Drought threatens again at Raumati Beach

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Global Warming has been in the news this weekend with GW deniers officially being declared scientific oddballs, though it hasn’t stopped the Australian Prime Minister  from positioning himself  as the de facto GHOD -(Global Head of Denial). It is an  ironic stand given that his island continent appears to be one of those countries most affected. 

White faced heron -Matuku Moana- in pines beside the Wharemauku 

At a human level there has been widespread reluctance to accept climate change, because it doesn’t seem immediate or real. It is difficult to establish local effects and our assessment of the weather is always going to be personal -one person’s hurricane being another’s stiff breeze. It does make you more wary of extreme events however. We had a severe drought last year, while this year the weather ran the opposite way bringing an unusually wet and blustery summer. (And here's a mute point  -how long is it going to take the Southern Hemisphere to move its summer forward a month to take advantage of the best summer weather?)

Now however, we’ve had little rain in over eight weeks, and drought conditions are being reported again. This doesn’t constitute scientific evidence for global warming of course, but the development of an awareness over the possible effects.

Dry pond beside Wharemauku

One local sign that drought is taking hold has been the drying up of the watering hole, opposite the dune lake, which we haven’t seen before. And the creek itself, which is spring fed, has been running unusually low.

Yet further signs of drought can be found in the behaviour of local wetland birds. Pukeko usually come out on the banks of the Wharemauku in late autumn. Part of this is social, they fraternise in larger groups, but there is also more food for them out here at this time, where they can be joined by mallard and paradise duck -putangitangi.  By then the weather has turned wintry, and the birds are obviously leaner and hungrier. You can also get a lot closer to them, though perhaps this is also because they are no longer protecting youngsters.

This behaviour has started a good 6 weeks early, with paradise duck and this white faced heron -matuku moana- found ‘grazing’ on the Wharemauku banks and in the creek itself.

White faced heron -Matuku Moana -in Wharemauku

The paradise ducks are always alert and can make a quick getaway still, it was pleasant to see a dog owner slip a leash on her dog when she encountered them. The heron however is an ungainly flyer in such a cramped area. There were slim pickings on the mown grass and so it glided down into the creek bed and from here continually looped back into the safety of nearby trees, as trekkers walked passed.

The appearance of the heron at this time however, may also good news. It is impossible to tell these animals apart without banding them, but it seems probable that this bird is the same one that took up residency at the dune lake over summer. Perhaps it will become a more permanent part of the community here.

Track we were listening to while posting this 

Bob Dylan      It takes a lot to laugh/It takes a train to cry

Don't the moon look good, mama

Shinin' through the trees 

Don't the brakeman look good, mama

Ragging down the Double E 

Don't the sun look good

Goin' down over the sea 

Don't my gal look fine

When she's comin' after me 

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Welcome Swallows on the Wharemauku

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

One bird that seems to be doing well in these open urban areas is the Welcome Swallow. We have noted three nests that have fledged since early December along with one abandoned (before eggs were laid) under the airport bridge.

Welcome Swallow at Raumati Beach dune lake

Swallows are noted long distance travellers so it is surprising that they didn’t find their way to these islands until quite recently. They are thought to be self introduced from Australia in the 1950’s and are a charming addition to our birdlife, welcomed with a civility not currently being reciprocated to Kiwi immigrants, (the human kind), traveling the other way!

Swallow mud quarry under bridge

Welcome swallow nest

A favourite roost is the Wharemauku bridge. The support girders are lined with guano, and they’re often to be seen coming and going, although nesting under the bridge has proved a mixed blessing. They abandoned one freshly made nest in November, presumably as a result of weekend night visits from local teenagers who drink beneath it and ‘bomb’ the girders. Yet blackbirds can also disturb them. Last year a male blackbird found the nest and fished out the soft down lining for its own use. (We caught it in the act, but it remained unfazed). They conserve energy and materials by rebuilding on the remnants of last year’s nest, although here, they have shifted along one bolt from last year. The mud base is dug out from the silt under the bridge.

