Capital Kiwi’s Pete Kirkman with Tangaroa (a young tāne) Photo: Neil Hutton
After four years of hard slog, a very special conservation milestone was reached in the hills of Wellington last weekend.
For the first time in around 100 years, 11 brown kiwi were released to roam the Mākara hills.
Paul Stanley Ward – leader of the conservation project Capital Kiwi – tells Jesse Mulligan about the mission to restore a wild kiwi population to the area.
Capital Kiwi CEO Paul Stanley-Ward. Photo: Supplied
The 11 kiwi, which travelled from the Otorohanga Kiwi House near Hamilton with their Ngāti Hinewai kaitiaki, are the first of 250 to be released into Capital Kiwi's 23,000-hectare project site over the next six years.
Paul sees the project as part of a wave of remarkable changes in Wellington over the last 15 or 20 years.
Spillover from the wildlife sanctuary Zealandia and council possum control measures have led Wellingtonians to develop a strong sense of community guardianship over their native birdlife, he says.
Voluntary commitment is the only sustainable way of conserving native wildlife, Paul says.
"If we aren't connected to these taonga, to these manu [birds], we will lose our relationship with these birds that are an intrinsic part of our identity.
"Conservation is shifting from being something that a DOC ranger does 'somewhere else' – in Fiordland or on an island – to something we all do in our backyards and paddocks and reserves."
Paul grew up in the suburb of Johnsonville hearing blackbirds, sparrows and possums at night and now lives in Newtown.
"My girls are growing up with tūī nesting in the ti kōuka, the cabbage tree, out the front of our house. We've got kākā parrots, every morning and even the falcon, the kārearea, we can hear most days."
He was involved in the successful regeneration of kākā and other manu in the Aro Valley as a co-founder of Ngā Kaimanaaki o te Waimapihi, and says the next proposition was whether our national bird could also be helped to thrive in the Wellington area once again.
"The answer is yes if you take the care as a community and you do the work to enable it ... If we take the care, we can successfully live alongside them."
Capital Kiwi's vision is that in five or ten years' time, Wellingtonians will go to sleep to the sound of kiwi calls.
"Getting letters to the editor complaining about the noise is a KPI for the project."
The Capital Kiwi project area, roughly the same size as Abel Tasman National Park, spans from Red Rocks on Wellington's south coast to west of Porirua.
To provide an adequate "cloak of protection" for kiwi to thrive on the hills they had to go large, Paul says.
"We can't look after wide-ranging species like kākā, kiwi, kererū in bits and bobs. We have to figure out how to do it at landscape scale for obvious reasons. The manu don't recognise property boundaries and neither do the pests that are threatening them."
A sign is erected on Mākara Road after 11 kiwi are released into the hills of Wellington. Photo: Le TANS Photography
Over three-quarters of the project area is privately owned land and Capital Kiwi got the go-ahead from landowners and farmers after many "yarns over coffee and tea" (and the occasional beer) in woolsheds and village halls, he says.
The remaining area is public reserve land where predator traps are monitored by volunteers such as the local four-wheel drive club and mountain bike club.
Before getting approval, Capital Kiwi had to demonstrate they'd removed enough stoats – the number one threat to kiwi – from the project area.
So far, the 4,500 traps have culled over 800 stoats, which Paul describes as "impressive, shy, cryptic predators"
"Where [kiwi] get hammered is stoats eating chicks before they get up to a fighting weight. Our number one job was to remove stoats so we could have a growing kiwi population, rather than one that was heading towards extinction."
On Saturday afternoon, the sun came out for an emotional pōwhiri at Mākara School by Taranaki Whānui and Ngāti Toa, but rain was falling when the birds were placed inside burrows for their first night.
The kiwi, with their built-in raincoats and a predilection for earthworms, would have been fine with the wet weather they were released into the next morning, Paul says.
"When they came out they would have had a smorgasbord… they'll be stoked in that environment."
Related:
Dame Kerry Prendergast on the Capital Kiwi project (Nights)
Capital Kiwi: the community-led project bringing wild kiwi back to Wellington (Nine to Noon)
