On Kapiti Island 4 - New Zealand's premier conservation island - ground grazing

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 104

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Keruru -grassed, on Kapiti Island

One of the more intriguing aspects of a visit to the predator free island of Kapiti is the sight of native birds grazing on the ground in the open grassland areas. This includes not only the more familiar native birds you’ll spot on the Mainland, including keruru (native pigeon) and tui... 

Tui -on path below Red House 

but also the rarer korimako/bellbird... 

Spot the korimako

and the kakariki. This red crowned native parrot has now virtually disappeared from the North Island, as has the yellow crowned kakariki from the South.

Kakariki grazing on Kapiti Island 

Kakariki are very vulnerable to rats, because they nest close to the ground; though even in the 1970’s you could still see the odd pair in Wellington. They have now been reintroduced in the city, thanks to Zealandia, the predator controlled reserve in Karori; though it is unlikely they will spread far into the unprotected areas. Blame for the demise of these native parrots is usually placed upon introduced mammalian pests, like rats, stoats, possum and ferrets but gun-happy, forest razing humans must shoulder the prime responsibilty.

Paekakariki, just south of here is translated from the Maori as many kakariki, a fact Charlotte Godley described in her letters home to England in the early 1850’s. She was riding in a horse and cart, north along the coast and noted how these indigenous parrots gave New Zealand so much of its exotic flare. Then in the next sentence she detailed how her husband was sitting at the back of the cart with their four year old son, teaching him how to shoot them.    

Kakariki pair - female in foreground

There must be rich food pickings in these grassy areas for the birds all looked in very good condition;   keruru in particular being the plumpest in the country. They are also very visitor friendly.  We took a party of visitors over to the island a few years ago in dampish weather. One lifted off a nearby bush but found it difficult to get airborne. She sailed over the top of the tour leader (from behind) then got some extra lift by pushing off from the top of his (hatted) head.     

Roosting out of the rain...birds dislike inclement weather just as much as we do.

Track we were listening to while posting this. Well its a dreamy post-Christmas now, and one of the sunniest Xmas spells for many a year - so we're going with -The Lovin Spoonful -What a day for a daydream

I been havin' a sweet dream

I been dreamin' since I woke up today

It's starring me and my sweet dream

Cause she's the one makes me feel this way

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On Kapiti Island 3 -New Zealand's premier conservation reserve

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 103

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Before we go up into the Kapiti forest to encounter more of our critically endangered birds, we are taking a short trip down to the stony beach shoreline, where a Blackback gull colony is right in the centre of its nesting cycle and unusual events were taking place.

The Blackback is not endangered and there are larger nearby colonies. One on pest free Matiu/Somes Island in the centre of Wellington Harbour (Te Whanganui o Tara) has proved a hazard to the local airport and steps have been taken to keep the size of the colony down (by slipping infertile eggs into the nests). Yet this Island colony is well established and its community dynamic proved intriguing.

Here upwards of a dozen nesting birds are spread along around a kilometre of coast, the females happily ensconced amongst the flotsam, well above the high tide mark. They make little effort to conceal their nests, though they will freeze if you venture too close, and only leave at the very last moment. 

All their defensive effort goes into mounting an aggressive aerial guard. Much of the colony flies over to the mainland beaches during the day to feed, (they flock back right on dusk), but there are always watchful birds left with the nesting females who will attack any human who ventures too close. A principal egg predator however, is the (protected) weka, and they hang around the colony; but a Blackback is more than a match for this endemic rail, and even at night the gulls can spot an intruder and will take to the air in defence.

Weka - near extinction in North Island  -foto Ridgway Lythgoe

Right in the centre of this colony however, was a nesting intruder – a lone variable oystercatcher -torea-pango. These birds are much more at risk than the Blackback’s and under siege from introduced pests where nesting on Mainland beaches. (From stoats, rats, dogs, feral cats et al; plus a self-introduced new comer, the spurwinged plover). But this presence provided a real intrigue because why would the blackback’s allow it?

Kapiti Island oystercatcher - gender unknown 

The oystercatcher pairs share the nesting, though there is only one at the nest at a time. We were on the island 5 days and saw the birds together just the once - at dusk - as they switched sitting responsibilities. They are somewhat like pied stilts in this. Assiduous at camouflage, they will spot you well before you spot them, and immediately leave the nest and begin very successful diversionary behaviours, fossicking innocently about, well away from the actual nest site, in order to lead you astray. So good were these two, that it took us forty eight hours before we finally developed the expertise to spot the sitting oystercatcher before she/he spotted us and thereby identify the nest – right out in the open.

