Keeping history alive

The Marlborough Sounds is one of New Zealand's few strongholds for the endangered tuatara, with just a few populations clinging precariously to some special offshore islands. Last week, for the first time, 53 rare Brothers Island tuatara came home. MAIKE VAN DER HEIDE went along.

Holding a tuatara is a strange experience. The animal is heavy but agile, cold and solid. Its claws with long, rounded nails dig in with a hearty grip and its spikes are soft but its skin is leathery.

The tuatara has large, glinting dark eyes which to me are quite pretty and to the Department of Conservation's Mike Aviss are "absolutely gorgeous".

I raise the reptile I'm holding in my hand up to my face for a better view and its grip on my hand tightens. It pivots its head to look around. I'm giving it its first ever view of its new home on the beautiful Long Island at the top end of Queen Charlotte Sound in the Marlborough Sounds.

Apparently the tuatara - I'm told it's a male - is pleased at what he sees because he's not keen to go into the earthy burrow prepared earlier by Mike and his DOC colleagues. He wants to explore. His claws flail in an attempt to climb over the burrow's entrance. I put the tuatara's head in the hole again and this time he scrambles into the darkness, curling its spiny tail away from daylight.

The tuatara is just one of 53 which were released on Long Island last week, the first time the animals have been put there by humans.

They are of the Brothers Island variety, Sphenodon guntheri for those in the know, and are the happy result of a Victoria University experiment to find out if the sex of their youngsters can be determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated.

Although they were born at Victoria University and raised at Wellington Zoo, these tuatara have had a homecoming of sorts: The Brothers Island, in particular North Brother Island where their parents live, is just a few kilometres from Long Island in Cook Strait.

For many on the DOC boat who accompanied the tuatara to their new home, the release was the result of seven years of care, nurturing and the annual search and dig of the enclosure to count the animals.

"I suppose we are the chosen few who are allowed to be here for this," Mike tells the gathering on the boat before we land on Long Island.

The small crowd includes several workers from DOC and Wellington Zoo, researchers from Victoria University, including Professor Charles Daugherty, assistant Vice-Chancellor (Research), plus kaumatua and Anglican ministers representing Rangitane and Te Atiawa.

On a seat in the boat, the precious reptilian cargo is stacked in cardboard poster tubes inside two black mesh bags. Each tube is secured with sticky tape over a ball of tissue paper to protect the tuatara inside.

A karakia is said by Rangitane's Jim MacDonald and Te Atiawa ministers Graeme and Mabel Grennell. Graeme blows into a bone flute, producing a haunting sound.

Then it's time. We scramble off the boat, up the steep rocks and onto a hillside of dense, shiny flax.

Robins flit deftly as we lumber slowly up the incline, clinging to whatever vegetation we can find as we go.

We reach the top and the first tuatara tube is selected from the bag.

Jim unpicks the tape and removes the tissue. A bright green scaly nose appears at the hole but, like its mates, it is reluctant to leave the security of the tube. Eventually, nails scratching, it is coaxed out by gravity on to a waiting hand.

Victoria University school of biological sciences researcher, Sue Keall, watches as the tuatara scrambles into the burrow.

It's a big moment for her.

She says the day was a long time coming from the day the eggs were collected on North Brother Island, then hatched over a year at the university.

Wellington Zoo conservation and veterinary science manager Katja Geschke says the zoo held a farewell on the morning the tuatara flew to Blenheim for the staff who spent six years looking after them.

She says the tuatara lived in big boxes away from the public eye but open to the elements, with lights to attract moths and other tuatara food.

"It's a fantastic day.

"We've seen them grow and now they go back home," Katja says.

For Sue and fellow researchers it was a chance to find out if, like other tuatara, the sex of the Brothers Island tuatara is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are kept: Temperature-dependant sex determination (TSD).

Sue says Brothers Island tuatara are considered a different species from "normal" tuatara, of which it is already known that the sex is determined by temperature.

Researchers found that, like other tuatara, more male Brothers Island species were born if the eggs were incubated at higher temperatures. With global warming, among other factors, this could spell dire results for the already flagging population, says Sue, especially as it was also found that females reproduce at an even slower rate than other tuatara. North Brother Island, she says, already has more males than females.

Sadly, only about 400 adult Brothers Island tuatara remain. That's not much.

Tuatara were once found throughout New Zealand but are now restricted to offshore islands, secure mainland "islands" and captive

facilities.

Thanks to introduced predators such as rats, cats, stoats and ferrets, the average New Zealand bushwalker has no chance of ever finding a tuatara lurking in mainland undergrowth.

The tuatara is commonly referred to as a "living fossil" because it is the only survivor of a group of reptiles which used to roam at the same time as dinosaurs. All species of the order Sphenodontia, except the tuatara, became extinct about 60 million years ago.

Having been around for a while, tuatara like to grow, and procreate, at a speed only marginally faster than a fossil. They can keep growing until they are 35 years old and haven't deemed it necessary to change much about themselves in over 225 million years.

Their slow way of life hasn't served them well when they're being eaten faster than they can breed and the tuatara have managed to survive on just 32 of New Zealand's offshore islands, which are generally

pest-free.

Because they live only in New Zealand, the tuatara is of huge international interest to biologists and several conservation management programmes are in place to ensure their survival.

Here in Marlborough, we are lucky enough to have several islands where the tuatara can thrive. Tuatara were already found on Stephens Island, The Trios and North Brother, and after predator control eliminated rats they were recently returned to Titi Island, Wakaterepapanui and now Long Island.

Stephens Island is home to some 50,000 tuatara, making up 90 percent of the world's tuatara population, and, says Mike, is therefore incredibly important.

All the islands are marked as reserves and many are not open to the public. DOC and other conservation trusts and organisations are fiercely protective of the tuatara's habitat and have stringent bio-

security measures in place on

several islands to ensure nothing rocks their fragile ecosystems.

Last year, tourism company Tuatara Maori applied to the Department of Conservation for consent to fly 14 up-market tours by helicopter to Stephens Island each year to see tuatara in the wild.

Department of Conservation Nelson Marlborough conservator Neil Clifton declined the application in August this year because tours would increase the potential for pests and disease to spread to the island.

The new population of Brothers Island tuatara who are now settling in on Long Island are not the first of their species to be moved off their four-hectare rock in Cook Strait.

In 1995 several young were moved to Titi Island and a few years later several more were taken to Matiu/Soames Island in Wellington Harbour. Sue says it has taken a long time to confirm the success of the transfers because it takes tuatara so long to establish and start reproducing. How well the Long Island transplant has gone will take years to confirm, Sue says.

The last tuatara to be released on Long Island doesn't care he's endangered. Like the tuatara I let go, he doesn't want to go in the hole.

Wellington Zoo animal registrar Barbara Blanchard has put the tuatara in, but the tuatara wants to be out. He writhes and struggles, stretching his patterned little head up to get above the burrow entrance.

Mike says that when the tuatara are a bit older - in 15 to 20 years - plans are to introduce more wild Brothers Island tuatara to get a bit more variety in the gene pool.

He also wants to see flax wevil and the giant weta released on Long Island - a tasty snack for the tuatara, among other things.

The adventurous tuatara is finally in his burrow, where he should be, and Barbara's happy he's not going to come back out. We get up and start filing down the hill.

On the way, I glance down at a small tunnel under some tree roots. A black eye in a green head looks back. I reflect that this is what New Zealand's bush used to be like, many years ago. Look into a hole and see a tiny dinosaur.

Mike agrees: Things are slowly returning to the way they once were.

"The future looks really good, and really exciting."

The tuatara moves slightly - it watches us go, making sure that we leave his new island.