Persistence Pays Off

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 48

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

We are running about a month late in our usual dune lake calendar, but finally some of the variety of birdlife that we have seen in previous years is arriving at the wetland, yet still not in the same numbers. And this seems to be happening as the mallards who have dominated the lake for the last little while, have decided to recreate elsewhere. Four parera-cross ducks were on the lake this morning with the males showing very parera-like colouring.

PareraX male at dune lake

Then a pair of kuruwhengi-shovellers, that we haven’t seen since late last summer  cruised in. They seem to be a new couple, because the male is very young and impatient and hasn’t yet got his full colouring. They spent the morning preening and feeding together.

Shoveller pair preening  

kuruwhengi- shoveller -male

Also present were  a pair of tete-grey teal, along with a third that had straggled along on his own. Both these species have bred here in previous years but there have been no signs of chicks out on the water so far.

Tete - grey teal pair feeding

The pukeko have repeated their surprising behaviours of the previous year as a third chick appeared at the lake and was absorbed into the wider family.  So two chicks have now become three, with all the adults lending a hand in their upbringing. And the pair of poaka-pied stilts are also feeding here regularly. We had three nests last year but there is no sign yet that these birds have settled into nesting mode.

poaka-pied stilt pair

Good news is also coming from the Waikanae lagoon about 4 kilometres away on the coast, where a pair of dabchicks have produced another youngster. 

Wewei-dabchick -a NZ grebe with youngster 

The parents take turns in carrying the little one on their backs over the first week or two, but it is the male who takes the bulk of the responsibility while the female goes out foraging for food. This pair raised a couple of chicks to maturity last year, and one turned up at the dune lake through October. Though we haven’t seen either of them since autumn.

NIWA pollution monitor - pipe detached

Finally we have been getting reassuring reports from the NZTA that their pollution control methods will prevent contamination from the expressway entering the local waterways. Not only does red stained pollutant contnue to enter the Wharemauku however but above  is a new photograph of the NIWA monitor on that creek. It has been like this for around 10 days now and is also  snagged  with flotsam.

Track we were listening to while posting this - Jack Bruce- It had to be - and the Cream's - White Room -on vinyl through dicky speakers...Its the only way.

I'll wait in this place

Where the sun never shines

Wait in this place

Were the shadows run from themselves

Jill Studd's Blog 

Contact Us

Gay Mallards?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 47

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

It is now mid-October around halfway through our southern Spring, and the dunelake remains very dry for this time of year. We have had only a third of our usual rainfall, and this is concerning because two years ago when the lake dried up in early December there followed one of our most serious national droughts.

It is lower now than it was then in mid October, so is the dune lake predicting another major drought? We’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile we are still not getting the rich variety of birds that we usually see down here at this time of the year. 

Tete - Grey Teal -Bright red eye usually indicates a male

One rather young looking tete (grey teal) cruised in for a look/see and a feed and was chased by a hopeful mallard male, while a pair of poaka (pied stilts) have been feeding, off and on for a week now. The female (foreground) has been acting broody but so far there is no sign of them nesting.

Poaka - Pied Stilt. Female in foreground

 Even the mallards and parera-cross ducks are getting thin on the ground though we continue to be puzzled by the parental behaviour of the males.

There have been at least four sets of ducklings come out on the lake so far, but the mothers have had a far from easy time in protecting their young. The males will occasionally stay with the females after the ducklings emerge. These are usually grey-headed parera-cross males, not the green headed mallard though the females remain constantly on the lookout whenever males  are around. We haven’t seen any actually harming youngsters, though the females react as if that is a real possibility and male stalking behaviour does separate the ducklings from their mothers.  They can be aggressively courted to a point where a female will sometimes abandon her brood entirely.

It is all a bit bewildering, for it creates an environment where the youngsters are hard put to survive, especially as there are so many other predators on the lookout and waiting an opportunity to zero in on them. To have the males creating such chaos doesn’t appear to be a successful evolutionary strategy that would support the ducks longer term survival, but somehow they do (survive)… And what a contrast this makes with the maternal behaviour of the pukeko. Here is some footage so you can judge for yourself. The camera work is a little handheld at times because its hard keeping up with them, but it still gives an idea of females under siege from their own.

