Community perspectives on kiwi conservation
Hearing the call of kiwi - by Wendy Sporle
Wendy Sporle,
national mentor
for advocacy,
Bank of New
Zealand Save
The Kiwi
When I began kiwi advocacy in Northland 16 years ago we didn't really know why kiwi numbers were declining so quickly. Now we do, and New Zealanders have become motivated to ensure we do not lose them altogether.
In areas where kiwi live, local people are taking up the call to action, with groups forming to protect new areas of habitat, especially on private land. Communities are also doing work in public conservation areas where the Department of Conservation lacks the resources.
This momentum has been building over the last 6-7 years as more projects come on stream. Over time group members have seen kiwi numbers in their area increase. They are also a vital part of kiwi conservation nationally.
Kiwi numbers are declining most quickly in the North Island and that's where community kiwi care projects are concentrated, in Northland, Taranaki, the Coromandel and Hawke's Bay.
Farewell/poroporoaki from Te Atiawa for
rowi bound for Okarito
Ensuring the continued survival of community kiwi care groups is a key issue, therefore, and there is no single answer - each group is different in the details, affecting how they work, their needs of DOC and the management methods used.
Projects may be on private land, or on public land. They may cover a few hundred hectares or many thousands. The work may be hands-on captive management via Operation Nest Egg, or weed and animal pest control to protect habitat for kiwi (and other native species).
Funding may be provided by many sources, others from just one (Bank of New Zealand Save The Kiwi Trust). Some groups do all the work themselves, others hire contractors. A few are fully funded but most rely on voluntary work and commitment.
Some are formal organisations, others are neighbours who have banded together to do pest control over a larger area, with more benefits for kiwi. The groups have varying degrees of contact and support with local DOC offices, depending on the expertise and availability of DOC staff.
The consistent thread is that communities are doing the work in a way that suits their aspirations, skills and resources. It is their project, their geographic area and their passion. They have ownership of how it is implemented and enormous pride in the achievements.
To meet the continuity challenge, a project has started on "future proofing" community projects. Some ideas include funding key project staff, and more training in the form of a DVD. The development of strategic plans for each type of kiwi will help get more information into communities on kiwi care challenges and solving them.
The power of one (after another) - by Dave Hansford
You'd swear there was a fantail for every sandfly here beside Mike Camm's dam - the spears of late sun are full of them. Beyond the thickets of raupo, the glossy, glassy water is ruffled only by the wake left by a flotilla of pateke, the rare brown teal. There are grey duck here too, and wait until the sun falls behind the rimu on the slopes beyond, and you'll hear the primal boom of that swamp phantom, the bittern.
"Not bad for a hay paddock, eh?" offers Mike. This gem of a wetland was bulldozed during the 1970s, and filled in with money from a government farm development fund. When Mike bought the place, the first thing he did was put it back.
Putting things right has been a central philosophy ever since. "I bought this place eight years ago. I was thinking of developing my own little national park here, as you do."
He knew that kiwi still survived on this 120 ha forest remnant near the Northland coastal settlement of Tutukaka, but he knew too, that within a few years they'd be gone - lost to the teeth and claws of stoats.
So he set to work, clearing lines for 170 Fenn traps. "I wasn't starry-eyed about what I was getting into," he recalls. "I knew that making a commitment to something like this had to be total; there's not much room for anything else. If I were keen on going sailing every weekend, I wouldn't have started this."
For a few years, he worked the trap lines alone, "then, as I met my neighbours, I realised there was this common denominator". One of the like minds, Nick Davies, started setting traps on his own property and helps Mike with his. The pair eventually became what Mike calls the nucleus of the Tutukaka Landcare Coalition "which sounds rather formal and boring", he points out, "until you appreciate the acronym."
TLC, like so many things Northland, is anything but formal - they've held just two meetings in four years. The philosophy, Mike points out, has always been: "let's get on and do stuff rather than talking about it."
Mike Camm and Helen Moodie
And that's what they're doing, with help from the Landcare Trust. Its Northland regional coordinator Helen Moodie says Tutukaka embodies the Landcare principle: "it's about looking after what's on your own land... without the support of landowners you can't go anywhere."
