Is NIWA Up To The Job?

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

NIWA monitor after flood -April 17

In a previous post (Broadsheet 3), we disclosed that NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) had installed water quality monitors on the Wharemauku, ahead of the NZTA’s contractors beginning excavation work in this area. The photo we published of this equipment shows a manicured, late summer scene, and the creek (and NIWA) has had a pretty clear run through our very late indian summer.

This creek is mercurial however and with autumn closing in fast, with it has come the first storm flushes. A large amount of vegetative material, plus flotsam from Coastlands shopping centre (We fished a supermarket trolley out of the creek a couple of weeks ago!) travels down the Wharemauku. It is a local creek, feeding off nearby steep hillsides and subject to frequent flash floods. These are usually contained within the banks but will overflow  3-4 times a year. These floods in turn, backfill the drains that feed into them, which helps lessen the risk of flooding. At the same time however, it carries a high silt content and black swamp water that comes out of these drains after every storm. (Even in summer).

NIWA monitor after flood April 29

The first two flushes have already jammed up NIWA’s presumably sensitive monitoring equipment and here are two recent photos picturing the mess. The first taken in 17 April after the first flood. NIWA finally cleaned this up around 8 days later, but 3 days after that, the collateral was back in residence where it now remains. This must be despoiling the  research results obtained from this equipment.

In putting monitors at both ends of the proposed work, NIWA hope to measure the pollution arising from the work undertaken but not with this kind of entanglement of its measuring equipment. Which raises the questions also, of just how robust this equipment is?  of how often it is tested? And how often it is replaced?

Here is a strong impression of sloppy work undertaken by scientists content to sit in their labs and watch their laptop monitors. A more serious issue is raised however by the cosy commercial relationship between these two independently operating, business-model driven,  taxpayer  funded agencies. In taking on this work NIWA is trading off its high public reputation; and there is a great deal of idealistic chatter on its website about high level outcomes, while ensuring that research is undertaken for the benefit of New Zealand

This is self promotion, so what is the reality? 

NIWA is a Crown Research Institute that operates as a stand-alone company with its own Board of Directors and Executive. So where is the independent reviewer of NIWA’s performance? Once again, like other scientific business organisations contracted by the NZTA, it seems that its peer review processes are managed ‘in house’. If NIWA wants to protect its independent reputation for scientific excellence along with its public standing then its auditing relationships must not only be independent, but be seen to be independent. This can’t be so when it has jumped so obviously into bed with its contractual employer the NZTA.

And it seems unnecessary to add, if this is going on on the Wharemauku, then it is standard practice right through this expressway's charted area. 

Track we were listening to while posting is this is the Blind Boys of Alabama’s take on Jimmy McNulty’s theme song (from Tom Waits) Way Down In The Hole

When you walk through the garden

You gotta watch your back

Well I beg your pardon

Walk the straight and narrow track

Jill Studd's Blog

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More good news about the critically endangered Parera (NZ Grey Duck)

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 17

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Parera pair on Wharemauku 28 April (male front)

We noted during our trip to the Abel Tasman National Park how male mallards appeared to be exiling any male without a green mallard head from their cabals. The females, to  general male consternation, follow these males, though this doesn’t stop the mallard behaviour. This observation  received more backing in developments over the last month at the Wharemauku creek. 

Mallard Parera flock Raumati Beach March 10 2014

A flock of parera/mallard ducks gather on the banks after fledging in March. Here a socialising occurs during which they gradually pair up. This photo is from March 10, in which a fair amount of flirtation and the accompanying jostling had already started up.   

Now this flock has divided into two blocks. The mallards with their females collecting down the Alexander Rd bridge end (where they can sometimes scam a feed from the local humans); while the parera have taken on a separate identity further down the creek. They are behaving like separate hapu (extended family) and while obviously pairing off within the group, they were still keeping to their separate groups of around ten birds.    

Parera foraging on Wharemauku April 28 

The parera were more wary of human approach and showed more self-sufficiency in foraging for food along the creek bank. They all had features that identified them at the parera end of the species spectrum. There were no green heads, while their legs were predominantly brown and then they had greenish speculum under the wing. There was still however mallard blood flowing through their veins.

