More birdsong once the pests are drummed out
BY GEOFF COLLETT
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Weekend
A grassroots effort has been launched to kill the pests and save the birds on Nelson's doorstep. Geoff Collett reports.
There didn't seem to me a lot of point in putting millions of dollars into the Brook sanctuary to grow birds that then flew into the Grampians and got eaten.
Sunday was a cracking day to head off with the dogs up the Grampians' Kahikatea Track behind Bishopdale. The sun was warm, the stiff breeze quickly vanished behind the hillside. There were the usual bonuses: the views; a few minutes admiring the mighty tree that gives the trail its name; a few more minutes gawking at a pair of fat, pinheaded wood pigeons; some idle contemplation of just what might reside in the numerous hollows, crannies and dead tree trunks all through the dank bush.
A couple of other things were noteworthy, too: how quiet it was, other than the occasional trill of a grey warbler or bellbird; and something entirely new to even the most regular Grampians visitors – numerous small, narrow wooden boxes strategically located in the bush all along the track, each marked "Birdlife on Grampians".
The day before, as it turned out, a small group of Grampian and bird lovers had been up here, too, led by Nelson businessman, conservationist and general outdoorsman Bryce Buckland.
As Mr Buckland explains in his inner-city office a couple of days later, in the 10 years or so he's been visiting the hills – mostly on mountainbike – it has always struck him that "there's just not the birdlife that there could be or should be".
The explanation is obvious enough: the usual bane of the New Zealand bush – rats, stoats, possums, feral cats and the like – all of which make the Grampians home and happily feed on the eggs and young of the birds which should by rights be enlivening the place.
Most people who walk the hill tracks frequently could report the presence of the various destroyers – Mr Buckland says one man told him of a recent evening walk up the Kahikatea Track during which he counted 36 possums.
Mostly, that's been accepted as how it has to be. Various individuals may have taken matters into their own hands (the same possum spotter told Mr Buckland his dog had accounted for a further 83 possums over the years), but the Grampians have been largely left to the birds and their predators to sort out a survival regime for themselves. Until now.
Mr Buckland says he has been trapping rats, possums and the like since he was a boy growing up on the West Coast. He clearly got a taste for it. When the Friends of Rotoiti group was established to help trap pests in Nelson Lakes National Park, he was at the front of the queue.
Similar community-based trapping programmes have become commonplace – one has operated for the past couple of years in Marsden Valley, taking out hundreds of rats and possums across the steep, bush-covered hills behind Stoke. Higher profile is the effort of volunteers to clean out the predators from the swath of Brook Valley expected to eventually be the fenced Brook-Waimarama wildlife sanctuary. But sitting between the two, and right on the city's doorstep, the Grampians were being ignored, Mr Buckland says.
The Brook project, and its goal of providing a bird haven to repopulate the hills around Nelson, prompted him to finally act on an idea he had been contemplating for ages. "There didn't seem to me a lot of point in putting millions of dollars into the Brook sanctuary to grow birds that then flew into the Grampians and got eaten," as he puts it. Although he thinks the Grampians have nowhere near the birdlife they should have, the apparent increase of some species – tui, for example – is, he believes, evidence of the inroads being made by trapping in the neighbouring valleys.
He did some basic survey work to confirm the pests' presence on the Grampians and he wrote a letter to The Nelson Mail seeking others who shared his idea for a community trapping programme. The result heartened him – 60 people turned up at a meeting he organised.
While his request to the Grampians' owner, Nelson City Council, for $10,000 to fund trapping work hasn't borne fruit, he hopes to get Forest and Bird funding and has dipped into his own pocket to get Birdlife on Grampians under way. Don Sullivan, the main man behind the Marsden Valley project, has donated 100 traps to Mr Buckland's effort.
Last Saturday, a core group headed up the hill to start laying the trap stations. The traps themselves have not yet been set. The first step is to introduce baits into the diets of the various pests.
While in one sense, running such a project is not very onerous – if it is well-organised, an individual volunteer may only be called on once a month, even less – Mr Buckland says that its long-term success relies on a "life-time commitment".
He has no problem with the fact that that commitment falls back on the community. "The public should take ownership – it's a public amenity. Rats are a public problem and birdlife is a part of public enjoyment."
The real point of difference with this programme compared with the other community pest-killing projects scattered around the region is its proximity to the city and its presence in a heavily used recreation area.
He is keen to make the point that no poisons are being used, but also to warn dog owners particularly to keep their pets away from the trap boxes. While they are designed to keep non-target creatures out, there is always a risk that somehow a curious dog (or person) could trigger a trap, particularly if the station has been upended by a possum. More positively, the prominence of the project, he hopes, will encourage public interest and ownership – people will realise that "they can make a difference, by getting out and nailing the predators – they can have a clean-up, and suddenly we've got good birdlife back again".
There was some heartening interest from passers-by on Saturday (along with those who showed no interest at all, it should be said). All in all, it was a low-key but encouraging start to restoring birdlife on the Grampians. Once Nelson's newest band of trap-layers had done their work, "we sat there and had a cup of tea at the end and thought, `this is not bad is it'," Mr Buckland says.
"Even if you've caught nothing, you get up there and look around the valley and you see the sea, and the town, and up the valleys, and the Maitai, and it's not bad."
- © Fairfax NZ News
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