Rare sighting of critically endangered Parera with 3 fledglings at Raumati Beach

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Parera female with 3 fledglings -Wharemauku Feb 17 2014



The critically endangered Parera or NZ Grey Duck has raised two broods at the dune lake this season and now we have a confirmed sighting of a third. This (rather anxious) female with her three adolescent youngsters was photographed in the Wharemauku at the back of the Paraparaumu airport at midday on February 17.

Parera at Wharemauku Sept 2013

We thought they had been decimated  by the drought and then the duck shooting season, yet have sighted these birds quite regularly this year, which suggests that they may be flying in from quite a distance. A pair set up residence down at the lake over a number of weeks in September and then a lone male in October. They disappear while sitting on their nests, but then a brood came out on the lake in November, and another very late brood over Christmas.

The surprise is that the males stay with the females for some time after the chicks hatch which (introduced) Mallard males never do. We thought the season well over with the lake now dry so this has taken us by surprise. We have seen female ducks taking their youngsters from the lake down into the Wharemauku and perhaps this has happened here. The local Council has recently cleaned weed out of the waterways. This would have provided them with cover and food, and perhaps this has flushed them out. 

The implications for the expressway and other development around the airport -on paper at least- remain serious. The expressway contractors are required to stop work during the breeding season of birds cited by DoC as being nationally threatened. Dabchicks -one was settled at the lake from September through October- fall into this category, while parera are much more seriously endangered. They may be our most endangered native bird, and they are certainly our most neglected. It makes a mockery of the Nation’s environmental credentials, that they can still be legally shot in the duck shooting season. 

Trucks working at the airport close to where the Parera
were sighted-February 17 2014. 

The NZTA scientists, for their part, dismissed the local presence of these birds  out of hand, (the suspicion was raised that they couldn't tell the difference between Parera and Mallard) and their fate in consequence was ignored by the Environmental Protection Agency’s risible Board of Inquiry. The confirmed prescence of these birds should also impact on new airport development adjacent to the Wharemauku and the drain where these birds were photographed.

Don’t go holding your breath over that either.
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