And here’s something else – there were more females than males in this parera group, a gender imbalance that was reversed amongst the mallards. Which rasies the question of whether the females (including mallard females), actually prefer these ‘snaggy’ males to the more aggressive mallard males?  Which raises a further intrigue. Are we looking at the birth here of an entirely new species, that may exhibit  the more attractive character of both? (Male Parera are much better Dad's)

Parera mallard pair standoff on the Wharemauku creek

These birds are still very mobile, flying around this area during the day. This in-flight manoeuvring seems to be a part of their courtship routine, though this week it will fly them straight into the sights of duck shooting shotguns. The season is about to start and it remains a conservation outrage that these critically endangered birds can be legally shot in season. Last year we observed a group of about 16 of these birds. It was reduced to 3 pairs by the end of the season.

Track we were listening to while posting this is Cole Porters 'Ev'ry time we say goodbye' from Simply Red (1987)

Ev'ry time we say goodbye I die a little

Ev'ry time we say goodbye I wonder why a little

Why the Gods above me who must be in the know

Think so little of me they allow you to go 

Jill Studd's blog

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Unfit for Purpose -Amy Adams and the Environment Ministry that isn’t.

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

A previous post queried the role of the Ministry of the Environment under Minister, Amy Adams, in providing guardianship for the environment.  This sorry state of affairs  continues with the advent of new legislation that undermines Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright’s role as an independent reviewer of government environment reports. (PCE media release ).      

It has taken around five years for Ms Adams to turn the NZ Environment Ministry from a frontline environmental advocate into its opposite –an arm of Government that is working to bypass, undermine and repeal legislative protection of the environment. Adam’s extreme views began to come clear as early as 2010, when she was instrumental in sacking the Canterbury Regional Council and suspending the democratic process in Canterbury. This Council was resisting the profligate introduction of irrigation into the Canterbury plains in response to the dairy boom and the ‘interim’ suspension has now been extended through to 2016.  

It indicates the mess management of water can get into as it is moved toward private ownership, and we suggest you follow the ongoing scandal in NSW (Australia) to inform yourselves on the endgame of this. (Job offer after wine gift)

In 2013 Ms Adams proposed making wide ranging changes to the Resource Management Act (RMA). She was shamelessly candid in her aims ‘to repeal the requirement to have regard to the maintenance and enhancement of amenity values…(and of) the quality of the environment’. This was media washed as cosmetic though even the Business friendly end of the conservation movement refused to swallow it. The intention was to make the RMA ‘fit for purpose’, a phrase which  has now joined win-win, ecologic and mitigation, as dirty words in NZ conservation.

Only as the Government’s political allies withdrew their support did her machination  hit the skids, which pinpoints something rare in our legislative history and that is that New Zealanders have taken the RMA to heart. Like the ACC and the anti-nuclear legislation it has come to measure something of what it means to be Kiwi.

Though rust never sleeps as they say and in this new Bill she is trying to quarantine legislation from the probing eyes of the Commissioner. How ironic it is that one of the best ever Ministers of the Environment was Simon Upton, one of Ms Adam’s more savvy colleagues from the 1990’s.

It is now time however, to get back to what we are all working for  the survival of these dabchicks, with their youngster, still thriving down at the Waikanae lagoon, though the autumn weather, balmy till now, is beginning to close in on them.

Dabchicks with adolescent chick (centre)

Update on going offline -We managed to track the trigger that caused us to crash last week to a Christchurch server. It definitely came from inside this country, though whether deliberate or not, we cannot say. However contrary to our original anxiety, Google’s procedures in handling such situations seem both sensible and robust.  

Track we were listening to while posting this is Slim Whitman's China Doll -one of the most endearingly creepy songs of all time.
This one goes out to our own Ms Amy Adams.

I'm tired of cry-y-yin'
And all her lie-ie-iein'
That's why I'm buy-y-in'
A china doll

Jill Studd's blog
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Why was our Blog taken offline?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 15

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

We thought it important to advise that Midnight Collective was taken offline by Google yesterday. We’re not sure of the exact time because we don’t keep a close eye on ourselves, but we were alerted by email around 3pm (Tuesday NZ time) by a supporter who was having trouble accessing it. From the stats we could have been out for up to 15 hours.

We then entered the kind of space inhabited by the ‘Revenge of the Nerds’. We are not tech-savvy, and still rely on good old dial up at 5kbs (that’s right 5kbs). Google keep advising us that they have detected that we are ‘slow down loaders’ (do they mean slow learners?) but we are patient  and not fussed by the implied disapproval.

However, we were concerned to find (2 hours later!) that the blog had been shut down because of suspicious activity. This couldn’t have been by us, though it was an automated response, so we have been left none the wiser about exactly what happened. Was it a technical glitch or something more sinister?

