Closing in on a Golden Bay

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 14

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Despite battling a dreaded Nelson lurgy we still managed to traverse the first stages of a trek into the Able Tasman National Park, up here at the top of the South Island. The Park offers some of the most engaging vistas of any in the country, although this end is regenerating so there is no mature forest, and quite a lot of weeds, wilding pine and gorse amongst them.

Golden Bay Vista - Adele Island in the background

The Department of Conservation (DoC) and a local Trust have combined to rid the park of the wilding pine which have been threatening the viability of this new bush. The pines (Pinus radiata mostly – the backbone of the NZ timber industry and originally from California) have been poisoned and then left to decay, which sounds pretty stark, yet it simply enhances the new native forest regenerating across these coastal hills.

These Trusts however, are controversial initiatives. DoC budgets have been slashed by the Government in the last few years resulting in the loss of over 200 staff with the onus put on DoC to make up any difference by dragooning in community volunteers and run itself as a business. It is difficult enough for DoC to develop and run long term species protection strategies without also having to deal with a potpouri of independent Trusts of varying degrees of ability and professionalism, along with raising sponsorship from local concessionaires who have been frogmarched to their altar. Volunteers have always been a major support for DoC. The sacking of DoC staff in such a way is alienating them.

The whole sorry saga reveals a Government lukewarm in its commitment to the environment. But there is a more sinister side to the development for it is fostering up a bevy of potential, malleable DoC competitors, to whom the Government can then begin to contract out DoC’s  budgets and responsibilities. This has been the history of the NZ public service over the last 25 years.

Golden Bay forest and understory

DoC’s pest control programmes are however bringing back the birds and the recent establishment of the offshore island of Adele as rat free, means the area is developing in potential as an asylum for endangered birds. And the track was packed with visitors! These were youngsters, mostly under 30 -school and college classes, with  international back packers, all going up for a night or two. (The balmy autumn weather continues). One Russian biologist from St Petersburg couldn't have got much sleep because he had a camera full of images of the creatures of our night - big horned weta, bush spiders and the little blue penguin amongst them.

There are large areas of shallow estuarine wetlands in good shape along this coast and here we were lucky enough to spot a couple of pairs of critically endangered parera-grey duck. They  showed evidence of cross breeding with mallard, (see previous post) though the males had the distinctive grey parera head. You need to be careful identifying them this time of the year because they could be immature mallard males yet to show their true colours, but these were bona fide parera, with females and this photograph shows how difficult it is to tell these animals apart from their female mates. Can you spot the difference?

Parera/mallard cross at Tinline Bay

Answer at the end of this post.

This is the season when ducks start pairing off, which leads to a lot of argy bargy. Not only among the males, but also among the females who are not passive in this courtship dance but can snub a male advance, or bully another female away from their preferred mate. Ducks in the wild seem to associate in small hapu (extended family groups), of 15 or so, and what has been catching our attention has been the apparent racial segregation that seems to be practised by the mallard males on the parera males. As the mallards mature, they develop a distinctive green head, and they turn on any male who hasn’t got one but is showing an interest in the females –siblings though they might be.  They caste them out of their community, though to the mallard's consternation, the females will then follow them. This finding seems to run counter to the Darwinian mantra of the survival of the fittest where the females always run with the alpha male.  (Parera are smaller in stature than mallard yet even the largest mallard male will back away from the chilly gaze of a spurning female so this wouldn't be the first time that a female has upended male theories about themselves.) 

This may be to parera’s long term advantage, and  is one reason why we've been seeing communities of parera, with mallard genes, that continue to behave like their native forebears. They seem to retain the cultural lives of our native duck.

Mallard hapu near Marahau-Able Tasman National Park

Here are raised large issues about the persistence of social identity amongst these interbreeding birds –questions about how they see themselves. Yet this insight, that these birds are continuing to live segregated lives, even as their genetic identity melds together, received further corroboration as we came across what appeared to be the main body of mallard ducks, segregated out, about 2km further up the coast.

Finally -Did you spot the difference between the parera?
One way you can tell you're looking at a parera male is if you see two grey headed ducks together acting like a couple; another is when a mallard male starts harassing what you have taken to be a female. So trying to decide from a photograph is a little unfair. The female is in the middle and the males (with reddening frontages) are vying for her  attention. What makes these three intriguing is that the male on the left already has a female mate, but is making a play for this one. 

Here again, our assumption that these animal’s minds are rudimentary when compared to ours seems premature. In their courtship behaviour they  are not so dumb. The females choose a mate and this dance seems similar in complexity and unpredictability to ours, an insight which begins to illuminate how they see each other. For us one duck is pretty much the same as another and yet we can begin to see here, that they see each other with a kind of complex personal attractiveness  that is similar to the way we see our potential mates.

We were listening to holiday music while posting this.
The Stargazers. I See The Moon
Good old English Music Hall from the 50's

Over the mountain over the sea

Back where my heart is longing to be

Please let the light that shines on me

Shine on the one I love

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