A Fledgling Black Shag - Kawau at Raumati Beach

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Shags are as agile and impressive as penguins under water where  they rocket around, but are ungainly low level flyers  and on dry land they lumber, rocking from side to side which is why we hardly ever catch them out on the bank like this one.

Immature Black Shag -Wharemauku 

This Black Shag -Kawau  made an unusual and spectacular sight, a black shade with blade-like wings, dipping awkwardly over rooftops before settling next to the Wharemauku beside the Alexander Road bridge.

The reason they never venture out on the bank is because of the local dogs. Most dog owners are responsible, but that doesn’t make the birds any less relaxed around them. We can be filming the Wharemauku and the water birds will suddenly take flight in panic, not because they mind us, but they’ve picked out an approaching  dog way before we have. Still, in four years there’s only been one incident in which we had to go to the aid of a paradise duck -Putangitangi, bailed up against a fence.

It was this time of the year (late summer) and the parri was a male youngster, the same as this shag, which hasn’t yet developed its adult colouring around the beak; nor the nous to keep away from risky public areas like this. Still there’s plenty of food in the Wharemauku at the moment which is why they’re hanging around. We’ve had 3 different species of shag feeding at the wetland this summer – the little -Kawaupaka, black and pied -Karuhiruhi shags . None of these are listed as endangered but the pied and black shags are rare though holding their own in this part of the country. All are under threat however from loss of habitat and food source. 

One third of the world's shag species ar found in NZ which didnt stop a bounty being placed on them in the 1940’s because they were seen as competition for recreational fishing. It brought some species perilously close to extinction and  constitutes a shameful episode in NZ conservation history. The expressway scientists we should also note, failed to sight any shags feeding in this area, which is hardly surprising given the fact that they only spent 20 minutes on their local wildlife survey. 

Finally, a literary note on the shag.

Little shag on Wharemauku 2013
watercolour on paper
Frances Jill Studd 

Shags are cormorants in the northern hemisphere and if you know your Finnegans Wake (James Joyce’s wayward masterpiece) there is a line that, massaged back into English, reads something like “Let me send a cormorant around this blue lagoon”. Here the living corpse of HCE is being scrutinized by four explorers (the passage is a rebuild of Gulliver’s Travels) and the interrogator fishing for information. Blue lagoons are South Pacific idylls however so they have resident shags not cormorants, though in switching words you lose that distinctive Joycean melody.  Joyce was working with a stack of foreign dictionary’s beside him, but we can safely assume that one of them wasn’t an introduction to the fledgling nu zilnd  language. A further curiosity is that one of his sisters emigrated to NZ, and lived in a Catholic community in Christchurch (devastated from September 2010 by a series of deadly earthquakes).

This post is for Pete Seeger one of the world’s good guys, who died at the end of last month in New York. We were listening to Banks are made of Marble while posting this.

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

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 6

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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Ominous signs of trouble at the Mackays to Pekapeka expressway

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 5

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

NIWA’s long term forecast for summer reassured us all that the weather would settle mid-January into our usual run of 6 weeks or so of balmy sunshine; it hasn’t happened. Summer continues turbulent and changeable and this is beginning to look like trouble for the expressway as diggers start chipping into the swampy peat at the Poplar Rd junction. Here the new road heading north, veers away from the old, straight through the heart of the Wharemauku Swamp.  This map (pictured) is from Carkeek’s –The Kapiti Coast (1966), and will orientate you. The junction is in the centre.

Peat excavation at Poplar Avenue -Feb 12 2014

Then, as you can see from these recent site photographs, water is already beginning to reclaim the site, while the peat being dug out is mucky black and sodden. They have been working in this small area for around 3 months, but they haven’t found a bottom 

to it yet. 

Swamp water at the Poplar Avenue excavation -Feb 12 2014

When we first settled in Kapiti we were warned to check that the piles of any house we considered buying went down through the peat, into the ground below. There were stories of houses, floating on the top of this land, that wouldn’t stay level. This effect varies summer to winter as the water content of the peat rises and falls. The area may look like solid ground, but down below it still thinks and acts like  a swamp. It is a thousand years old and deep -23 feet where the NZTA has drilled at the dune lake, though we’ve heard estimates that range as high as 40. And this is the kind of variation you would expect in what at base is a coastal dune area,  that has a long history of sea coast movement.