We finally managed to get an email through to Google, who re-connected the site within ten minutes and have been on the ball since, without however, explaining what was going on.  The whole affair has put us on our guard, with our confidence in blogspot being somewhat dented.  If you have had trouble getting through to this blog, or have better experience than we have in using blogspot and can advise us, then we would appreciate hearing from you at contact us (gmail wasn’t affected).

In the meantime here’s a couple of surprises, that were waiting for us at the Wharemauku when we arrived back from Nelson...emphasizing again, how rich this small area is in wetland bird life. 

Kotare - NZ Kingfisher

Little Shag -Kawaupaka

The shag was coming in on a rising tide, which is why the water is so murky, though this  didn't worry the shag.  
Jill Studd's Blog

Track we've been listening to while posting this 

Empty Bed Blues 
This is a Bessie Smith song but its the Josh White version 
we've got on...

When you get good lovin',
don't you, don't you spread the news.
Because those gals will doublecross you and leave you,
with the empty bed blues!

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

Jill Studd's Blog
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Who's afraid of a blue-green wash?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 

Actively supporting NZ's endangered Wetland Birds

We have been steering clear of the political and policy issues that arose during the Board of Inquiry into the expressway in order to focus on the dune lake and it's birds. These have been festering away since the hearings gave the NZTA the green light however, and over the last week have been aired in local papers.

The controversy arose when a number of local groups committed to the principles of environmental sustainability were denied stands at a weekend sustainability 'Fair' while the NZTA were invited to participate. This raised the ire of local people who take their green principles seriously, which in turn raised the ire of the new local Mayor who came out in strong support of the NZTA's environmental credentials. 

The NZTA has so far maintained a silence on the controversy though the issues it raises are world wide and growing, and centre locally on the credibility of the scientific evidence used by this corporate SOE, (a State-owned stand alone business), in the 

preparation of its submissions to the Board. As countries have begun taking their environmental responsibilities more seriously in response to growing public concern, so Business has developed strategies to resist and undermine legislative controls. Some of those strategies involve employing specialist companies to develop 'independent' scientific evidence sympathetic to their position. In other cases it may involve more controversial activities that throw doubt on legitimate data, or work to undermine the reputations of the scientists involved. (For a US account of the campaign to undermine Tyrone Hayes findings on the herbicide atrazine, see the February 10 issue of The New Yorker).

The issues raised in Kapiti concern the make up of the Board of Inquiry appointed by the Environment Minister, which didn't include a member with any environmental experience, scientific or otherwise and the quality of the scientific evidence that the NZTA presented to the Board.

We aren't Scientists, but as we went through the relevant evidence it became clear that it was a very rushed job (the project had been fast-tracked), and that the environmental evidence had been consistently massaged to NZTA's advantage. The lack of coordination between the various teams working on the assessment can be seen in the fact that 8 different descriptions of the dune lake were presented ranging from it being definitely a wetland to emphatically denying that it was. It was asserted that the wetland was formed by stop banks along the Wharemauku and yet a simple visit to the site would have shown that this was impossible because the ground was sloping the wrong way. 

All the scientists were employed by a privately contracted 
environmental firm that had no experience of working in this area. Their evidence consistently underplayed the evidence of the local authority scientists.

The avian scientist spent a year surveying local wetland birds and 
failed to encounter 30 percent of them. 20 minutes was spent surveying the birds on the dune lake. More serious was the failure to identify the critically endangered parera or grey duck. Future posts will delve into the history and current status of this duck, suffice it to say that the male differs from the mallard because it doesn't have a green head. They are similar to their mates and mallard females with which they are often confused. Though rare in this area we have seen and filmed them reasonably regularly and they have set nests at the lake over the last 3 years. 

In summing up evidence to the Board, the NZTA denied that the grey duck were in the area, despite film evidence presented to the Board. The Board accepted this evidence. There was no mention of parera in their final report and yet subsequently the NZTA have added parera to an endangered species watch list. Subsequently two further nationally threatened species have been discovered in this small urban area -dabchick and spotless crake. About these the NZTA have remained silent.

From this short review it can be seen that those raising doubts about the NZTA's environmental credentials raise legitimate and 
serious questions about greenwashing that need answers. At the moment they are being swamped by an ongoing and effective 
media management campaign.

Our apologies for posting no images with this. We are on holiday and left our gear behind. Next post we hope to bring photos from the Abel Tasman National Park.(top of South Island).

Track we were listening to while posting this
Siouxsie and the Banshees. This Wheels on Fire (Bob Dylan (again)).

If your memory serves you well
You'll remember you're the one
that called on me to call on them

to get your favour's done