Welcome to the Midnight
Collective Broadsheet 39
Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland
birds
Despite
two or three days of frosty mornings, today has been one of those memorable
spring days - the air is clear and sharp and warm, it has that sweetly tempered aroma which invades the world
with a quite remarkable calm and then fills it with the promise of everything that is to come. Which is
ironic because the expressway contractors are now poised to move into the
dune lake as the breeding season gets underway, and begin to destroy it. This
seems incomprehensible given that the NZTA has now
conceded that there are critically endangered parera in this area.
They
have sent dogs through the area and declared it parera free which is where the
problems really start, for the morning immediately following this categorical announcement, we photographed this
parera male comfortably settled at the wetland around 7.20am.
 |
| Parera male dune lake August 28 2014 |
And here
is another caught the next day at the back of the airport beside the
wharemauku creek. This male has been hanging around a wharemauku tributary looking somewhat
anxious and perplexed which may indicate that he has a mate hidden on a nest
near the waterway confluence because these native ducks, unlike mallards, hang around their mates while they are on the nest.
 |
| Parera male at back of the airport -August 29 2014 |
All of which demonstrates a systemic problem with the NZTA's strategy
of using privately contracted ecologists to do this work.
In our next post we will be
exploring the folly of that. Meantime...
To all those in the Northern Hemisphere
who are following our little environmental drama down here at the bottom of the South
Pacific -our commiserations as you leave your summer behind – though perhaps
you are a little tired of all that 40 degree heat by now! Here we welcome the return of the sun, to which
there can be only one backing track -Donovan’s -Sunshine Superman- though we file it here with very mixed feelings.
Sunshine
came softly
through
my window today
Could
have tripped out easy
but I’ve
changed my ways
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