The island life for hundreds of giant wētāpunga

Thursday, 6 September 2018

Ectotherms keepers from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin and Emily Edkins release 300 juvenile wetapunga on a island in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf.

Roaming a forested island armed with Tupperware containers, the same you'd get with a takeaway curry, at night can be hazardous.

The main things to watch out for, warns Auckland Zoo ectotherm keeper Ben Goodwin, are grey-faced petrel burrows.

'Step in one; you'll snap your leg.' He is ever laconic.

There are exactly 300 zoo-bred wētāpunga – the heaviest of the giant weta – in our plastic boxes. We brought the juvenile giants to this tiny island in The Noises in the Hauraki Gulf by boat, and must now wrestle them out of their boxes for their first night in trees.

* New reserve for iconic grasshopper

One of a collection of Islands known as the Noises in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf where a team from Auckland Zoo released 300 juvenile wētāpunga.

* How do we decide which endangered species to save?**

Ben insists they're one of the gentler weta species, though they haven't been named as such. Wētāpungameans 'god of ugly things' in Maori and its binomial name, Deinacrida heteracantha, means 'terrible grasshopper'. The beasties live up to their names that night.

They're chunky and struggling, some bitier than others; it's a challenge to not accidentally tear legs off. That both human and weta limbs remain intact by the end of the release is an achievement worth celebrating with wine around the campfire.

We do so with a motley crew of ecology buffs. Ben and his fellow ectotherm keeper Emily Edkins are tattooed, heavily pierced and dripping weta facts. Chris Gaskin's a wildlife artist and founder of the Northern Seabirds Trust. Representatives from two generations of the Neureuter family, the island's titleholders, are our hosts.

When discussing plants, they all drift seamlessly into latin - metrosideros excelsa, melicytus ramiflorus, Pseudopanax arboreus – and for the uninitiated it's like listening to botanically minded witches casting spells.

ISLAND TIME AND AVIAN WARS

Four generations of Neureuters have owned the island in The Noises, each dedicated to low impact summers spent appreciating and conserving it together – based out of an off-the-grid bach that hasn't changed much since the 1930s.

Fifty-seven-year-old Sue Neureuter's dad taught her only take what she needed. As a child, she once caught an excess of snapper – so he made her eat them all in one sitting.

'I remember it so well,' she says. 'Very sternly he said, 'Susan, if you catch it you must eat it'.'

These days the family works with a slew of organisations including the zoo, the Auckland Museum, and AUT to better understand and protect the island's biodiversity 'because no one can do anything in isolation'.

'We're very open to building those relationships because we're working towards the same goal. It's for the good of the environment: marine, foreshore, and terrestrial,' Sue says.

She's a landscaper living at Cooks Beach and loves how blooms and birdlife define months on the island..

In June, when the kohekohe decks its trunk with fine plumes of white petals, woodpigeons and hook-beaked kaka fly in to feed.

August sees rough-and-tumble gangs of tui, scoffing nectar from karo blooms. They come again at Christmas for the pohutukawa flowers.

Bellbirds are permanent residents, with a stronghold in a windswept valley to the island's east. When the tui aren't around, they drop in on the bach for its sprawling hibiscus plant.

'Those tuis bash the bellbirds up really badly, so we don't see them at certain times,' says Sue. 'But the minute they bugger off, the bellbirds are back.'

New Zealand's native birds are hardly shrinking violets, but Sue reckons they're extra cheeky on her island.

Ectotherms keepers from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin and Emily Edkins package up the 300 juvenile wētāpunga at Auckland Zoo to be transported to an island in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf.

'Sometimes you'll leave an avocado on the kitchen table and come back to find a tui gorging itself,' she says with fondness. 'Then we've got little blue penguins nesting under the shed – they're hilarious. They do not give a s… and will walk right over your feet.'

At the bach, it's normal to fall asleep with a dozen weta and an extended gecko family in the rafters above their heads.

'You can tell the difference between a weta and a gecko falling on your sleeping bag – one's all scratchy, and one's a gentle plop,' says Sue.

Ectotherms keeper from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin with adult wetapunga.

CATS, RATS, AND CULLS

From the age of dinosaurs up until the mid-1800s, wētāpunga lived between Waiheke Island and the Far North's Paihia. But by the early 1900s, they were found only on Little Barrier Island.

A mass cat eradication on Little Barrier in the '80s saw wētāpunga numbers plummet. Cats had been killing birds – which duly thrived after the cat massacre – but also kiore rats, the deadly enemy of wētāpunga and the main reason for its late 19th-century demise.

A rat cull in 2004 boosted the wētāpunga population, but as with any species restricted to one spot, it exists precariously. Drought, fire, disease, or another surge in predators on Little Barrier could make it extinct.