The youngsters are reluctant to leave the nest and nesting area, and the mothers practice tough love in getting them away. They tease them, by fluttering in front of them as if about to feed them. If that doesn’t work they’re not above doing a little bullying.  They’ll fly low over head to prod and provoke them up into the air until they get the idea that they need to fend for themselves, and the confidence to start trying. Often one while get away and the others will gain the confidence then to follow. Still, they’re not above reverting to childhood and flying back to the nest where they try to chivvy back inside, though it is now too small to contain them.

Female swallow with fledgling (on post)

Here is one bird that doesn’t mind a stiff breeze for they can almost stall like humming birds in it and let the food come to them. The dune lake provides an ideal feeding area for them and up to 20 or more can gather there, feeding off the insect life nurtured by the lake. They all have individual flight paths, and it is a glorious sight watching them at work, swooping across the terrain after flying insects invisible to us, while keeping a sharp eye out so they don’t collide with each other.

Welcome Swallow in flight

Track we were listening to while posting this 
Judy Collins   Sunny Goodge St (Donovan)  

The magician, he sparkles

in satin and velvet.

You gaze at his splendour

with eyes you've not used yet.  

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Rare Spotless Crake/Pūweto found in Kapiti shopping mall

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

The discovery of a rare spotless crake in distress in Kapiti’s Coastland Mall complex brings to four the number of rare and threatened species now known to be settled in this urban area. It joins parera, dabchick and fernbird.

Spotless Crake on nest in Raupo (Courtesy NZ Department of Conservation)

Like the endemic fernbird, which was rediscovered in the Waikanae estuary and environs in 2012, spotless crakes are swamp dwellers and notoriously difficult to find. They are rails, and share a cousinage with weka, now pretty much extinct in the North Island, although efforts have been made to reintroduce them. The rediscovery of the fernbird led to the location of a small colony that, much to everyone’s surprise, had begun to find safe habitat in the more open cleared areas, away from the wetland.

Hand held Spotless Rake (courtesy NZ Department of Conesrvation) 

Where there is one spotless crake there will surely be more and a similar pattern of resettlement in response to human activity may be occurring here.  The Wharemauku and its tributary drains run through the shopping complex and it is likely that this dishevelled stray has come up from the creek and its surviving wetlands. If so, it confirms that the creeks and drains in this area are used as passageways by these wild animals from one rare surviving habitat area to another.

All this continues to show up the deplorable quality of the NZTA’s scientific survey into the effect on native wildlife of the expressway. There are no evaluation or management plans for parera,  dabchicks, and now spotless crake, though they will be carving an embanked 4 lane highway right through their surviving habitat. 

Read story at Kapiti News

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How do animals think?

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

What we try to do is work without disturbing birds, and not only around nesting and fledging areas. New technology is a big help here still, these animals are wild and difficult to surprise especially in the centre of town and it’s useful to keep in mind the inadvertent damage that can be done by plunging around in the undergrowth looking for eggs or following youngsters.

What we are trying to do is form a view of the world, as animals see and experience it. By remaining patiently attentive at a distance, a picture of this can be built up over time. The bonus is that animals are more like us than we care to admit, changing and adapting to the world around them, so whatever we see is unlikely to have been experienced in quite that way before.

One of the great conservationists of NZ remains Scottish-born farmer and writer, H. Guthrie-Smith 1861-1940. 

H Guthrie-Smith and friend at Tutira 

An accomplished natural historian and an obsessive observer of native birdlife at Tutira, his farm property in the northern Hawkes Bay, he wrote the enduring classic of NZ natural history, Tutira, while bearing witness to the tragedy of our environmental history - the clear felling and burning of over 14 million hectares of native podocarp forest.

As an astute observer of waterbirds he recorded this regretful account of stumbling over a parera/grey duck nest in January 1909.

“Unfortunately, I came on the bird very suddenly, and she flew off, badly scared, and without any time for concealment of her eggs…Hoping to photograph the bird herself, I set up that afternoon a rough preliminary screen and as the eggs were much incubated and I was fearful of losing my chance, I may have erected it in too close proximity to the nest. At any rate next morning when revisiting the spot, I found that the eggs had been thrown out of the nest on all sides, and its edges trampled and flat. The blunt breaks in the ruined eggs, and the presence of the whole clutch uneaten in any degree pointed to this destruction as having been the work of the duck herself. No hawk or rat, or weasel would have thus wantonly destroyed them. Had vermin been at work, most of the eggs would have been devoured and one or two probably missing. The holes would have been of different shapes and sizes.”

