protected with a predator-proof fence to help keep the nesting birds and their chicks safe.

“The great thing about little penguins is that they are remarkably robust so limited handling is well tolerated, allowing the children to see the birds in their natural environment and learn about them with no risk to the adult birds or the ongoing care of their chicks,” Chris says.

“For the short-term disturbance, the penguins benefit from the improved understanding of their place in our ecology and what needs to be done to help protect them and ensure they not only survive but thrive. This is a win for both the penguins and our future conservationists.

“The KCC members got a rare chance to see the penguins up close and even briefly touched the chicks. This was an experience that the children really enjoyed and will carry the memory of into their adult lives. The beneficial flow back to the wellbeing of the penguin is potentially substantial.”

The group certainly enjoyed the experience and enthusiastically participated in Chris’s talk.

They saw chicks of various

2 1 A white-flippered penguin

at Harris Bay. Photos: Steve Attwood

2 Penguin chicks.

3 Dr Chris Challies shows Declan,

left, and Aiden Coleman a white-flippered penguin.

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ages, eggs and adults, and had the penguin’s life cycle explained.

The KCC kids enjoyed the adventure of the day, too, with the walk along the track from Taylor’s Mistake and 1 the steep ladder descent to the beach. The youngsters took to the climb like they’d been born to it but a few adults were a tad uneasy about the height.

The penguin pairs incubate their eggs in turn for about 37 days, then share the feeding of the chicks for a further 50-55 days. Initially one bird is left to guard them while the other goes to sea but by the time the chicks are 15-25 days both parents leave and only return briefly each night to feed their hungry young.

Without help from their parents, the young birds decide when they are ready to exchange their life in a burrow for one at sea. They then stay at sea continuously until the next breeding season when they make occasional visits to the colony at night. When they reach two years of age they are old enough to breed.

Chris also described the plumage differences that distinguish the white-flippered penguins of Banks Peninsula from other little penguins. He showed the visitors a smaller and much darker southern blue penguin that is presently paired with a locally bred male in the colony. n Steve Attwood

WHAT ARE YOU LEAVING YOUR KIDS?

50% of lakes are polluted 90% of wetlands have been drained 90% of lowland forests have been destroyed 90% of our freshwater native fish are endangered 21 of our bird species have been wiped out by introduced pests 96% of our lowland streams have pathogen levels too high to swim in

Kiwi kids deserve to live in one of the most incredible natural environments on Earth. But our native animals, plants and wild places are under threat. You and your children can help change the story. Become a Nature’s Future supporter of Forest & Bird, and help ensure that New Zealand will always have an untouched natural environment. You’ll receive a Forest & Bird membership, and your kids will become members of the Kiwi Conservation Club. They’ll receive Wild Things magazines and develop an interest in nature that will last a lifetime, and inspire them to make a positive difference to New Zealand. Please become Nature’s Future supporters now by visiting forestandbird.org.nz/joinus

A shining cuckoo (pīpīwharauroa) from Bringing Back the Birdsong.

Bringing Back the Birdsong

By Wade and Jan Doak New Holland, $49.99 Reviewed by Marina Skinner Wade and Jan Doak have spent much of their immensely productive lives underwater, revealing a busy world below sea level and advocating for greater marine protection. But in the 1970s they began to emerge from the water and take a closer interest in life on land. Wade describes using his underwater techniques to photograph plants. “As I pressed the trigger I even found myself holding my breath to avoid the noise of bubbles! I was land diving,” he writes.

This is the story of the Doaks’ exploration from their homes in Northland – first on the Matapöuri River on the Tutukäkä Coast, then their 18-hectare forested hilltop above the Ngunguru River. It’s also a celebration of the native plants and animals they’ve come to know and love.

They document many individual species and portray the bigger picture of ecosystems. Living beside a mangrove forest gives them the chance to observe its network of roots that anchor the trees to the sandy floor and shore up the river banks, and the many animals it supports.

Since 2007 they have been intensively trapping pests on their Ngunguru land and they relish the birdlife boom that has followed.

I greatly admire the couple’s hard work and commitment to conservation though I admit to twinges of life envy while poring over the photos of the gorgeous landscapes and many plants and animals in their neighbourhood. For inspiration, the Doaks’ book is hard to beat.

Living in a Warmer World: How a changing climate will affect our lives Edited by Jim Salinger Bateman, $39.99 Reviewed by Jay Harkness If you care deeply about conservation and are worried you might be a little too carefree for your own good, Living in a Warmer World is probably just the ticket. It’s a collection of essays from scientists around the world about how climate

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change will affect the planet’s natural heritage.