'It's important we restore it to other islands where it was once found naturally – it'll make the species safer,' says Ben.

Ectotherms keepers from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin and Emily Edkins arrive at one of the Islands in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf with 300 juvenile wētāpunga.

Ben has a weta tattooed on the back of his right leg. There's a kidney fern on the shin of his left, and a native butterfly above that knee. He's always been passionate about flora and fauna, especially New Zealand's and our insects most of all.

'With lions, the work's been done. Same with most mammals,' he says. 'But there's a need for insect people because they're such an important part of our ecology and criminally understudied. There's also scope to be a pioneer – doing stuff like this.'

This stuff entails figuring out how to breed wētāpunga in captivity at a larger scale than ever before, which Auckland Zoo has been doing since 2012. Ben, Emily, and their team work in a small windowless room lined with mesh capsules, love nests for the wētāpunga.

They started off with just twelve insects from Little Barrier, which quickly begat thousands. When we visited the room before heading to the island, Ben opened a door on an enormous pair locked in a motionless embrace.

'They're mating,' he says. 'They can stay like that for 24 hours.'

Ectotherms keepers from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin and Emily Edkins check the locations on the island where they will release 300 juvenile wētāpunga.

The second part of the zoo's programme is population restoration via release. So far about 4300 of the Zoo's wētāpunga have been set free on Hauraki Gulf islands, most on the Neureuters'.

It's a lush spot for wētāpunga due to its ancient pohutukawa trees; their flakey bark makes a perfect refuge for the insects. There's also plenty of food, and it's free of mammalian predators – namely the dreaded kiore rat. Birds abound, but Ben sees them as a more acceptable cog in the circle of life.

'They've had millions of years of evolution to escape birds, but none to escape rodents,' he says. 'Birds hunt by sight, and weta have very effective camouflage … but rats just sniff them out.'

FOGGY MORN

The fog horn on nearby Tiritiri Matangi boomed overnight, and the Neureuter's island is blanketed at dawn. Our early morning walk takes us along a cliff edge of gnarled pohutukawa draped in fog. It's an ethereal sight, and a white shroud hides the sea below.

Sue leads us back into the bush, past some bird burrows.

One of the 300 juvenile wētāpunga released on an island in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf.

'Stick your nose in,' she commands. 'If this was a penguin burrow it'd stink to high hell.'

There was subtle musk if anything, indicating a petrel had claimed it this year. Penguins and petrels go to war over burrows, and there can be fatalities.

Seabird expert Chris Gaskin says battles can go either way, but usually to whoever's inside.

'Sometimes you'll see a dead petrel at the entrance of a burrow, and there'll be a live penguin inside,' he says. 'Penguins are stroppy little birds. A petrel does have a very sharp bill, but it doesn't quite have that stabbing power.'

Ectotherms keeper from Auckland Zoo, Ben Goodwin, releases a juvenile wētāpunga.

We reach a lookout and watch neighbouring islands appear as the sun burns through the fog. Boats emerge too, dozens of them. It's the first day of the scallop season, a pet hate of Sue's for the damage she says it does to the marine environment – which has follow-on effects for the land.

Sue is keenly aware of the impact Auckland's growing population has on the gulf. How scallop hunters' anchors and dredging scar the seabed; how overfishing impacts birdlife; how careless island hoppers leave rubbish and light fires.

'It's so sad. It's not joy I feel when I see something special now, it's relief,' she says.

Sue speaks of relative plenties gone by. Hers were the huge flocks of seabirds and rock pools teeming with life. Her parents' was abundant crayfish – they could simply stroll out to the rocks and grab one whenever the craving struck.

'We just don't see anything like those numbers of birds anymore,' she says. 'And the kids don't have that passion for snorkelling that we did, because you just don't see much on the rocks anymore.'

OPTIMISM ON THE BEACH

Down at the beach, surrounded by dog cockles, oyster shells, and the pearly fat spirals called cook's turban, Sue's mood lifts. She remembers a trio of fledgling gulls from a few years ago, dubbed Hughie, Louis, and Stupid.

Stupid had been Stewie until he developed a reputation for dropping mussel shells on an inflatable boogie board.

'Most gulls fly up into the air to drop the shells onto pebbles, to smash them open, but with Stupid and the boogie board, they'd just bounce,' laughs Sue.

The night before we'd all sat on this beach whooping – making sounds like American Indians off to war – to summon grey-faced petrels. Dozens of the seabirds swooped around our heads, invisible in the dark sky unless centimetres from our faces, then landed at our feet. It was a magical moment, evidence of plenty that still exists.

Sue and Ben agree the newly released wētāpunga will play their part in bringing the island back to a full capacity ecosystem.

The zoo's programme is not only about safeguarding the giant insects, but also about making up for us blundering mammals' devastating whack to New Zealand's unique and fragile ecology.