And just to remind us that we really do know next to nothing about these birds, along comes a conundrum like this one. Here is footage of a mallard pair, that have settled in the Wharemauku in the last few days. They look like  a male-female pair, and act like a male-female pair, but are in fact two males. Their size, the red breast, the green stripe along the top of the ‘females’ head and the curl in their tails, are the giveaways.

From this it would appear that these birds have the same kind of gender complexity in their relationships that we do.

Finally we send a haere mai to all our German friends. Though if you live near Hanover we may very well be distant cousins, because one branch of our family set out from that region to settle  here in the Antipodes in the mid-19^th Century.

Track we were listening to while posting this Leadbelly’s Bourgeois Blues.

I tell all the coloured folks to listen to me

Don't try to find you no home in Washington DC

Cause its a bourgeois town 

Got the bourgeois blues

Gonna spread the news around

Jill Studd's Blog

Contact Us

Gentrifying wetlands

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 45

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

The Wharemauku creek divides the town and is spring fed so it never dries up. It is a picturesque asset, but has a number of tributaries that pick up effluent as they pass through it. Rather than stopping this pollution at its source, a restoration project was begun in one of the feeder drains (Drain 6) to try and clean it up. It is a serious attempt to mitigate pollution, by making a wetland from scratch and was also designed to benefit wetland birds.

So how successful has it been?

The project has been managed by a volunteer NGO –the Friends of the Wharemauku Stream (FOWS) - under the auspices of the local Council, utilising money from  Transpower. Transpower runs the national electricity grid and is a CCE – a stand alone Government business and this cash has been controversial because it was a mitigating  quid pro quo for a Transpower pylon project above the town. To quell opposition $70,000 was donated to local environment projects,

Transpower transmission above Paraparaumu town

The pylons were predicted to be a visual eyesore  and so they have proved to be. Yet the quid pro quo wetland itself, now looks like a case study in how not to go about rehabilitating a natural area. 

The wetland was designed to operate on three fronts -to use riparian plantings that would filter pollutant seeping from the land before it reached the drain -to excavate three small ‘settling’ ponds lined with stones that would screen out pollutant before it entered the main creek -to provide an attractive scenic vista close to the centre of town.

 

Restored wetland - Drain 6

It certainly has created a park-like setting but  is failing in its more important environmental roles because it has become itself, a source of pollution. Rather than filtering pollutant it is stagnating and growing it.

This drain doesn’t have a spring source. It is rain dependent and originally dug to lower the Wharemauku Swamp water table to make the surrounding land farmable. On the best of days it is very sluggish and whenever the Wharemauku rises after rain, instead of flushing the drain out, it back-fills it. It doesn’t take much rain for it to begin doing this and  quickly flood the area of plantings along with  the path beside it.

Polluted wetland Oct 15

A similar question mark hangs over the riparian filtration. It is  certainly good to have a community involved in utilising this kind of planting strategy. The pollutant however doesn’t appear to be coming from this wetland's surrounds, but further upstream where there are no riparian plantings.

Around this now fetid waterway an attractive park-like area continues to be constructed, but the birds it is attracting aren’t the rarer wild waterbirds but animals used to human contact from the town – notably introduced mallards along with an occasional pukeko. But even these are rare. It is too small to provide a regular source of food for ducks and too enclosed and close to traffic and pedestrians to provide a haven for waders like pied stilt and white faced heron.

 

And this is a feature of many of the reconstructed wetlands in the district. They are built first and foremost for the pleasure of the local public. A successful wetland that attracts our rare native waterbirds including ducks, grebes, scaup and waders, needs three essential features -to be large, -to provide a safe environment (safe from humans  that is) with good visibility. It needs to provide  room for our larger birds in particular, to take off and land. It also needs to able to grow good wild food for these animals. None of this is provided in this small area. 

  

A particular point is that  the public must be kept at a distance and at the moment the exact opposite is happening with landscaping paths designed to take us right into their midst. The birds  will vote with their wings on this issue. However all these conditions are being fulfilled at the dunelake which is why it attracts such a diversity of wetland birds. 

Though not for much longer.

Track we were listening to while posting this was The incredible String Band -Maya - 

The dust of the rivers does murmur and weep

Hard and sharp laughter that cuts to the bone 

Jill Studd's Blog

Contact us

Generation Pukeko 2014

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 45

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

For about a fortnight now we have been expecting pukeko chicks to come out of the blackberry. One of the signs has been the disappearance of about half the local hapu (local extended family), which we assumed was on nesting duty in the blackberry; and we weren’t wrong with the matriarch shepherding out a couple this morning.