This is from Birds of the Water, Wood and Waste (1910) and provides a salutary lesson on not being ham-fisted around wild animals. Yet it also provides compelling insight.

Parera males, unlike introduced mallards, hang around their female mates after the chicks hatch. They try to be good father's but find it difficult, reacting at first as if the chicks have been dropped out of nowhere. They can’t seem to appreciate the female’s preoccupation. In this they are more like shovellers and grey teal (and some humans!) than mallards that leave their mates when they start laying down a nest. But the females are very sparky and won’t hesitate to attack a mate if they seem to be threatening the youngsters. One icy glare from the female can send them into a prolonged sulk. Too much of this and it can drive them away. And though they look impressive in taking up a guardian  role like this one over a resting brood, (pictured); 

Parera male on guard over female and chicks

they continually take their cue from the female, who can spot and react to trouble well before her erstwhile protector.

Despite the mother’s protective custody however, the attrition level of her brood is high – especially here in the town, where domestic cats, rats, stoats and pukeko can find their way through the blackberry to nesting sites. They will often lose a chick (or two) over night. Yet this loss is balanced against the fact that they are prolific breeders, and with the males always at the ready, she can put down another nest almost immediately. Then another.

What Guthrie-Smith’s experience appears to show, is that the females have some insight into this. In destroying the nest herself, she has taken pre-emptive action and here her thinking and decision-making is taking place at a very high level, (and without the use of language). The maternal instinct develops the strongest emotions an animal can experience (consult your mother on this!), yet she has overridden this in assessing that the nest no longer provides a safe haven. But neither is she prepared to abandon her brood (about to hatch) to their fate. 

What adds to the poignancy is that these animals grieve for their lost young. We watched a solitary parera mother haunting the dune lake at the end of one season, after pukeko had taken her last chick. Despite her own vulnerability, and now plastered in mud, the mother refused to leave the lake bed, and kept approaching the pukeko and their own chick as if in rebuke, in a futile search for her lost youngster. 

It is difficult watching these animals sometimes.

Track we were listening to while posting this - 

Billie Holiday God Bless the Child

Yes, the strong gets more

While the weak ones fade

Empty pockets don't ever make the grade

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Bianca Begovich

Dabchick-Weweia pair raise late brood at Waikanae estuary

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Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

It is now officially Autumn, starting to get chilly in the morning and with the first Southerly buster currently assaulting Christchurch and due here this evening, the last thing you would expect would be a new dabchick family  emerging from a nest at the Waikanae lagoons.

Dabchick feeding youngster -Waikanae estuary March 4

Yet here they are, pictured this morning. The chick has just been tipped off the parent’s back and yet, full of fight and indignation, it took every opportunity to climb back on. It’s endeavours were met with short shrift however as the parents zipped around trying to keep it supplied with breakfast.

And zip is the operative word. We were admiring how shags could rocket around underwater last week, but dabchicks leave them standing. It’s impossible to keep a camera on their track, unless they’re close to the surface, where you can see they have an ability to change direction, and accelerate while doing it, that is quite alarming. 

Meanwhile the chick had picked all this up just by watching. At the point when it first, suddenly disappeared under water, we became seriously alarmed, thinking an eel might have got hold of it especially as the mother, settled nearby and watching it all, looked even more alarmed. Though everything settled back into order when the little one came up a good 20 metres (and 30 seconds) behind her.

Weweia takes a dive -March 4 

What the camera revealed was that it had in fact dived – though it was a clumsy first attempt –a belly flop. Still, once underwater, there was no stopping it. 

All of which augurs well for the local survival of this nationally threatened species though we won’t of course, be seeing them, like this one, right in the centre of town on the dune lake once the expressway has eviscerated this wetland. 

Male dabchick at the Raumati Beach dune lake -Sept 24 2013

Anyone interested in an independent view of expressway developments in Kapiti could follow Bianca Begovich at  www.kapitiindependentnews.net.nz  

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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

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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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