Not surprisingly, a mild-sounding two degrees Celsius average global temperature rise will affect our natural world in countless ways. Sadly, these effects will often include outright extinction.

It is also apparent from the book that climate change has already made an indelible mark on the natural world over the past few decades.

Demystifying a threat is empowering. It’s like doing a household budget – you might not like what you learn but, having done it, you wind up in a better place.

Living in a Warmer World gives the reader an understanding of how the lives of all things on Earth will alter with climate change. It also shows how difficult it is to predict the changes.

The book has been written by academics, with its reading lists and the hierarchy of fact over emotion. But it avoids what can be the downsides of an academic work – a lack or pace, clumsy structures and a failure to adequately sum things up.

Despite being edited by former NIWA scientist Jim Salinger, none of the essays is specifically about the impacts of climate change on New Zealand (though there is a foreword by Helen Clark, written as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme). It does not matter. The lesson is that all of us – invertebrates, frogs, coral and humans – are in the same boat.

Rivers: New Zealand’s shared legacy

By David Young, photographs by Aliscia Young Random House, $59.99 Reviewed by Debs Martin David Young has updated his 1986 book, Faces of the River, weaving history with the braids of his 11 rivers. Some rivers are obvious choices such as the Buller, but others are more obscure , such as the Waipäoa and the Taramakau.

Each story holds a theme, whether it is the long Mäori association with the Whanganui or the more recent history of northern hemisphere migrations and their sometimes turbulent relationships with rivers like the Clutha. Young explores the historical geographies of these rivers, from early battles of territory and religion to court battles to protect and preserve rivers under threat from damming for hydro-electricity or irrigation.

Each river is clearly set in its place and Young’s obvious love for the story of places is apparent throughout. His research shows his own journey with each river and he shares stories from early and recent explorers. For sheer lyricism, his account of his early childhood journey to a farm up the Rangitïkei is one of the book’s best.

This is a story of people and their close relationship with “their” rivers. Descriptions of the rivers’ geologies and biodiversity are incidental to the telling of the story. My only frustration was the lack of detail in the maps. So many places were described on the river journeys that I found myself wishing they had been labelled for my own journeys in the future.

Tu-hoe: Portrait of a nation

By Kennedy Warne and Peter James Quinn Penguin, $60 Reviewed by Mark Bellingham This beautiful book showcases the natural landscapes and the people of Te Urewera. It is a must for those who love Te Urewera National Park and are wondering about its future.

Kennedy Warne shows the area’s natural heritage and magnificent landscapes through the eyes of its people. The successful trapping programme in northern Te Urewera has protected and increased our largest kökako population, and birdlife is thriving at Otamatuna, where Tühoe have been involved from the start. A similar programme has boosted the kiwi population at Waikaremoana. This may be the model for bringing back more wildlife in other parts of Te Urewera.

These stories follow the people and their interaction with nature in Te Urewera, past settlements, a difficult history and the efforts today to make a sustainable living from the mainly forested lands – nature tourism, bee keeping and hunting. Peter James Quinn’s photos bring us to those iconic forests, deep gravelly rivers and the varied shorelines of Waikaremoana.

Those of us who have tramped through Te Urewera will see many familiar places and some familiar faces too. Quinn’s photographic essay initiated this book and the photos and the text work well together.

Last year Ngäi Tühoe settled outstanding land confiscation claims with the government. The settlement included greater autonomy for Tühoe and the return of Te Urewera National Park and other confiscated lands. Forest & Bird agreed with the settlement and has supported the ongoing protection of Te Urewera in a UNESCO biosphere reserve. This is the

first in-depth account of that settlement, and from a Tühoe perspective. We need to appreciate their perspective to be able to move forward with Tühoe and the long-term protection of Te Urewera.

Dolphins of Aotearoa: Living with New Zealand dolphins

By Raewyn Peart Craig Potton Publishing, $59.99 Reviewed by Anton van Helden This hefty book relates many key stories of how New Zealanders interact with dolphins. Much of it is dedicated to individual wild dolphins that have become part of the folklore of this country: Pelorous Jack, Opo and Moko.

Peart details the history of our captive dolphin industry and how our understanding of the science of these animals and the recognition of them as highly social, big-brained animals made their captivity intolerable.

There are some remarkable characters in these stories: the pioneers of the captive dolphin industry, the people who attempted to communicate with them in the wild, eco-tourism developers and scientists.

The rise of eco-tourism ventures, dolphin watching and swimming programmes and the impact these are having on our culture and on the animals are well described. The impact of legislation and our desire to protect these animals is discussed and highlights how at odds it is with persistent fishing practices in this country.

