Restoring the Dawn Chorus in Sth Waikato

Forest and Bird, Issue 307, 1 February 2003, Page 41

Restoring the Dawn Chorus in Sth Waikato

GORDON STEPHENSON

recounts the efforts required to reintroduce North Island robin.

aotu is a dairy farming district on rolling pumice soils in the southern Waikato. Our 25-hectare Barnett Reserve, which includes six hectares of covenant and a bit of neighbouring bush thrown in for good measure, is one of several scattered remnants of a former 1000 hectares of dense podocarp forest. The old name was ‘he waotu tahi nga rakau; the tall bush that stood alone, a forest outlier somehow left after the last Taupo eruption. Almost all the remaining remnants are now protected as reserve, covenant, or under Nga Whenua Rahui. When the main bush was purchased for a Reserve in 1992 and vested in the South Waikato District Council, a group of locals led by South Waikato Forest and Bird, plus Rotary, the Walking Group, and others, said to the Council ‘we will manage the Reserve’. That was when a neighbour added his six hectares and put a covenant on it. As a result, things have happened that would never have got under way under the Council — boundary fences put up, thousands of trees planted in grassed areas, blackberry defeated and shrubs planted (much of the latter the work of one 80-year-old woman), and pests controlled. In 2000 the time was ripe for the next stage. Consultation with DoC led to the ambition of introducing North Island robin (toutouwai). Before Christmas that year, bait stations were made from old plastic milk bottles, and bait lines were laid out at 50-metre intervals, and pairs of lines allocated to volunteer teams. Rats and mice were blitzed to undetected numbers. The school (Te Waotu) made tracking tunnels and read

all the tracking papers. April 2001 was the time to make our first contact with the robins of Waipapa in Pureora Forest Park. We stayed at the Recreation Centre; the school children were there for two weekends, and parents for the days between. What a wet cold week it was! Yet everyone was out there, eyes open for the birds, feeding them mealworms and tapping the lids on the peanut butter jars that held the bait. After only three days the robins learned to come to the sound of tapping. We trained 111 robins in the 10 days. In May, a team from Auckland Regional Council came down and, with our help caught, weighed, measured, and leg-banded 60 robins. It was nerve wracking carrying two or three small black bags, a robin in each, through rough bush, not knocking them on trees, and holding them up safe when falling flat into mud. Amazingly all, human and robin, survived. Thirty robins were ear-, or rather leg-marked for Waotu and 30 for the Hunua Forest. After a blessing from tangata whenua at Pureora, they were taken over three days to Waotu, where they were welcomed with due ceremony by a big crowd of volunteers and school children. Twenty birds went to the Reserve, and 10 to Stephenson’s covenant, as part of an experiment. The transfer was extraordinarily successful, possibly due in part because they were all fed every few days, and so settled easily. Robins will not breed successfully with rats present — in August 2001 we began what will have to be an annual pestcontrol programme. Over recent years, more than 100 ferrets have been killed, possum are now virtually absent from

the whole district, 14 wild cats met their doom, and magpie numbers are kept low. Very few stoats have been seen, possibly because of poison by-kill. The 2001 breeding season was not the success we hoped for, due partly to very bad spring weather (some nests were flung out of trees by gales) and we stopped pest control too early. Nevertheless, 18 robins were fledged. In 2002 control started in July, and we have made an entirely new set of bait stations from 110-millimetre plastic drainpipe. The first baiting rounds with pellets (first generation anticoagulant) was weekly until the end of August. The bait was then changed to waxed blocks fixed onto a wire in the bait station. These only

need attention monthly, but continued until January. The whole operation is being monitored by Dave Pattemore of Auckland University, who weekly locates all nests, checks the breeding, leg bands the fledglings, and gives all the young ones a name! He is also supervising the experiment to observe whether any birds transfer between the Reserve and Stephenson’s bush about half a kilometre away. One cannot but be impressed by the commitment of the volunteers. The rewards come when walking through the bush and hearing a continuous orchestra of birdsong. — GORDON STEPHENSON is a distinguished life member of Forest and Bird, living at Waotu, South Waikato.