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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Lets make the water turn black - Pollution levels rising in the wharemauku

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 97

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

The great Czech writer

This post is dedicated to Franz Kafka, who got it about right

The story so far: we had been collecting evidence of pollution generated from the construction of an expressway through our local swamp when we discovered the NZTA, which managed the consortium building the expressway, had gone to great lengths to pump blackened dune lake  water, into the wharemauku, bypassing its own pollution monitors. So we took the issue to the local environmental watchdog the Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC). Here’s what happened next. 

Red Zoned - the Raumati Beach dune lake

In dealing with any large organisation you need to keep in mind that everyone has received extensive training in the universal C.A.R.E Policy; ie. Cover A*** Retain Employment. To countermand this it is best to start at the top and work your way down. And, where possible, drop a big name into the conversation. We had previously approached the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (a  fruitless foray but they weren't to know that); so we dropped her into the mix, which elicited an immediate response from the GWRC who floated the enquiry down into  the inner reaches of their middle management.

Munted Monitor 

We broached three issues – the dilapidated state of the NZTA’s pollution monitors; the polluting of the lower reaches of the wharemauku and then the appearance of a red pollutant in the waterway following the dumping of quarried scoria onto the expressway.

Pollutant from Drain 7

They were courteous and formal, if somewhat patronising, advising that an investigation was being launched and giving a time line; but then also conceding that  they had a relationship with the NZTA to speed up consent processing etc. This set alarm bells ringing because, crucially, they also revealed the NZTA did not have a consent for pumping water into Drain 7. Our anxiety intensified however, when their liaison turned out to be one lower order foot soldier inspecting goings on once a week, with the upper echelons of GWRC management taking the NZTA’s word, for whatever issue was put in front of them.

The GWRC it turned out, had no idea the NZTA had been pumping blackened dune lake water into the wharemauku, but they made a confident assessment nevertheless that might be briefly summarised as

      1   The red pollutant was ‘natural’.

   2  The pollution monitors had been out of action, but not recently. (We had foto’s disproving this). They would keep an eye on them from now on. (They haven’t)

     3    The Board of Inquiry gave the NZTA a licence to do pretty much what they liked. (This was true)

It was then that we put in our supplementary question that asked if they were happy that the NZTA had been pumping black water into the wharemauku below the pollution monitors. We had foto’s so they did a double take and went back to their drawing boards: then got back with a detailed response on the black water issue which we publish in full…

Discharge of black water into Drain 7

We are aware that M2PP has been pumping water into Drain 7 which then flows into the Wharemauku below the NTU loggers.  This discharge is occurring under a “Permit to Pump”, which is an M2PP measure authorised under management plans and consent conditions for the Project.  This Permit to Pump requires M2PP to use handheld NTU monitors upstream and downstream of the discharge to manage the effect of the discharge within certain limits.   Therefore, while it may appear that the discharge is bypassing the monitoring requirements for the Project by discharging downstream of the NTU logger, it is in fact being monitored under a separate system.  We are currently following this up with M2PP to ensure that the relevant permit is being complied with.

Actually, they weren’t aware of the pumping, and if they’ve been  following anything up at all, we haven’t been advised of the result; though what they did reveal was that the NZTA, armed with something called a ‘permit to pump’ and a compliantly sleepy GWRC, could do pretty much anything they wanted. At which point we threw up our hands.

Well, almost, because lets state the unresolved issues clearly.

   -We still haven’t got an answer as to why the NZTA would go to all the trouble and expense of draining water out through a hidden drain, when they could have pumped it straight into the wharemauku.

   -This pumping would have occurred over three or four days and we frequent this area regularly. We picked up signs of the resulting pollution in Drain 7 and traced it back from there, but there was no sign of NZTA staff standing anywhere near this waterway, or the wharemauku itself, measuring pollution levels.

   -This they would have had to do 24 hours of the day going by the experience revealed in our last post, where we found NZTA pumps left going through a weekend, and around the clock, with no staff in attendance.

The evidence remains circumstantial so we’ll leave you to make up your own mind. Though we now have the even more serious issue of a permanent pollutant, invading the wharemauku from Drain 7 to preoccupy us.  

Conclusion

There’s a lesson here in what happens when laws are arbitrarily jiggered, corners cut, scientific findings massaged to suit, while everyone is ‘inside the tent’ scratching each others back… because now we find that the wharemauku isn’t the only waterway that is starting to turn black. Here is a foto of Andrews Pond, about a kilometre to the north. It is listed as highly significant by the Kapiti Council, is a favoured haunt of protected scaup and their young, and sits right across the road from the expressway. And no, GWRC, this is not its natural colour. 

Andrews Pond 26 October 2015

You won’t find this story in your local New Zealand media and its been a long haul working through it; but it has generated considerable interest so it’s a pleasure to see that not all Kiwis (not to mention our international friends), have fallen asleep at our environment wheel.