A lot of the early scientific work on New Zealand dolphins is somewhat glossed over, with emphasis on the past 30 years of endeavour.

It is a shame Peart does not highlight further the remarkable diversity of dolphins in our waters, with only a handful of other dolphin species, some of which are probable residents in New Zealand’s Exclusive Economic Zone, mentioned in the introduction. One large omission, given the focus on human interactivity in this book, is the long-finned pilot whale. They are large dolphins, and our interaction with their mass strandings is remarkable and involves stories of innovation and scientific discovery that would have been a useful addition here.

The book makes clear that New Zealand is “blessed with a wealth of dolphins” and that “if we want to continue to enjoy these remarkable animals around our shores, we will need to take much better care of them”.

Bridal Veil Falls in Te Urewera National Park, from Tūhoe: Portrait of a nation. Photo: Peter James Quinn Forest & Bird

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The Essential Audrey Eagle: Botanical art of New Zealand

By Audrey Eagle and Patrick Brownsey Te Papa Press, $49.99 Reviewed by Joan Leckie Today it is so easy to photograph a flower or a botanical specimen that we have forgotten the process to portray the “new” plants and flowers to the Western World when our country was “discovered”. The detailed sketching and painting of New Zealand plants took a party of nine, organised by Joseph Banks on the voyage of Captain Cook to observe the transit of Venus and discover the great south continent in 1769.

New Zealand flora was unlike anything these European botanists had seen. It was a race to record the details of form and colour before a specimen wilted. And evidently the samples came on board the ship in the sackful.

Patrick Brownsey’s description of the history of botanical art in New Zealand is fascinating, especially the painstaking work that went into every illustration, with detailed drawings, painted in colours unlike northern hemisphere plants. The drawings were then etched into metal plates for printing.

Audrey Eagle will appreciate how much work it took. Her beautiful paintings reproduced in this edition of her work, with 163 illustrations and descriptions of our most-loved plants, such as köwhai, tötara, nïkau and pöhutukawa, will make identification and enjoyment accessible to as many people as possible, as she hopes.

The paperback binding does not detract in any way from the desirability of a book to be treasured in the home library.

For the nature adventurer this summer...

Caring for our Coast: An EDS guide to managing coastal development

By Lucy Brake and Raewyn Peart Environmental Defence Society, $75 Reviewed by Mark Bellingham This is an everybody’s guide to protection and better management of our coasts through the Resource Management Act. It takes readers step by step through coastal threats and values, national coastal policies and good and bad examples of coastal planning.

EDS had a long history of demystifying New Zealand’s environmental legislation with many publications and user guides on aspects of the RMA. The worked examples in the book show best practice for protecting a range of coastal values, and coastal landscape and coastal biodiversity get a thorough examination. A vexed issue that may have needed more prominence is protecting coastal wildlife habitats, mangrove saltmarshes in particular. The recommendations of this guide certainly contrast with the Auckland Council’s proposed Unitary Plan, which plans major mangrove and saltmarsh clearance, in which habitat for bitterns, banded rails and fernbirds in coastal wetlands will be lost.

The threats to coastal ecosystems from sea level rise probably needed better coverage as the coastal hazards chapter tends to focus on threats of sea level rise to urban areas rather than natural coasts where much of our coastal habitats back on to farmland.

The photos of the “desirable” examples and the “undesirable” examples, along with key points and how to avoid adverse effects make this a true users’ guide. I thought of some better examples from Forest & Bird’s recent cases, such as Mangawhai in Northland, where the harbour and its mangrove ecosystems have the best food sources for New Zealand fairy terns. But I’m sure these will be in the next edition, along with how we plan for fairy tern nest sites that are all threatened by sea level rise.

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Our new KCC hat!

Bright, fun and sun-smart these are great out-innature hats for our adventurers. There are two sizes. A small hat of 50cm (that can be tightened down to 46cm) and a slightly larger one for the young teenager of 58cm (that can be tightened down to 54cm). Check our online store https://secure.forestandbird.org.nz/shop/shop. asp or call 0800 200 064 to buy one. They’re $29.95 each incl. GST – and postage is an extra.

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For Stewart Island Accommodation in the Bush Rakiura Retreat Motels overlooking Braggs Bay/ Halfmoon Bay • Access to beach • Complimentary bikes • Warm & comfortable • Transfers & Professional guides available • Sleeps up to 24 Individuals & Groups welcome.

