This Is How It Ends: Can we tear down the sanctuary fences?

Wednesday, 27 October 2021

We rely on sanctuaries and offshore islands to keep rare species alive – but can we lock up nature forever? Andrea Vance and Iain McGregor investigate for Stuff’s This Is How It Ends series.

“You’re going to c… yourself when you see the toilet,” says photographer Iain McGregor, bounding across a seaweed-strewn rock platform.

Despite the inconsonant phrasing, he has a point. Rangatira Island’s sole long-drop is crawling with spiders.

Its most intimidating resident is the Rangatira spider: nocturnal, hairy and bigger than the average hand.

By dark they emerge from their lairs to hunt giant wētā, the world’s heftiest insect. They might be terrifying, but these enormous arachnids are precious.

Classified as having a ‘relict population status’ – surviving in less than 10 per cent of previously known habitat – that long drop is one of its last strongholds.

Rangatira, or South East Island, lies 55km off mainland Chatham Island/Rēkohu, and is an offshore sanctuary. It is a last refuge for some of the country’s rarest and most at-risk species.

Free of all introduced predators and pests, it has been uninhabited since the 1960s.

Human visitors are tightly controlled, with access generally restricted to those undertaking conservation management activities.

Getting there involves crossing the choppy Pitt Strait in a fishing boat, from Owenga Harbour, a tiny harbour on Rēkohu’s south-east coast.

We sit on plastic buckets packed with food, our clothes and equipment needed by the Department of Conservation’s Chatham’s team. Luggage, which could carry seeds, dirt and disease, is banned.

Each piece of clothing is washed in Sterigene, a biocide which kills all bacteria, viruses and spores. Boots are scrubbed of mud. Then, in a quarantine room on Rēkohu, ranger Jamie Cooper uses tweezers to painstakingly combs seams, linings and pockets for any stray invaders. Nothing unwanted is getting on that island.

“The last thing we want to do is get a disease over there, which might potentially wipe out species,” he says.

The rough seas that make some of us green around the gills has created another problem: we can’t land close to the DOC hut.

It takes a couple of hours, and the disturbance of a couple of snoozing seals, to haul the heavy buckets uphill.

Undertaking conservation 800km from mainland New Zealand is back-breaking, intensive work.

“It can be a mammoth undertaking,” biodiversity ranger Jemma Welch, who is based in Waitangi, the island group’s main settlement, says. “We’re here six or seven times a year, for two to four weeks at a time.

“We’re planning all year round. We don't have enough staff on the ground, so we’re organising volunteers, recruiting them. That takes up quite a lot of time.

“There's not many creature home comforts. We have to bring all our food by boat.”

There’s no printers or the Internet.

“We’ve got to make sure we’ve absolutely everything we need in terms of our data, past reports or species management guidelines, so we can do our jobs out here effectively. We can't just hop onto the Internet and access it.”

Even moving around the island is difficult. The ground is pockmarked with thousands of seabird burrows. Staff clomp around the forest wearing ungainly ‘petrel boards’ – a sort-of snow-shoe to stop them crushing the fragile homes.

“It’s quite physical, spending eight hours a day walking around on petrel boards. Some days it’s a 16 kilometre day walking. And some quite steep terrain.”

The effort has paid off. Since farming ceased in 1961, the forest has regenerated. It is home to little blue penguins, snipe, tui, tomtits, red-crowned parakeets and oystercatchers. Gulls, skuas and terns all nest and roost there. Skinks thrive alongside giant click beetles, weevils, and giant stick insects.

Most famously the island is an ICU for species on the edge. There were only five Chatham Islands black robins left in the world by 1980. Their survival hinged on Old Blue, the last breeding female and a pioneering programme of cross-fostering eggs.

“We have the population now sitting at about 270 adults across two islands,” Welch says. The other is desolate Mangere Island, to the north-west of Rangatira.

The tiny, jet-black forest sprites flutter around human visitors, whose footfall disturbs leaf litter revealing invertebrates.

“As soon as you stop and take a minute to look around, they'll all come out and just be hopping around your feet,” Welch says. “It's pretty special.”

The island’s soft, cushiony ground is ideal for the eight species of burrowing seabirds that breed there.

Its Moriori name, Hokorereoro, loosely means the vibration of flight. And at night, the skies reverberate with the eerie calls and screeches of hundreds of thousands of storm petrels, penguins, sooty shearwaters and broad-billed prions.

“It does make for some sleepless nights when you've got what feels like a million prions calling under your room in the hut, but you get used to it quite quickly,” Welch says. “We've got a Chatham Island subspecies of little blue penguin and their calls sound much like donkeys.

“To really experience the island, you have to do it at night. It comes alive.