I've got my eye on you

Oystercatcher nest

Blackback nest

Their nests are very similar to a blackback nest, and the eggs too are similar though lighter in colour; though you might easily mistake one for the other. But oystercatchers are both canny and feisty. They don’t confront a human, gauging them too large a threat so respond by diverting them. Smaller threats, as you will see in the video they implacably confront.

There is a lone male paradise duck –putangitangi- on the island. He has just lost his long time mate and is  a lost soul without her, perching on a picnic table through the night (which had to be cleaned every morning) before ambling down for company to the gull nesting colony during the day. The gulls were watchful but tolerant of his presence, but the oystercatcher wouldn’t have a bar of him – immediately denying him passageway and constantly swooping at him, and forcing him to fly passed to a roost at the far end of the colony.

So what exactly is going on here. Gulls are scavengers and could easily (a pukeko wouldn’t hesitate!) predate the eggs of the oystercatcher, but showed no interest in doing so. The oystercatcher, likewise could have had a feed out of the many gulls eggs it was surrounded by. And while it launched itself at the gloomy para, it showed no similar aggression to the gulls. 

They obviously know and are used to each. Presumably the gulls benefit from having this feisty cohabitant in residence, while the oystercatcher is in a much safer environment nested within this colony. Yet this is only half the story for these animals are actually building complex relationships. Most of the wildlife programmes you’ll see on TV and elsewhere focus on  predatory behaviours of wild animals. This is what attracts human interest (and lifts ratings) but it provides a very fallacious picture of the real lives of animals. Here on Kapiti, in an environment protected from human intervention and from introduced predators,  we are witnessing interspecies behaviours which both surprise and intrigue; for what is going on in these animals minds? Is it really that different to what goes on in ours? 

The benefit seems mutual and bares some similarity to the Raumati Beach dunelake environment when paradise duck were raising their young. (This wetland has now been destroyed by an expressway). The parents, particularly the females provide early warning signs of danger,  which benefitted (by alarming them) all the birds on the lake. They were also big enough  to confront the chief predator of the youngsters reared at the lake –pukeko. They  kept them at a wary distance.  

Track we were listening to while posting this - Mitchell Torok from 1953 - Caribbean...

Up in a tree so high away up in the sky

Sits a wide-eyed monkey on a limb.

He wonders why the people go to so much trouble

Just to try and be like him.

He doesn't understand that it's a ladys hand, 

That makes a heart feel so sublime.

But before too long he starts to sing their song, 

And then he gets in the conga line.

     
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Kapiti Island sojourn 2 -The Takahe

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 102

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

The Takahe is a flightless rail, one of our rarest birds and very endearing. They are a big lumbering animal (amongst our NZ native birds) and, having lived apart from mammals like most of our rarest birds, they appear tame and approachable. This led to their dramatic decline especially after the arrival of Europeans and they were thought to be extinct, until rediscovered in South Island alpine  tussocklands in 1948.  Even after their rediscovery however they were poorly managed until the 1980’s when they began to be placed in pest controlled areas like Kapiti Island. There are now around 260 birds. This is an increase of around 60 in 15 years so this is a long term rehabilitation programme with a viable population thought to be around 500 birds.

Ideal takahe country is open grasslands. And this is the reason they are doing well on Mana Island just south of here, where a couple of years ago we encounted 11 youngsters. (Four were recently shot in a pukeko culling fiasco involving duckshooting volunteers on Motutapu Island in the Hauraki Gulf). But Kapiti is a reforested island and not ideal takahe country, so a minimum number are kept here. These are  three older birds, that live on the flats around this DoC station. 


It is still hoped they will breed so they are fed a couple of times a week to keep them in breeding condition through the spring.  We only spotted one over the first few days; hanging around the Red House and cawing for a feed, and this raised our nesting hopes, but then all three came out one evening, so it’s a little up in the air as to whether they’ll produce youngsters this year. It’s still early in the season however so let's keep our fingers crossed.  

We have put together a video clip of these birds coming out into the open. It gives a good idea of how these birds move and then their distinctive harsh cawing. Both kiwi and weka can match this grating sound though you’ll only hear kiwi at night and though you'll see weka through the day they are vocal mostly around dusk and dawn. We were especially fortunate however in capturing one takahe on the run and here you can see a rollicking movement that traces them right back to their dinosaur ancestors.