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Keep your photos and videos safe for future generations Special offer for Forest & Bird members SanDisk Memory Vault 8GB $99 $69 SanDisk Memory Vault 16GB $139 $99 To order, contact Lacklands Ltd 09 630 0753 or info@lacklands.co.nz

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

Forest & Bird

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Parting shot E

astern bar-tailed godwits spend summer at the Foxton Beach bird sanctuary, which is where Roger Smith of Waikanae photographed these birds. “There is a large mudflat exposed at low tide where the godwits and lesser knots gather to feed in a large flock comprising about 120 birds,” he says.

“The best time for viewing the birds is about two hours before high tide when the incoming water has covered the mud flats.

Usually, about this time the birds take off together and come on to the beach area just in front of the road access. Unfortunately, there is a wide expanse of open sand to be crossed if you want to get close enough for a good photo. I often crawl across the sand to any available cover and get reasonably close without disturbing them.

“As the tide comes in over the next hour or so the birds will retreat from the water and, if you stay concealed, they will end up only a matter of metres away. Sometimes they will take off in a large flock and settle a short distance away.”

Roger used a Canon EOS60D with Canon 100-400mm lens.

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If you are a Forest & Bird member and you have a stunning photo that showcases New Zealand’s special native plants or animals, it could be the next Parting Shot. Each published Parting Shot photo will receive a GorillaPod JGP3 worth $159.95. The GorillaPod SLR Zoom is a portable, packable heavyduty tripod that keeps your camera equipment steady, no matter where you might be.

Please send a low-res digital file and brief details about your photo to Marina Skinner at m.skinner@forestandbird.org.nz Winners will be asked for higher-resolution files.

branch directory

Upper North Island Central Auckland Branch: Chairperson, Robert Jones; Secretary, Charlene Fitisemanu. centralauckland.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Far North Branch: Chairperson, Dean Baigent-Mercer; Secretary, Michael Winch. farnorth.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Franklin Branch: Chairperson Vacant; Secretary, Keith Gardner. Franklin.

Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Hauraki Islands Branch: Chairperson, Jacqueline Joseph; Secretary, Lyndsay Meager. haurakiislands.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Hibiscus Coast Branch: Chairperson, Karen Field; Secretary Katie Lucas.

HibiscusCoast. Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Kaipara Branch: Chairperson, William McNatty; Secretary, Barry Wilson. kaipara.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Mercury Bay Branch: Chairperson, Augusta Macassey-Pickard; Secretary, Lynn Hampton. mercurybay.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Mid North Branch: Chairperson, Tony Dunlop; Secretary, Raewyn Morrison. midnorth.branch@forestandbird.org.nz North Shore Branch: Chairperson, Richard Hursthouse; Secretary, Jocelyn Sanders. NorthShore.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Northern Branch: Chairperson, Kristi Henare; Secretary, Diane Lee. Northern.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz South Auckland Branch: Chairperson, John Oates; Secretary, Lee O’Leary.

SouthAuckland.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Thames-Hauraki Branch: Co-chairperson, Ken Clark; Secretary, Frances Burton. thameshauraki.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Upper Coromandel Branch: Chairperson, vacant; Secretary, vacant. uppercoromandel.branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Horowhenua Branch: Chairperson, Debbie Waldin; Secretary, Angelina.

KapitiMana.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Kapiti-Mana Branch: Chairperson, Ian Corder; Secretary, Judy Driscoll, Tel: (04) 904-2049. KapitiMana.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Lower Hutt Branch: Chairperson, Russell Bell; Secretary, Jennifer Vinton.

LowerHutt.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Manawatu Branch: Chairperson, Paul Demchick; Secretary, Alexandra King. manawatu.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Napier Branch: Chairperson, Neil Eagles, Secretary, Cheryl Nicholls. Napier.

Branch@forestandbird.org.nz North Taranaki Branch: Chairperson and Secretary, Carolyn Brough, NorthTaranaki.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Rangitikei Branch: Chairperson, Graeme Smith; Secretary, Kate Williams.

Rangitikei.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz South Taranaki Branch: Chairperson, Dave Digby; Secretary, Carol Digby.

SouthTaranaki.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Upper Hutt Branch: Chairperson, Barry Wards; Secretary, Kathryn Hicks.

UpperHutt.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Wairarapa Branch: Chairperson, Geoff Doring; Secretary, Peta Campbell.

Wairarapa.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Wanganui Branch: Chairperson, Esther Williams; Secretary, Ray Hutchison.

Wanganui.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Wellington Branch: Chairperson, Peter Hunt; Secretary, David Ellison.

Wellington.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

South Island

Ashburton Branch: Chairperson, Edith Smith; Secretary, Val Clemens.

Ashburton.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Waitakere Branch: Chairperson, Robert Woolf; Secretary, Jan Edmonds.