Pukeko chick with matriarch

These chicks are very young and though we were on the path around 50 metres away, still they were quickly whisked out of sight when we stopped to film them.

Pukeko chick 13 Oct 2014

The females pool their eggs into one nest and share the nesting and then the upbringing although there is a definite pecking order amongst them. There seems to be one matriarch that dominates the group, with the younger birds often bringing back food for her to distribute to the chicks. 

Three years ago we watched the matriarch showing a younger bird how to feed a chick – so a lot of this maternal behaviour is learned  and not innate. Last year two nests emerged at the same time from different ends of the lake and within a week they had also pooled their resources and were bringing up the three chicks between them. Like putangitangi, (paradise duck) they are very vigilant parents and all three survived, though in the previous year, of a brood of four chicks only one reached maturity. The other three weren’t set upon by predators but seemed to fall to an illness. They could be seen sitting for long stretches, which is very uncharacteristic. And then became coated in mud.

Neverthless this bird is the most successful inhabitant at the dunelake and often raises a second brood. Last year they produced another youngster, after the lake had dried up. It was raised inside the blackberry and on a diet that must have consisted mostly of blackberries. We think these birds like many others on the lake, also have a nightlife, though this remains entirely unknown.

Song we were listening to while posting this the Howard Morrison Quartet    -My Old Man's an All Black. Early NZ folk protest song (against the sending of a team of All Blacks to South Africa from which Maori players had been excluded) Words by the inimitable Gerry Merito - 

Fe Fi Fo Fum  

(Hey Howard

Yeh)

There’s no Hori's in that scrum.

Jill Studd's Blog

Contact Us

The Barbarians are at the Gates

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 44

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Dune lake looking south

We know have a no-go fence facing off across the Wharemauku, though we jumped it anyway and got these shots from up on the hill overlooking the lake. And then by turning 180 degrees you can see it all closing in.

view North

But there is an eerie sense of calm as the machinery, having cleared the blackberry, grinds to a halt in front of the dune lake which now has three sets of ducklings out on its waters; though they’re hard to pick out in the decaying clumpy grass that dominates the lake this year. 

Parera cross pair with youngsters

Passersby have been stopping to express their distress that this wetland will soon be destroyed and also point out new sets of hatchlings along the Wharemauku. The opinion is also being voiced that the construction activity has frightened off the birds this year. It is a little early to tell whether this is actually the case – though it certainly looks likely at the moment. There is no sign yet of the 8 to10 poaka-pied stilts that usually feed, then breed here, while kuruwhengi-shovellers and tete-grey teal are also missing; though these appear to have been progressively shot out of this area by duck shooters. Nor has there been any sign yet of papango-scaup although it’s a bumper season again for these fully protected and delightful diving ducks with 27 counted down at the Waikanae lagoon this morning.

Our lake has been taken over by mallards from the town. The behaviour of these male reprobates and their long suffering females, we will shortly review but as our wetlands have been progressively gentrified, these are the birds that have moved in with our rarer native birds being  pushed into ever diminishing reserves. We expect this pattern to be repeated here. No sign yet of the dabchick from last year, though a lone male parera has been in residence for about a month now. He appears not to be welcome by the green headed mallards  and keeps his distance from this rowdy intemperate lot. 

Same pair 5 October

Putangitangi 1 October

We were hoping this pair of putangitangi-paradise duck might settle here. The female was starting to look a little broody in searching out a suitable site for a nest, but they seem just to be feeding so far, though they have also been on the Wharemauku pond across the way,  scooping up the waterboatmen. The 8 or 9 female putangitangi sighted in a tribal group around a month ago, are still together and were seen yesterday down at the Waikanae lagoon. They are probably juveniles – not yet ready to begin to mate.

Polluted lower Wharemauku

The pollution we have been reporting coming through into the Wharemauku from Drain 7 is now intensifying though the relevant authorities are sitting on their hands regarding it – so watch this space – we’ll keep you posted as this disaster  progresses.

Track we were listening to while posting this Royal Blood's -Out of the Black. You don’t need to know the words, they’re pretty much teenage daft, but when they turn on their amplifiers they take you off the planet...and they'll be in Auckland January 26...so chill the ginger beer and bring your Panama's - It'll be hot. 

Jill Studd's Blog

Contact Us