“The walk to the toilet is about 30 metres and in November, during the white-faced petrel prospecting period, that takes about 10 minutes. They get a bit dazzled by your light, and they fly into it and down to your feet. It's a very slow shuffle to the toilet, and just quite amazing.”

Welch cares for one of the island’s most vulnerable species: the Chatham petrel. They breed only on the island and risk being overcome by the sheer number of other birds, especially the pushy broad-billed prion.

The solution is a ‘state-housing’ scheme for the sleek grey and white seabirds. Artificial burrows are installed for breeding pairs and a network of around 220 is regularly monitored while chicks are being reared.

Neoprene is stretched over the entrance which allows the petrels to squeeze in, but keeps the larger prions out. In the winter, while the birds are foraging up to 3000km out over the Pacific, the chambers are closed off.

“There are 10 to 100,000s of broad-billed prions and only a few hundred Chatham Petrels. So we want to avoid them taking over the burrows.”

In January, the DoC team established eight artificial burrows in a clearing next to a speaker, which plays their calls. The males make a high-pitched sound, the females a deeper ‘yap.’ Cosy in the burrow, they both purr.

“The idea was the Chatham Petrels would be lured in by the sound and hopefully discover there are all these nice burrows already set up, and start breeding.

“In April, two of them had birds in, and another had two birds in the one burrow. It was pretty exciting.”

The success of the programme has meant DOC has been able to create new colonies on Pitt Island and Rēkohu.

“They are still counted as endangered but they're doing much better now,” Welch says. “We've got 120-odd chicks that are likely to fledge this year.”

The island also nursed the small, colourful shore plover/tūturuatu back to life.

“They would have once been present on almost all islands and the mainland shoreline,” Welch says. “Their last refuge was Rangatira Island.

“Through quite intensive management their numbers have gone up a wee way and there are approximately 130 adults here. We've also been able to make some introductions back to mainland New Zealand.” Only 250 exist.

“It's a special island,” she says. “It holds such an important place in New Zealand conservation history. You pinch yourself to get to work and live here sometimes for weeks at a time.”

Conservation work is challenging, uncomfortable and labour-intensive. To keep forest carbon on the ground, species’ habitats intact, wetlands functional or landscapes beautiful, costs time and a great deal of money.

DoC’s total operating budget for 2020/21 is $667 million, a fraction of other, larger Government departments. Most of that is spent on species protection and ecosystem maintenance.

One conservation staffer told Stuff it costs around $45,000 to keep a kiwi alive, and roughly $30,000 for one of our rare forest birds.

Then there is the tireless work of iwi, private landowners, community groups and fenced sanctuaries like Wellington’s Zealandia, Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari in Waikato and Otago’s Orokonui Ecosanctuary.

Operation Nest Egg was hatched in 1994, a programme to boost the dwindling number of kiwi. Eggs are taken from the wild, incubated until they hatch and then cared for in a predator-free creche, usually an offshore island, until they reach a healthy weight. They are then returned to the wild.

One such island is Pomona Island, within Lake Manapouri, in Fiordland National Park.

Its steep, forested slopes are separated from the mainland by the pounamu coloured waters of Hurricane Passage.

And it is largely predator-free, making it a 262-hectare haven for robins, mōhua and the endangered Haast tokoeka kiwi, of which there are only 400 in the world.

“The work started in 2005,” says John Whitehead, chairman of the Pomona Island Charitable Trust. “We had deer, possums, stoats, rats, and mice. So it was a big job.

“I think we used eight tonnes of brodifacoum. We thought this was great, we've got a moat around this island.

“So we talked to DOC about Kiwis.”

In 2009, 200 Kiwi came to the island, and have gone on to hatch chicks of their own. Nearby Rona Island is also a creche where kiwi spend up to a year before being returned to Haast.

But keeping them safe is a huge undertaking, staving off rats, mice and stoat incursions. “You have to be a born optimist in this job,” Whitehead says.

Pomona’s trap network has grown from 20 to 200 traps. The trust has already 50 volunteers, with a solid core of around a dozen. Most are retired.

“We can do the trap check …in a day with six people, but you come back and feel buggered, basically,” Whitehead says.

Whitehead, a retired farmer, spends much of his time in the workshop building and repairing traps.

“We rely on grant applications and donations. And it's a totally voluntary trust so none of us get paid for doing anything. But it's enjoyable. That's why we keep coming.”

Each expedition is celebrated with a home-made cake, made by Whitehead’s wife Fay Edwards or Lynley King.

King’s husband Paul is the trust secretary. He takes care of the island’s 14 ‘trailcam’ cameras, set up to detect pests. In 2019, they also captured smaller kiwi, leading to the discovery that the birds were breeding.