 

Track we were listening to while posting this we are still knee deep in birdland with Charlie Parker at Carnegie Hall...

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Kapiti Island Sojourn 1

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 101

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

  

 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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.            

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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Stop the Press! Midnight Collective live from Kapiti Island

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 100

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Over the next few days Midnight Collective will be reporting live from New Zealand's premier conservation reserve -Kapiti Island. It is five km's off the coast here and still very restricted in access and communication (a 20 minute weather dependent boat trip) so we are not yet sure whether we will be able to post as we go. But will be reporting anyway and play catch up as we can... 

So keep a look out for news, foto's and video  of many of New Zealand's  rarest and most intriguing forest birds, through the rest of the week...

  

A New Zealand dabchick and the scaup - cross species fraternisation 2

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 99

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

In our previous post we were pondering the apparent fraternising between a lone dabchick and a pair of scaup and speculating without being able to bring any evidence to the table, that this dabchick was the same one seen off in a fracas we filmed at the Waikanae estuary in August. 

Dabchick Mum

We have also been monitoring a dabchick pair with two adolescent youngsters down at the estuary. Here to our great surprise we discovered the male had abandoned the female and the youngsters. The males are usually great house-husband’s and sometimes take up a lions share of the parenting. (The females may be better hunters than their partners) This was a concerning surprise although the mother seemed to be coping well as a solo mum.  

Dabchick adolescent looking for Mum

Only then, we managed to capture this remarkable footage of a very impatient mother finally losing patience with a youngster who was resisting setting out on his own. She attacked the youngster who then, for the first time we witnessed, began diving under the water to begin feeding himself.

These three are doing well at the estuary, but when we visited the Ratanui wetland next, to check up on our dabchick/scaup relationship, we found (uh oh!) that the dabchick had completely lost interest in her scaup companions, because she had found herself a mate.

New dabchick pair at Ratanui

Or had he found her?

We now had for the first time, a dabchick pair at this wetland. Along with a tantalising mystery.  Was this the ‘bad dad’ who had abandoned his family at the estuary and now taken off after the female previously ousted from this wetland in August. We are now back in speculative territory, though the lives of this animals are beginning to look much more socially complex than is currently allowed for. The one thing we can be sure of, is that the fraternisation between the dabchick and the scaup did appear to be filling a social need of the interloper. 

There remains however, a good deal of puzzlement around the male’s behaviour, if indeed, this is  the same bird. The coincidence however, of his disappearance and then another turning up at Ratanui shortly after, points to it, as does the fact that, to our knowledge, there are only these five dabchicks in our local area. But if it is the same bird then the psychology surrounding his defection remains puzzling. There were two chicks, quite a handful for the parents, and he didn’t leave the family until the youngsters were about ready to start feeding themselves. Perhaps he’s not quite such a bad dad after all.  

Dabchick pair at Ratanui

But how did he connect with this female at Ratanui. It is 4 kilometres away and it is tempting to think that it is a random encounter, but a couple of factors count against this.  Wetland birds move around a lot during the day, sometimes this is for feeding but it can also be for resting up and social activity. Evidence we have seen, indicates that they know where their feeding grounds are and the youngsters learn this from the parents. It isn’t simply random.

A second issue lies in the apparent familiarity with which the two behaved to each other. They appeared to know each other very well.

It is very obvious when a couple is in a new relationship. There is a lot of preening reinforcement. The initiator of this preening is usually the more anxious of the two. This also reveals if one of the birds is a lot keener on the relationship than the other. They’re a lot closer to us in these behaviours than we like to imagine.

Parera cross pair

As an example from the duck fraternity, we witnessed a fracas between a parera-cross couple who had been in a relationship for two years. A mallard male began to flirt with the female, which the male mate took great umbrage at –with the female. He went into a sulk from which the female tried to distract him. She was unsuccessful as he became ever more passive/aggressive, so finally she just stalked off down the Wharemauku. At this he pulled himself together and they made up, standing on the bank through a long preening session. Nevertheless within a week she had dumped him. He could now be seen roosting on his own, in places they’d often been seen together over the last two years.

Once again we are guilty of anthropomorphising these animals, but the scientific convention, of turning them into cyborgs, has made an even worse mess of our understanding.