That support comes in different forms and levels of commitment. Some maintain their own traps, while others are happy just to let a contractor onto their place to do it. "We have a core of about seven or eight landowners," says Mike, "though there are another 30 lending tacit support - which adds up to some 2500 ha."
That's big enough, he reckons, to accommodate the seasonal movements of predators - it means they can get numbers low enough to get conservation gains. "We're not looking for total eradication - that would be nice, but we don't see it as a likelihood. We aim to get predators down to levels that will allow kiwi and our other key species - pateke, kakariki, what have you - to lift their survival rate much higher than it otherwise would be."
With support from the Department of Conservation, WWF-New Zealand, Ducks Unlimited, Northland District Council, Transpower and the Landcare Trust, TLC has more than doubled the number of kiwi inside its bounds. "Based on last year's calls," says Mike, "we think we have somewhere between 130 and 200 birds."
Now neighbouring districts want in. "Two other land care projects have started up as a result of ours, just a few kilometres away," says Mike, "it's a matter of joining the dots in the landscape."
As the scale has expanded, so has the scope. Now possums, cats and rats are in the crosshairs too, which means maintaining another 200 bait stations and live capture traps (for cats) as well as the Fenns. For Mike and Nick, that adds up to long, plodding hours of slog because, says Mike: "once you start on that road, you've got to cover all your bases; there's no way around it."
If you take one pest out of the control mix, you can never be sure just how the others will respond to the gap left behind - will rats erupt if you kill off the stoats? And what might that mean for the smaller bush birds like fantails?
Tutukaka Landcare Coalition members
Nick Davies and Mike Camm catch
around 12 feral cats a year in their
purpose-designed traps
Even more impressive is that Mike's operation is run from an old caravan that's seen its last stretch of tarmac, with a lean-to nailed up against it. He's taken a decentralised approach to planning this haven; 200m down the gravel drive, just before a battered Mini, is his "communications centre", a tin shed just big enough to keep his telephone out of the Northland summer downpours. Somewhere in a bushy gully to the west, the sound of hammer on tanalith announces the impending birth of his workshop.
At the drive's end, with a view over the returning forest toward's Nick's place, is a rustic ply-and-batten construction that is his bedroom. But right now, we're slithering up a clay track to his "ultimate house site".
We break out from under the lanky kanuka into a view no Lotto win could buy; to the east, the Poor Knights Islands dotting the horizon, the languid coastline of Ngunguru. At our feet, his "own little national park" - ranks of rimu, totara and kauri.
Kereru swoop between the leafy rewarewa, and even before he can brag about them, a flock of kakariki chatter from overhead. Bellbirds regularly fly from the Poor Knights to feed here, as do kaka. Tui chortle at one another across the valley.
Best of all, Mike can bring the local schoolkids up here and know that they'll hear kiwi - lots of them.
From here, he can see the other blocks where like minds are doing the hard yards along the trap lines, and beyond TLC's boundary to distant quarters where people are setting up their own projects. Helen Moodie says 19 other kiwi groups now treat some 53,000 ha - 60 per cent of it on private land - to give our national emblem in flesh and feather, a future in Northland.
Combating acts of dog - by Dave Hansford
Todd Hamilton, a contract wildlife
manager, checks a North Island brown
kiwi at a farm near Whangarei Heads.
While conservation work is going well,
roaming dogs continue to be a menace
to kiwi
At Whangarei Heads, six community groups have been controlling weeds and pests over 6000 ha of native forest, pine plantations, scrub, pasture and wetland. Today the area boasts more kiwi to the hectare than anywhere else in New Zealand, says Todd Hamilton, a founding member of the Whangarei Heads Landcare Forum.
One reason is the access to food all year round - the kiwi can chase crickets in rank grass in the summer, and fossick for worms in pasture during the winter. Another saviour is the abundant puriri; the fallen timber make for ready-made burrows impervious to digging dogs, a major predator of kiwi.