Waitakere.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Central Otago-Lakes Branch: Chairperson, Mark Ayre; Secretary, Denise Bruns. CentralOtagoLakes.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Central North Island

Dunedin Branch: Chairperson, Robin Wilson, Mark Hanger & Beatrice Lee; Secretary Janet Ledingham. dunedin.branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Eastern Bay of Plenty Branch: Chairperson, Mark Fort; Secretary, Peter Fergusson. EasternBayofPlenty.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Gisborne Branch: Chairperson, Grant Vincent; Secretary, Wendy Vincent. gisborne.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Rotorua Branch: Chairperson, Chair rotates among committee members; Secretaries, Margaret Dick or Delight Gartlein. Rotorua.Branch@ forestandbird.org.nz South Waikato Branch: Chairperson, Anne Groos; Secretary, Jack Groos.

SouthWaikato.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Taupo Branch: Secretary, Laura Dawson, taupo.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Tauranga Branch: Chairperson, Richard James; Secretary, Pam Foster.

Tauranga.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Te Puke Branch: Chairperson Cathy Reid; Secretary, Margaret McGarva.

TePuke.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Waihi Section: Chairperson Vacant; Secretary, Krishna Buckman. Waihi.

Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Waikato Branch: Chairperson, Philip Hart; Secretary, Jim Macdiarmid.

Waikato.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Golden Bay Branch: Chairperson Vacant; Secretary Jo-Anne Vaughan. goldenbay.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Kaikoura Branch: Chairperson, Ailsa Howard; Secretary, Barry Dunnett. kaikoura.branch@forestandbird.org.nz Marlborough Branch: Chairperson, Andrew John; Secretary, Evin Wood.

Marlborough.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Nelson-Tasman Branch: Chairperson, Julie McLintock; Secretary, Gillian Pollock. NelsonTasman.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz North Canterbury Branch: Chairperson, Rachael Hurford; Secretary Elizabeth Lochhead & Cathy Brumley. northcanterbury.branch@ forestandbird.org.nz South Canterbury Branch: Chairperson Vacant; Secretary Justine CarsonIIes. SouthCanterbury.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz South Otago Branch: Chairperson, Roy Johnstone; Secretary, Jane Young.

SouthOtago.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz Southland Branch: Chairperson, Craig Carson; Secretary, Jenny Campbell.

Southland.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Lower North Island

Waitaki Branch: Chairperson, Zuni Steer; Secretary, Chloe Searle. Waitaki.

Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Central Hawke’s Bay Branch: Chairperson, Dan Elderkamp; Secretary, Rose Hay. Centralhawkesbay.branch@forestandbird.org.nz

West Coast Branch: Chairperson, Kathy Gilbert; Secretary, Clare Backes, WestCoast.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

Hastings-Havelock North Branch: Chairperson, Vaughan Cooper; Secretary, Nick Sage. HastingsHavelockNorth.Branch@forestandbird.org.nz

For branch postal addresses, please see www.forestandbird.org.nz

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 Anita Herbert, 71C Totara North Road, RD2 Kaeo, Northland 0479. Tel: 09 405 1720. Email: herbit@xtra.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.

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) 5256031.

Tautuku Forest Cabins, 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@yrless.co.nz

With each of our stores stocking over 7500 products from 150 different suppliers, we are able to offer the best performers in each category.

We present cutting edge technology from leading international manufacturers such as Arc’teryx, Berghaus, Black Diamond, Exped, Osprey, Outdoor Research and The North Face. Every item has undergone a selection process during which the product has proven itself to be a top contender in its category.

Exped SynMat UL 7 Exped Ultralight fabrics are extremely lightweight yet robust. The abrasion resistance is high, but puncture resistance is lower than with Exped's standard fabric.

High frequency welded seams for durability FlatValve Technology easy inflation and deflation valves Synthetic filling is internally laminated to both top and bottom of the mat to prevent any loss of loft Spacer baffles welded between the synthetic filled chambers prevent cold spots and provide a stable sleeping surface Fabric grommets to attach a pillow or the included multifunction stuffsack (which feature double cords on the inside to allow attachment to the grommets) Repair kit with adhesive and fabric patches included

Length 163cm (Small), 183cm (Medium) Width 50cm Thickness 7cm Rolled Size 23cm x 9cm (Small), 24cm x 9.5cm (Medium) Fill 60 g/m² Texpedloft Microfibre Average Weight mat/packsack and mat combined: 440g/454g (Small), 470g/485g (Medium) Relative Warmth (R Value) 3.5 (0.62m2.kelvins/watt) Warranty for all Exped UL products is 2 years From $139 RRP (Small)

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