All this leads to peculiar flows of water, which is constantly seeping towards the coast from the hills, below the ground. You can see this whenever it rains because the water in the drains immediately turns swamp-water black. Substantial spring-fed creeks can suddenly disappear underground into nowhere. The dune lake has a smaller sister, just across the Wharemauku, which to our great surprise never dries up. Kapiti has  long pleasant seaside summers (usually), which is why so many are moving out here from the City, yet even at the height of last year’s drought, this wetland still retained water. Like the Wharemauku,  it is spring fed and yet the expressway has been designed to run right over the top of it.

Does the NZTA know?     

An interesting sidelight to all this is to compare the way in which engineers work now, as compared to 100 years ago. The original highway was along the beach, but the railway and road were designed to hug the base of the hills for as long as that was possible. Those engineers could see the trouble they were heading into, and this looks like a sensibly managed, low risk, cost effective response to it. They were employees of the Public Works Department, so have today’s engineers, now effectively independent operators (even where employed by the State), abandoned the solid, butter box pragmatism, that played such a large part in forming the character of early NZ Pakeha history? 

Email contact -vantoohey@gmail.com     Jill Studd's blog

Raumati Beach dune lake puts on its summer coat

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Dune lake looking south east towards Wellington – the native azolla water fern is responsible for the red hue

February 3^rd  and the business end of summer and finally we have a dry lake – looking very pretty  and green still, now that summer seems finally to have settled in. This is the first time we have been able to venture out here to picture the dry bed which is very soft and spongy.  Having taken the foto, the white faced heron, resident here since November, suddenly lifted her head out of the grass. She had swallowed something rather large that was taking some time to squirm down her throat. (Not a pretty sight!!) It was a surprise to get so close to her though she took off immediately we were spotted. Still, there must be food aplenty in the long grass.  

White-faced heron swallowing

The local birds are continuing to raise families here with a female Mallard seen two days ago, having left her nest and now making her way up the Wharemauku with four newly hatched chicks in tow, this late in the summer. These mother’s are nervous wrecks, constantly monitoring their vivacious youngsters. And then on this gorgeous sunny Sunday morning two young Welcome Swallows were spotted sitting on a ledge under the airport bridge having just fledged. Their mother was continuing to bring them tucker, while at the same time enticing them out into the air.

Welcome swallow fledglings

It was a nervous time because of the Sunday strollers with their dogs and bikes and cell phones, trampling across the bridge, though they remained blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding below. The swallows build nests up under the superstructure of the bridge, digging the mud out of the clay creek bank with their beaks. But the site is problematic, not simply because water seeps through onto the nests when it rains, but because it is a favourite Friday night refuge for teenage revellers and taggers.   The swallows remain very wary of human contact (unlike the NZ fantail-(piwakawaka) but also resourceful because this is the second nest that’s fledged here, this year.

The Blackberries are now thick with berries. Blackberry has been a noxious weed in NZ for many years having been brought over by the first Pakeha (non-Maori) immigrants. It was a great delicacy and early records show that the first plants sold for record prices. But it loved the climate and soon turned feral. At the dune lake however it has put itself to work, doing the job of a predator-free fence and is the primary reason why there are still so many wild birds down here in the centre of town. When the blackberry goes, so will the birds, because the locals with their dogs will get down to the water’s edge while domestic cats will have an open road into nesting areas. This is the bleak history of the wetland areas of the Coast where development has steadily gentrified the area in favour of introduced species, not only Mallards, plover, magpies and Canadian Geese, but cats, stoats, rats and rabbits. This has pushed our native birds, relentlessly toward local extinction, even where wetland ponds have been retained as water features.

 

So here’s to the Kapiti  blackberry. The berry’s are very late this year (blame the rain) so we’ve only just got our first jars of jelly bottled. The recipe is from Ghillie  James’ book, Jam, Jelly & Relish, mentioned here because Ghillie is Fran’s English cousin and the recipe comes from near Norwich (with its famous Broads). Here her Grandmother Pom, was born and raised, and Fran spent her childhood. But this is a pot of NZ jam and the blackberry is as English as we are – (ie, not at all).

Top Shelf - 2014's Blackberry Jelly