The forum started trapping stoats in 2001 and hired Todd as a part-time trapper the following year. Stoat numbers have been knocked down to the point where land owners may go months without catching one.
As well as growing kiwi numbers, the area is seeing more tui and kukupa (native pigeon), little blue penguins and visiting kaka from the Hen and Chickens Islands.
The forum can now afford to leave male kiwi to brood the eggs, as nature intended. A few chicks are fitted with transmitters to ensure the stoat control is still working.
Measuring the beak of a kiwi
But the Whangarei Heads kiwi have not always done so well. Numbers had dropped down to a few breeding pairs and isolated individuals. Today's managed population was kick-started in the last five years by releasing around 50 subadults raised in captivity at Auckland Zoo, Whangarei Native Bird Rescue Centre, and on predator-free Motuora and Matakohe/Limestone Islands.
Todd has named almost all of the Heads' kiwi, some after sponsors - Flash for Transpower, Bacon for Kiwi smallgoods - and others after the owners of the land they live on. When they see Todd on the side of the road with his antenna, they stop to ask how "their" kiwi is doing. A farmer who's tuned into the local kiwi is more likely to look after their dogs and keep them away from kiwi.
The case for the defence - by Dave Hansford
One April morning Arthur Hinds discovered a vehicle half-hidden near his property, looking like a pig dog carrier. "I suspected they might be on our block, I went up and got to the dogs before the hunters did." He found five dogs locked onto a pig inside his boundary and shot three of them.
Whenuakite Kiwi Care Group chairman
Arthur Hinds has zero tolerance for
roaming dogs on his Coromandel property
Pilloried in the media and on hunters' web sites, the Coromandel dairy farmer, Waikato regional councillor and chair of the Whenuakite Kiwi Care Group is unrepentent. He knows dogs' lethal impact on kiwi as well as anyone. In 197 his own Weimaraner killed one during a walk in the back paddocks. He reported the death to DOC which sent a ranger to collect the bird.
Whenuakite is a swathe of coastal broadleaf forest, an outrider of Coromandel Forest Park, clothed in rimu and crowned with old volcanic plugs and spires. This is the heart of the kiwi group's work, a partnership with DOC and Environment Waikato.
Around the periphery are farmed steeplands, pine stands and regenerating scrub. It's hard country and the group controls predators over 50 properties - 560 traps on 52km of lines. Hired contractors check most of them once a month in winter, and fortnightly for the rest of the year. Landowners maintain the rest themselves.
The trap is set for stoats
For their part, Arthur runs 36 traps on his family's 465 ha, and his wife Diane is the kiwi group's treasurer. She says that while volunteers save the group around $60,000 annually in labour costs, fundraising still occupies most of their time and effort. Each year, they have to find $60,000 to $70,000, mostly to control stoats, ferrets, weasels and feral cats.
Much of the shortfall is met by a government Biodiversity Condition and Advice Fund Grant. Environment Waikato contributes, along with WWF-New Zealand and Bank of New Zealand Save The Kiwi Trust.
The group monitors progress by staging regular call counts at 24 prescribed sites over several but not consecutive nights. "In 2001 we counted 31 birds," says Arthur. "This year we had 68, which was absolutely brilliant."
The next big step at Whenuakite was a DOC aerial 1080 poison operation aimed at rats, timed to give the native birds a respite to breed. Most landowners in the kiwi care group supported the operation.
Recalling the choir - by Dave Hansford
Take a walk in most any mainland forest today, and you can hear yourself think, which was more than could the teacher at Mt Bruce's first school. It's said that she dismissed her class one 19th Century morning because she couldn't make herself heard above the chorus of kokako outside.
The reward for hours of volunteer labour
at Pukaha comes for Daniel McKeague
of Florida as he releases a young kiwi
back into the forest
SH 2 cleaves a route north from Masterton to Eketahuna, swinging close by the National Wildlife Centre at Mt Bruce - known to Rangitaane people as Pukaha - squeezed between the Tararua Range and the 942 ha that remain of Seventy-Mile Bush.
