Small Section Handles Big Job

Forest and Bird, Issue 313, 1 August 2004, Page 43

Small Section Handles Big Job

—ANN GRAEME

ehind the bustling town of Whitianga, and a world away from the surf and the trendy town houses of the Coromandel Peninsula, lie the secret inlets and estuaries of the Whitianga Harbour. Captain Cook once stood high on Kopaki Point in Kaitoke forest, admiring the view across mangroves and saltmarsh to the kauri forests lining the Whenuakite and Waiwawa rivers. The remnants of those great forests still provide a magnificent sight from the water, but, when volunteer goat hunters Steve Hart, John Longden and Adele Smaill explored Kaitoke Scenic Reserve in May 2001, they found a dying forest of leafless kohekohe, gaunt pohutukawa and the stench of billy goats. Under the onslaught of possums, goats, wild pigs, feral cats, stoats and rats, Kaitoke forest was near collapse. But Kaitoke Reserve has had a reprieve. Steve Hart was the chairperson of the small Mercury Bay section of Upper Coromandel Forest and Bird. In August 2001 the section set up the Kaitoke Restoration Project, now in its third year. The group secured funding from the Waikato Branch of Forest and Bird, Project Crimson, the Ron Greenwood Trust and Environment Waikato. The project also received excellent support from the Department of Conservation’s Hauraki Area Office which donated Fenn trap

covers, track markers and permits. Possums were poisoned over the 122-hectare reserve. A goat hunting team, helped by trained goat dogs, exterminated all the goats. Goat reinvasion is now limited by regular patrols with dogs (trained to be safe with kiwi) and a boundary fence with the adjacent Landcorp property, built and funded by Mercury Bay Forest and Bird, DoC and Landcorp. Steve and his wife Gay continue to trap possums, stoats and pigs in the key ecological sites within the reserve. Tallies so far are 378 possums, 11 pigs, 73 stoats, one weasel, 59 rats and 160 goats. Stoat numbers this year have been alarming — most months between five and seven stoats are being caught using only 25 Fenn traps. For Kaitoke forest, the results of this pest control are spectacular. Kohekohe and pohutukawa have a new lease of life and are flowering again. Hangehange is now two metres tall in places where there was none two years ago. Seedlings carpet the previously bare ground and the trees ring with bird song, to the delight of members who came to picnic in the summer. Members of the Mercury Bay section of Forest and Bird also protect dotterels nesting on Buffalo Beach.