Track we were listening to while posting this  Sonny Day's '84 classic of Springston's classic    Saving Up   

You better start savin' up

For the things that money can't buy

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Pollution levels rising in the Wharemauku - 3 -The destruction of a New Zealand wetland

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 96

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Bonjour, once again to our French friends, who may or may not be rugby people, though you read it here first – the NZ-French matchup at Cardiff Arms…And this is to say that everyone down in this hemisphere is very very nervous about what you guys are going to pull out of your cockaded tricornes this year. 

Though now we can get back to our story on pollution in the Wharemauku.

Polluted lower reaches of the Wharemauku

No-one is talking about this pollution, including the agency that should be monitoring it, the Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) – our waterway pollutant watchdog. So we have had to assemble our own evidential record and publish it here. And bear in mind while we go through this, that the NZTA has denied all along, through the Board of Inquiry, that there ever was a wetland here.

Expressway bridge site Raumati beach

What we are going to do is try and track what the NZTA has been doing regarding pumping polluted water into Drain 7 and a good place to start is with water they are now pumping from the northern site of the bridge construction. They have dug a stream diversion around the bridge site and are lifting water from this  across the Wharemauku, into the area where the dune lake used to be.

Pump taking water from new Wharemauku diversion 

Over the Wharemauku and into the destroyed dune lake

This water collected in the excavated sand dunes on the north  side of the bridge construction. It had been left to settle, so was  relatively clear; clear enough perhaps, for it to have been pumped out into the Wharemauku.  They aren’t doing this however but pumping it back into the site where the dune lake used to be and which they have previously gone to a great deal of trouble to drain. The water in the destroyed lake however, is now filling back to the levels it had reached, before it was drained in August. And it is that draining drama we are now going to focus on. 

This new pumping activity however, has been useful in revealing the NZTA’s draining methodology. The pump was observed around 7am on a Sunday morning (The site is shut down on a Sunday though work usually begins at 7.30 during the week). It was unattended and had been left working through Saturday night, though there are residential houses close by.

Hard at it. Draining the dune lake early August 

It was back in August that the NZTA first began draining what was left of the dune lake. We have noted how the dune lake areas had expanded once the NZTA began levelling the area and carting sand from the surrounding dune lands onto the expressway –building up its escarpment. Despite being sat in a swamp basin the dune lake always ran clean, but with the disturbance of the peat the water on this site has became polluted.

Drainage channels to hidden drain.  

The engineers then began excavating channels between these areas connecting them up and building a passageway that led back to an inaccessible  hidden drain, that channelled water (underground) into Drain 7 and thence the wharemauku.

Sump spilling polluted water into hidden drain

This was easy to track if you knew what you were looking for; but who would think the NZTA would begin pumping water into Drain 7 through such a circuitous farrago. Why go to all that trouble when they might simply spill it straight into the wharemauku. There might be many reasons for them to do this, though the one that immediately springs to conservation mind is that they needed to release this pollutant water, below the monitors set up in the wharemauku to detect pollution leaking from the site. Why? Because the site could be shut down if they reached prescribed levels.

Compressor draining polluted water early August

We gathered incontrovertible evidence that that was exactly what the NZTA had done. And took it to our environmental watchdog – the GWRC…

Pollution in Drain 7 early August

We have  a lot of time for the GWRC, because it's working in an environmental no-mans-land set up by the Board of Inquiry. This Board has effectively overruled the RMA leaving the NZTA to work without environmental legislative oversight so they appear to be  making up the rules as they go along. And these rules are based on expediency. Helping this is the fact that the GWRC have formed a team to work in close liaison with the NZTA to fast track environmental consent processes as they arise. As we saw in the financial crisis of 2008 however once Business and its auditors chum up, expect trouble.

What we didn’t expect however was that despite this cosy relationship, the GWRC had no knowledge of what was going on at this excavation site.

We have taken enough of your time  in this post however, and will continue this story in our next one.

Though here’s an update on our dabchick chicks who are thriving down at the Waikanae estuary. Which provides a timely reminder of why we’re out here, undertaking  this investigative toil.   

Two dabchick chicks with mum.

One noticeably bigger than the other.  Heres  the largest.

Track we were listening to while posting this… we’re on a Carter Family binge so its  I'm  thinking tonight of my Blue Eyes'   

'Twould been better for us both had we never

In this wide and wicked world had never met,

But the pleasure we both seemed to gather

I'm sure, love, I'll never forget

Oh, I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes

Who is sailing far over the sea

I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes

And I wonder if he ever thinks of me

The women were the heart and soul of this band though it was AP who collected the songs, a fascinating toil, that managed to archive songs that stretched back through the 19th century and then some.   What it revealed amongst many other things was  how music was universally present in those lives, not simply in the church congregations on Sunday's, but in the kitchens and wash houses of the local people.  They made music for themselves whereas today (sigh) we spend our time listening to others make it.

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