Forgotten isles 'small but very precious'

Forest and Bird, Issue 293, 1 August 1999, Page 20

Forgotten isles 'small but

very precious'

MIKE LEE

ousands of this country’s small islands have enormous conservation potential but most are never considered. My explorations by kayak in the Hauraki Gulf, reveal that tiny islands can be rich in birdlife, yet most of them are unknown, often nameless and usually ownerless. Conservationists everywhere face a challenge to recognize and protect such oftforgotten places for their wildlife values. The community has probably discounted these little islands because they are too small to exploit commercially — for instance, by turning them into ‘real estate’

Conservationists may overlook their importance because of an official mindset which sets aside larger islands as refuges for species threatened on the mainland. In those cases official island ‘biogeographical’ theory decrees ‘the bigger the better’. However, islands are something other than miniatures of the mainland. Island ecosystems are generally simpler, with fewer species and less habitat diversity than mainland systems. Their ecological processes are therefore more readily restored. Despite extensive efforts by pioneering biologists through the years, many islets

believes we’re ignoring the conservation

potential of thousands of small islands.

and small islands in the Hauraki Gulf have received only minimal inspection. While my studies have concentrated on islets near my home on Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf, there is every indication that islets everywhere are likely to be just as valuable. Popular convention has it that there are anything from 40 to 65 islands in the Hauraki Gulf. Some of the larger islands, including Little Barrier, are internationally renowned sanctuaries for many of the country’s endangered forest bird species. In reality, however, there are many more islands than this and most have some wildlife values. Extrapolating from the Department of Conservation’s Register of Northern Offshore Islands, the total number of islands inside the Hauraki Gulf, including reefs, stacks, and sandbars, is 425. The most numerically significant category among

these is islets of from 0.1 hectares to 1.0 hectare — 351 in all. There are also a further 64 slightly larger islands, from one to 10 hectares. All these are potentially valuable habitats, especially for birds and lizards. Despite this, the significance of islets and small islands has not been adequately considered in the various conservation management and local authority planning documents. Some do not appear on planning maps at all. Indeed for most purposes of society (with the practical exception of navigation), our little islands tend to be ‘invisible’. Yet, as breeding sites for seabirds, these islands are important remnants of a once much more extensive ecosystem, which in pre-human times would have included the coastal cliffs, beaches and promontories of the mainland. These fragments of land are also interest-

ing in a social and historic sense as they can be seen as a tiny remnant of pre-European New Zealand. In a curious anomaly, many of them are not formally owned in a prop-erty-title sense. For nearly 150 years they have existed in a legal limbo as ‘uninvestigated’. They are the tiny crumbs ‘left over, and subsequently forgotten, after the extinction of ‘aboriginal’ communal ownership and the allocation of land into individual, Maori and Crown property titles. With the exception of one which is privately owned, and another owned by the Crown but not managed by DoC, all the islets in my study are ‘ownerless’ in the formal sense. This means they are likely to be Maori customary land. Like many islets and small islands in the Hauraki Gulf, and elsewhere, those in my survey have received only minimal inspec-

tion in the past. Indeed, many have never been legally surveyed, nor had any formal management or protection — even islets within a few nautical miles of Auckland City. Many small islands, more than 100 in the Hauraki Gulf alone, are ‘unnamed’ The most numerous class of islands in the Gulf are therefore the least cared for and the least known — it can be said they literally ‘don’t count These islets, though individually small, extend throughout the Hauraki Gulf and collectively add up to approximately 120 hectares; much more if slightly larger islands (from one to 10 hectares) are also included. (There would be many more islands included if the extended boundaries of the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park Bill were considered, for this proposed area stretches round the Coromandel Peninsula and into the Bay of Plenty). This is a significant area of conservation land and could present an opportunity for the practical expression of the much-talked-about partnerships between traditional Maori owners and central and local government agencies. In light of the proposal to form a Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, I hope the ‘rediscovery’ of these and many other islets — effectively abandoned and neglected for at least 150 years — will lead to their formal protection and some form of co-ordinated conservation management. It could also be productive to consider the conservation value of similar islets all round the coasts of New Zealand .

MIKE LEE is a former chair of Hauraki Islands Forest and Bird and a member of the Auckland Regional Council. This article is based on a chapter in his MSc thesis, ‘New Zealand, the 10,000 island archipelago, Auckland University, 1996..