Track we were listening to while posting this – Had to be Tom Jones -Say You'll Stay Until Tomorrow – Sir Tom he is now, but you can’t get rid of the old photos - Grease is the word -though you'ld forgive a Welsh voice anything..

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A New Zealand Dabchick and the Scaup - Cross-species fraternisation Part 1

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 98

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Facing off - 3 dabchicks at the Waikanae estuary August 2015

It was back in August that we renewed contact with our rare local population of dabchicks, filming a pair at the Waikanae Estuary, as a third attempted a spirited intervention. ‘She’ was seen off, apparently by the female. This pair have now raised two chicks who are doing well at the estuary.

The dabchick and scaup at Ratanui wetland

We saw no further sign of the third dabchick, until much to our surprise, one turned up at the Ratanui Rd wetlands about 4 kms away. We noted the appearance in early March, of a lone dabchick on this wetland who appeared to be trying to bond with a scaup pair. The scaup seemed barely tolerant of the fraternal overture, but didn’t see her off. 

Australian Coot - self introduced

This is a very different response to a coot for example, a recent Australian arrival and also a diving waterbird. They are prickly and aggressive and dabchicks give them a wide berth.

Both the dabchick and scaup disappeared over the winter months, but they are back and appear to be forming a similar alliance. So what do we think is going on?

Here multiple questions are raised and all seem unanswerable. Waterbirds move around all the time, though dabchicks and scaup appear only to do so at night. They are underwater a lot which makes them very difficult to track (and film!). But here are the questions anyway. Are these the same three birds from February? Is the dabchick one of the youngsters raised on the estuary last year? Is she the same bird that was seen trying it on with the Waikanae pair in August. How did she get to Ratanui –by air or through the many waterways taht link these wetlands, some of which are underground? Has she made a local home here?

The question we most focussed on however is a behavioural one. And this is a query that dare not speak its name! Is she lonely?  Is her apparent attachment to these scaup, a response to her enforced solitary status?  

Female scaup takes a dive -bubbles extreme right

Scaup and dabchicks do have a lot in common. They are both diving birds and often seen in the same habitat. They have similar passive or ‘domestic’ temperaments; a feature of the character of many New Zealand birds, which evolved in a land where there were no indigenous mammals (sans the bats). It’s not that they don’t get feisty and provocative in their behaviour; it’s simply pitched at a level way below their more recent arrivals, like coot and pukeko. These birds are of course from entirely different species (Scaup  is a diving duck -genus Aythya - Dabchick an endemic grebe).

Dabchick follows suit -bubbles on the left of the male scaup

All the relationship work at Ratanui appeared to be done by the dabchick, with the scaup once again seeming tolerant, rather than welcoming. But the three seemed to interact more closer  than in March, because they were filmed feeding together, or rather the two females fed, while the male scaup snoozed amicably on.

We are straying here, well off the beaten path of scientific orthodoxy, becasue we are  anthropomorphising  these animals, but bear with us for an unexpected development has occurred that both throws  light on what is going on,  while at the same time deepening the puzzle. Though the good news of course, is that the dabchicks which are rare in this area, and certainly rarely seen in urban environments, seem to be here to stay and their numbers are increasing.

We’ll cover all that in our next post, but before we go, here's  two further issues. We’ve covered waterway pollution from the expressway extensively  and this foto appears to record more. 

Discoloured Ratanui lake - expressway in background 1 November 2015

This Ratanui lake should be reasonably clear this time of the year, not this shade of sand-dune brown. The colour appears to be leaching through from the disturbed workings of the expressway which is around 200 metres away.

Little black shag with algal growth - Ratanui wetland

And here is an equally concerning algal growth. That’s a little black shag poking its head through a thickening  infestation which is also rapidly spreading down at the estuary. These profoundly modified waterways are prone to algal bloom which can poison birds and marine life. It isn’t a deadly variety yet, but we’ve never seen it this thick at this time of the year, and are wondering if it is an early sign of El Nino. We’ll be keeping a close eye on it.   

Track we were listening to while posting this  The Man From Laramie - A Jimmy Young classic from 1955

He was a man with a peaceful turn of mind,

He was kind of sociable and friendly,

Friendly as any man could be,

But you never saw a man out-draw

The man from Laramie.

We're way to young to remember this or the TV series, but the song  deftly manages the incongruity between its lilting, croony balladry and  gunfighter flare.   And why? Because it aint American at all; but a rare Anglicised Western. Picture John Wayne in a blazer if you will...He couldnt bring it off but Cary Grant could...

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