Ranks of totara, rimu and rata once crowded these hills between Masterton and Norsewood. The calls of tui, kaka, bellbird pierced this misty, mossy realm, but birdsong became swansong as one by one, the chorus departed the stage. Some of the singers - the huia, piopio, bush wren, laughing owl - were never heard from again.
Even the most resilient, the kaka, tieke and kiwi, eventually fled or perished as raging clearance fires devoured the forest, and the kokako went with them.
The Pukaha Mt Bruce Board means to bring the din back, and with the help of some imaginative fundraising, fierce local support and some friends in high places, they've made a start.
Born out of the signatures of the Department of Conservation, the National Wildlife Centre Trust, Rangitaane O Wairarapa and others, the Board has pledged to drive the predators out of Pukaha and return its rightful occupants.
Like conservation anywhere, this project needs a lot of money - more than $200,000 a year - and commitment. Through Masterton mayor Bob Francis, the Board secured both. "It became clear that to sustain this into the future," he recalls, "it was going to take a far bigger effort from the community. I suppose that's where I got involved."
In late 2004, Bob led a fundraising campaign that ended with a 12-hour telethon and more than $500,000 worth of support from local businesses and communities.
As well, the Board sells CDs of native birdsong and invites people to sponsor a hectare's worth of pest control each year, the sort of fresh thinking that has allowed species like kokako, kaka, and most recently the kiwi, a return appearance.
DOC ranger Tony Silbery had a sense the plan might just come off when he had to find a bigger hall to hold their first public meeting. "We had something like 300 people turn up to hear Bob announce the kiwi plan - I was just amazed."
Take the long labours of Rangitaane's young men and women who spent three years cutting tracks, 110km of them in sometimes atrocious weather, opening the way for the trap lines marking Pukaha's line in the sand between predators and paradise.
North Island brown kiwi
leaving their mark at
Pukaha Mt Bruce
Kaka were the first to return home, in 196. The first six kokako were released in July 2003. Then, in December the same year, six adult kiwi. Today, 11 kiwi range the hills behind the visitor centre, the offspring of captive breeding efforts in the early 2000s at Rainbow Springs and Otorohanga and other centres. Last season, two kiwi set up nest burrows barely five metres from the Centre's busiest tracks.
There is no fence around Pukaha, and that's down to a philosophy as much as any practical consideration. Pukaha sets out to prove a point, says DOC Wairarapa Area Manager Derrick Field: "On the mainland, you need to be able to control pests forever, and simply fencing them out doesn't achieve that. We wanted to demonstrate that it could be done."
A vision still more precious, says Tony Silbery, is the prospect of kiwi living within the wider world, safe. "The day when a kiwi sets up a territory outside the reserve, I'll be chuffed. I can't wait till I'm up there one night and I see a bird trotting across a neighbour's property; I'll be on the phone to them the next day."
Meanwhile, Bob Francis - now chairman of the Pukaha Mt Bruce Board - is making sure the bills get paid and the traps keep getting set:"We have funding in place now for the next five years and we're also building a capital fund - we're up to close on $200,000 in that - which we'll be using beyond that five-year period."
Testing stoat trapping methods at
Pukaha Mt Bruce
There are plans galore - new funding, education, a new visitor centre, conservation training programmes for young people emphasising mainland restoration. Partnerships with Rangitaane (Tony likens it to the confluence of the Clutha and the Shotover), District and Regional Councils which continue the pest control beyond Pukaha's bounds, with business (the Tui Brewery down the road chipped in $275,000), with schools, with Trade and Enterprise New Zealand, and with those hectare-sponsors from suburbs all over the country.
"The thing about Pukaha," says Tony, "is that it's about rebuilding as much as restoration." For Rangitaane, their young people get a glimpse of their spiritual estate, the earth their ancestors walked on. For Bob Francis, it's a new life after 21 years of mayoral office. For Derrick Field, it's a centre of learning: "A place where we'll encourage people to come and learn about mainland restoration - a centre for research."
For the people that pull off SH 2, it's a chance to hear that chorus again, lost to five generations. And an encore by our namesake, our national likeness. Pukaha is reaquainting us with our kiwi.
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