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 Editorial
- Great Barrier Island on the Map?
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by John Ogden
I came back from Australia at the end of October to a pile of mail. At
first I thought a lot of it was very positive – everyone from the Local
Board to the Minister for Conservation and the local MP seemed to have
the pest problem on Great Barrier on the radar:
• A new Regional Pest Management Strategy
up for comment;
• “Building the Aotea Conservation Park” from Nikki Kaye;
• Maggie Barry backing Community initiatives for pest control in
Northland;
• DOC’s “Ridge to Reef” seminars well advertised (and subsequently well
attended);
• The first Report from the “Community Conversations about the future
Ecology of GBI” presented to the Local Board;
• Publication of a scientific paper based on GBI work showing that rats
slow down succession and thus increase the fire risk1 ;
• Ngati Rehua Ngati Wai ki Aotea welcoming back the black petrels/taiko
on Hirakimata, and receiving strong support for their “Bring Back
Kokako” programme.
This is all positive and certainly
contrasts with Great Barrier’s profile in conservation a decade ago,
when even researching the means to improve the Island’s ecology was
resisted by some locals and the significance of the Island’s plants,
birds and reptiles was unknown to the vast majority of New Zealanders.
However, there is certainly no room for complacency, because there is,
unfortunately, a wide gap between what is being said in political
circles, and what is actually happening on the ground.
In the last four years the GBI Department
of Conservation staff resident on the Island have been cut from 18 (14
‘permanent’) to nine FTEs (Full Time Equivalents), but two of these
positions are currently vacant. Only two people, Louise Mack and Craig
Mabey, have full-time ‘responsibility’ for biodiversity protection,
monitoring, research and advocacy. Identify the importance of the place,
list what needs to be done in the Conservation Management Strategy, then
halve the staff on the ground and expect it all to work! Yeah right.
Let us be clear, this is not a local
decision, someone ‘up there’ (or rather ‘down there’) seems to think
that fewer staff can ‘look after’ one of the most significant off-shore
islands in the country. Of course the Department has been drastically
cut nationally by a government that claims to represent the interests of
the nation, but even allowing for this, the internal re-structuring
seems to have fallen very hard on Great Barrier. As a result there is no
money for a project coordinator to progress the promised rodent
eradication on Rakitu, no money to protect the endangered kakariki and
tomtits on Hirakimata, no money for research on brown teal / pateke
mortality rates (although a review is in progress), no money to
investigate the re-establishment of Cook’s petrel, or monitoring
bitterns etc., no money for anything much except re-building the
infra-structure destroyed by last year’s freak storm and the new visitor
centre /office at Okiwi. While that is clearly important, arguably a
priority, surely support should not have to come – however indirectly –
by cutting local work on biodiversity protection and community
relations. I may have got some of this wrong – but that is part of the
problem. It is not easy to find out what is being spent on biodiversity
without seeming to criticise those at Okiwi DOC endeavouring to get a
huge job done with much reduced resources.
One of DOC’s responses to their parlous
state nationally is to facilitate community conservation initiatives.
While we applaud that, it must not be seen as an alternative to a
full-time, properly funded Department, with the capacity to monitor
native biodiversity, keep data on trends and initiate both research and
appropriate legislation and protective actions. Volunteers can be used
to do some of the work, but voluntary organisations cannot provide the
long-term continuity required to protect our fauna and flora.
Meanwhile, it appears that DOC’s current Barrier budget will be
allocated to track work in the new Aotea Conservation Park. Having a
“Great Walk” seems to be the politician’s idea of “recreation to support
conservation”, but without pest control the walker’s footsteps will echo
through a silent forest. Sadly, this silence will become the norm; most
of the urban visitors of the future will have no idea what has been
lost. And it is going on right now - an estimated 86,500 native birds
are being lost on Great Barrier Island every year from predation by rats
and feral cats (see: “Back of Envelope” calculations and references in
this issue). Why have we no resident bellbirds on Great Barrier Island?
– that is why.
Table 1 (see back page) contains
“Guestimates”of the 2015 status of some indigenous birds on Great
Barrier, by the author.
Nikki Kaye got the pests present on Great
Barrier wrong, but I can forgive that if the general message came
across: the Gulf Islands – including Great Barrier – are special places
in need of high levels of protection. Support for Glenfern Sanctuary was
a government “commitment to contribute to the proposed purchase”. The
“We will save Glenfern” announcement was made by Maggie Barry in April
2015 (see: Environmental News 34). This promise has yet to be fulfilled.
Maggie has continued to support rodent control, speaking out in favour
of the use of 1080 in Northland forests, which are also losing species
(kakariki are the latest to disappear from there, but as yet nothing is
proposed to save the few remaining on Great Barrier).
Toxins like 1080 or brodifacoum are seen
by some as a great menace, or at best, an unknown risk. It is right to
be cautious because there are known manageable side-effects (‘collateral
damage’), and possibly unknown long-term effects. Long-term
environmental persistence has been studied for all the toxins in use
today. No long-term environmental build-up, or other long-term
detrimental effect, has been demonstrated, only hugely increased
survival for forest birds. Of course what is ‘long-term’ is a matter of
judgement and, as in
 medical
matters, no scientist or surgeon would claim the risk is zero. Aerially
applied toxins are all we have at present to control pests over large
areas of rugged terrain, and they have been proved world-wide to be the
most cost efficient and effective method of pest control. If you visit
somewhere where aerially delivered baits have eliminated predators–such
as Hauturu (Little Barrier) or Tirititi Matangi Island – you will see
and hear the benefits immediately.
Although new technology is likely to
overtake these methods, we cannot afford to wait as several already ‘at
risk’ bird species are declining (Table 1) . New technology research is
being spearheaded nationally by a group here on Great Barrier – with
support from the Local Board. The Glenfern team have developed a
“trapminder” system which senses when a rat enters a trap or tunnel, and
sends an electronic message to the “cloud”. This server accumulates the
data and can be accessed at any time from a home computer or smart
phone, so you can see if you’ve caught anything without actually getting
out to have a look. While this might seem a small advance, it is crucial
because it allows instantaneous calculation of trapping efficiency and
should greatly reduce the time spent on checking traps, and thus the
person-power costs.
Unfortunately all the hype about
Conservation Parks, protecting biodiversity, and community consultation,
is not being reflected in action on the ground. This is not the fault of
local DOC staff, who need more support from all of us to regain their
capacity to protect the Island’s taonga – forest ecosystems, birds and
reptiles. As we enter 2016 the Trust and the Great Barrier community are
looking for evidence that this island is indeed on DOC’s map. The new
Conservation Park warrants more than seven dedicated staff to deliver
the stated goal of the Conservation Management Strategy (CMS)–a pest
free island where kokako, black petrel, pateke, kakariki and other
species thrive.
The sad bottom line: so far as I can
determine from the available data–all the species which were declining
ten years ago are probably still doing so.
REFERENCES
1 Perry GLW, Wilmshurst JM, Ogden J & Enright NJ. 2015. Exotic mammals
and invasive plants alter fire-related tipping points in southern
temperate forested landscapes. Ecosystems. DOI 10:1007/S10021-015-9898-1
(Springer Verlag Science + Business Media. New York. July 2015).
Environmental News
Issue 35 Summer 2016
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