Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 101
Actively
supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
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| Shoulder High! Youthful kaka on Kapiti Island -foto Ridgway Lythgoe |
We are just back from our stay on Kapiti
Island and will be reporting on that sojourn over the next few posts. This is
New Zealand’s premier conservation reserve and it has a rich though not always laudable
history.
It was named Entry Island
by James Cook in 1770 and one of the most famous of the Maori Rangatira -Te
Rauparaha- is buried here in an unmarked grave (to forestall his enemies
digging him up). Called the Napoleon of the South, he was also one of the most
violent, so it is a fitting redemption perhaps, that much of the Island was
declared a conservation reserve by the first effective Liberal administration elected
in the country, in the 1890’s.
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| Kapiti Island from Raumati Beach |
The Island is now co-managed with local
Iwi (Maori) who operate a Visitor Centre at the top end of the island. It was a whaling station for many years however, and the
Right Whale in particular, having been exterminated from these waters, is yet to
return.
It lies 5 km’s off shore. That’s about a 20 minute boat trip on a good day, but it remains very
isolated (to keep it rat, mouse,
stoat, possum etc free); and the crossing can be tricky. There are
fierce rip tides twice daily, while the weather can change it from docile to ballsy
within half an hour, especially at this blustery time of the year. Trips are dependent on the early morning
weather forecast so visitors can have a frustrating time getting across,
especially with boat skippers erring on the side of safety.
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| Marginal condiitons out in the strait |
Even in these days of helicopters, wifi
and radio telephone, it can still
feel a very isolated locale, though not so much as it was for the first
custodians Stan and Amy Wilkinson and family. When Amy broke her leg in the 1920's, Stan had to
light a bonfire on the beach to summon help from the Mainland.
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| Inside Kapiti Island forest |
The island was originally covered in
podocarp forest, dominated by red flowering rata, but like much of the rest of the country,
this was burnt and cleared by successive waves of European immigrants, to
establish farms. It was never economic however, and this led to its establishment as our earliest conservation venture, though it remained infested with possum and rat in particular.
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| Remains of giant rata burnt out in nineteenth century fires. |
The forest was left to regenerate yet
even after 120 years there are few of our large forest trees here. These are
rata trees which were in the Island's gullies and escaped the fiery holocaust.
They bloom red from about now. Much of what is now on the island is
understory regrowth, but this still gives the island the haunting beauty, typical
of our temperate podocarp. The forest birds, wiped out with the forest were gradually reintroduced.
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| Mist shrouded forest at the top of the Island |
We hadn’t been back to the island for
around a decade and it was gratifying to see how this regrowth has continued to
flourish. This is particularly true up at the Iwi end of the island where regenerating
bush has now taken back the former farming areas.
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| The typically patchworked greens of New Zealand regenerating forest |
In one of the most successful of our early
pest eradication programmes Kapiti Island was declared pest free in the late
1980’s. It has been intensively managed since then and this has led to an explosion in numbers of the many endangered
forest species that find a refuge here. These include hihi, tieke, kiwi,
kokako, kakariki, korimiko tui, kaka, robin (all birds) along with gekko and
skink and our big lumbering dinosaur of a bird– the takahe amongst others and in our
next posts, we’ll detail our encounters with some of these… Kapiti Island is as
close as you can get to the experience of what Aotearoa/NZ was like before the arrival of the human and it is this that provides the magic of even the shortest visit there.
Track we were listening to
We’ve been on a Charlie Parker bender.
Five CD’s from his Carnegie Hall appearances. Its tooooo much….Yet how
appropriate; to be in bird-land listening to Bird…
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