Bream Head Community Initiatives

Forest and Bird, Issue 302, 1 November 2001, Page 16

Bream Head Community Initiatives

The Department of Conservation initiated the Bream Head kiwi zone in August 2000 using kiwi-zone funding that Forest and Bird's ‘Kiwis for Kiwi’ campaign helped secure. The area includes Crown forests and private farmland beyond the north head of Whangarei Harbour. Work began with an intensive predator-trapping programme. Kiwi that had been taken as eggs, from an unmanaged population where their survival was dubious, and raised in captivity until they had grown to a ‘stoat-resistant’ size, were released at Bream Head in September 2000. At the same time, local residents at Bream Head and further down the peninsula at ‘The Nook’ had been having a few ideas of their own. They held a public meeting and, with the help of DoC staff, set up their own predator-trapping programme to protect kiwi on their own land. The result of the combined effort by locals and DoC staff was encouraging to say the least. In June 2001, locals and DoC staff undertook the first ‘kiwi call’ count to incorporate the private land surrounding the reserves DoC was managing. In an area where kiwi populations were expected to have become locally extinct, call counts clearly showed that the kiwi population was expanding rapidly. Even better news is the fact that local enthusiasm to save the kiwi is growing as fast as the kiwi population appears to be. In July 2001, another public meeting signalled the likelihood that locals

further along the peninsula were about to set up their own kiwi protection programme. Predator control in these steep, bush-clad hills means that kiwi are once again able to survive at Bream Head, beyond Whangarei Heads in Northland. Residents and DoC staff hope that, in time, kaka and other birds that survive on nearby offshore islands will also return to breed in the area. Trappers check and re-bait the traps on foot.