King also uses an app called Walk the Line which helps volunteers navigate traps. It sounds an alarm when the cell phone is in proximity. Other satellite technology alerts him when a trap has been triggered.

They are vital tools to help the community trust get control of predator plagues in beech mast years, which are happening more frequently.

“We're just getting rats back down but they are talking about another beech mast coming this autumn,” Whitehead says. “With climate change we seem to be getting more and more which makes it harder and harder.”

At Orokonui, the largest predator-free forest in the South Island, conservation manager Elton Smith nurtures “the Haasties” until they are strong enough to fend off stoats.

“It's like a little kiwi farm. They take wild eggs from the Haast range, incubate and hatch them in places like the Franz Josef Wildlife Centre or Willowbank.

“We get them when they're about four weeks old, probably weighing about 300 grammes. And then our job is to get them up to a decent weight, say 1200 or 1500 grammes.

“And then DOC, the overlords, put them somewhere else, either on creche islands or other sanctuaries, with the ultimate goal of returning those ones back to Haast. That is the quickest way of building up a population.”

The work takes hundreds of hours of staff and volunteer time. “The kiwi creche is very intense.

“But by far the best thing we do here is go catch little Kiwi chicks. It's fun.”

The chicks are skittish and learn quickly from human behaviour, he says.

“The most special thing about the Haast tokoeka is they are ginger, the gingers of the kiwi world.

“Some of them really are strikingly orange but not exactly Ed Sheeran. They have a really distinct plumage, quite rare.”

Smith loves his job, but he hopes it doesn’t last forever. “The future of conservation isn't this. It's a means to an end.”

In the early 2000s the fenced sanctuary came about. Then, it was the cutting edge technology of conservation.

“You get some really good biodiversity results, second only to offshore islands. But you can't have huge areas fenced off. They are very expensive beasts,” he says.

“So now, the next kind of challenge is to do without fenced sanctuaries, and that's the Predator Free movement.”

Predator Free 2050 was a bold plan, announced in July 2015 by then-Prime Minister Sir John Key. It would mean the complete eradication of seven species: three of rats, three of mustelids, and possums.

“Maybe in my lifetime, just as I retire hopefully, we can tear down the fence,” Smith says.

“That's the bigger picture, really. I might be redundant in a few years time.”

Kevin Hague, chief executive of Forest & Bird, agrees.

“Our Pākehā tradition is about putting nature in parks and building a fence around those parks.

“And that's been very important for conservation. We have driven so many species to the brink of extinction, but we're great at building fences that actually have stopped them falling over that edge.

“Actually, that's not going to be good enough. We need to make conservation happen everywhere.”

Melanie Mark-Shadbolt, co-founder and chief executive of Māori environmental not-for-profit Te Tira Whakamātaki, wants “whole system reform.”

“Conservation, the way we do it right now, is just not working. The conservation sector comes very much out of a colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal environment. People hate hearing that.

“We have a conservation system that's based on a history of ownership and a history of colonisation. It doesn't suit us now in Aotearoa in 2021. We need to reframe the way we do conservation and environmental management. And part of that conversation is definitely around ownership of land.

“All the research and evidence shows that when indigenous people live on their land we have better biodiversity outcomes, around the world.

“In New Zealand, we exclude Māori from their land, pull them out of the forest, and then we lock it up as a conservation estate. And we only allow people in and out for trips.

“That, in my mind, is wrong, we need to change if we want better biodiversity outcomes.”

Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan agrees a “cultural tension” exists. “I don't mean just Māori and Pākehā, this is a tension that exists across the board. Do we lock [nature] up and throw away the key and look at it from afar?

“Or do we get in there and engage in and see ourselves as part of the taiao, the natural environment. I am probably often offside with traditional conservationists in my views on this, and I'm okay with that.

“I'm very clear about my view, in terms of conservation. We preserve our environment. By having a connection with our environment. We have a connection with our environment by using our environment.”

Allan says the Predator 2020 movement is moving away from islands and fenced ecological islands.

“We are moving on to larger landscapes.

“We're not relying on fences, we are relying on things like mountains and the oceans and rivers. That's a pretty big undertaking, one I'm pretty excited about.”

Hague imagines rare species returning again to the mainland. “Kākāpō used to be numerous and spread through most of the country. Wouldn't it be great to see that happen again?

“Fortress Codfish Island has been really important, but we need to have a plan that will see them everywhere.”

For Whitehead, it makes all the work worthwhile.

“I don't think we can put what we've got in the zoo. I almost feel like Pomona Island is a zoo, it's an ark, we're trying to keep stuff alive.

“I'm sort of pushing 70, and I've seen stuff disappear in my lifetime.

“But that’s my dream: that we can have this country predator free.”