24 hours: Mark Webb

CLAIRE ALLISON

Mark Webb is an officer with Central South Island Fish and Game, and has developed one hectare of wetlands at his home.

I'm not an early riser. I'm a late-to-bed person. I prefer to work at night and sleep in the morning. I'm usually up about 7.15am. I get the kids up, and we all have breakfast as a family, and then the kids are off to school by about 8.25am.

Then I just wander down the back corner of the section and through the fence and I'm at work.

I'm normally at work about 8.30am, and probably the first thing I do is check the email. There's not much overnight, but it starts to come in from about 9am onwards.

We get inquiries on the web page about what our season might be, what regulations, what the rivers are going to be like in two weeks and what the best tackle is.

We get quite a few inquiries from people overseas who are looking to plan a trip, so we try to direct them – whether they want nice scenic fishing, or successful fishing. Some of those things can take quite a while, sorting out maps, marking roads.

There's no standard day. You can arrive at work with all sorts of aims, and three days later, still not have got back to them. At this time of the year, we could have fish salvage, gamebird on paddock complaints.

There's quite a lot of consent stuff. When I first started here, if we got one consent to look at in a month, that was a big month. Now we get several a week and we do quite a few of our own. We're wanting to do some work at Ealing Springs, just north of the Rangitata, in a stream bed there, because it has potential for salmon enhancement.

If we get it right, we reckon we can increase the Rangitata fishery by about 20 per cent.

It's quite a major undertaking. You're getting to the pointy end of your work when you think you are good enough to build a river.

I've been working on that for eight or nine days, and have got nine different groups of people I need to consult as part of that.

My ranging has really taken a dive this year. For every day I spend in the field, I'd probably have 15 in the office. So that's quite a change.

I started with the Acclimatisation Society in 1984, and in about 1990, the Conservation Act brought Fish and Game councils into being.

The Resource Management Act has increased the focus for us on trying to protect the habitat and keep water in the rivers. We have a resource officer now. We never had one of those back then. More than half of the work is RMA-related). Not so much of it is about getting out and talking to anglers.

It's a big area. If we're going up to the Mackenzie, just to get there and back is half a day. There's a lot of travel.

I don't normally have lunch. I'll have my time off, so I can go home, mow lawns, prune trees, and a few days a week I'll go for a run. Because home's just over the way, I can get away from the office. Sometimes, I don't have lunch until 2pm or 3pm.

Council meetings are every two months, so we've got to do an activity report on what you've done in the previous two months, plus any major reports and recommendations that go to council. As a result of a council meeting, you might be asked to do something else. Councillors can bring up issues that they want sorted.

Council meetings are good. You get a bit of feedback on what you have been doing. If you have done a good job, hopefully you'll get some response, and you'll certainly know if you haven't done something.

In the mornings, I try to get on to the significant things. If I'm halfway through a report, I'll try to get on with that. Because my morning can go until 2pm or later, it's the best time I have for that. After that, you tend to get interruptions.

There might be 30-odd rangers' reports, people not fishing properly, so I get all those. Some are five-minute jobs, checking vehicle registrations or checking whether people have a fishing licence. Those sorts of things I try to do in the afternoon.

A lot of the work we do involves volunteers who have "real jobs" and farmers, and I can't get hold of them during the day. Often after tea, I'll come back to work for an hour.

I get it done a lot more quickly at work, and if someone asks me a question, I've got the information here. Otherwise, it's just another phone call to make. If I'm in the middle of a report I'm really enjoying or nearly finished, I might do some work on it that at night.

I usually leave about 5.30pm to 5.45pm, and tea's usually about 6pm, but the kids are getting to the age now where they've got swimming clubs, sports teams, all sorts of things, so tea can be any time from 6pm onwards.

I'll get people phoning at home and wanting a fishing licence, but that's only a handful of times a season. In the past, it would have been once a week, or people phone asking about the rules and regulations.

I enjoy the ranging if I can spend the whole day out there, and talk to 50 to 100 anglers. Opening weekends on the Tekapo or high-country opening, or ranging on the canals, are quite rewarding.

I try to keep weekends free, but that's when most anglers and hunters go out, so if we're doing harvest surveys, that's when they have to be done.

There's probably less weekend work than there used to be, but if you wanted to, you could work every weekend.

I'm involved in community liaison work, and that can involve after-hours work, doing electric-fishing demonstrations for various groups.

And I do a lot of work with schools with the electric-fishing machine. You can catch lots of fish, and fish that they have never seen before, and if the river's big enough, they can have their fishing rods.

After 20 years, I wouldn't know 1 per cent of what's all around the region. There are so many little streams and ponds and springs.

After work, usually it's out on the pond (the wetland area at home), with all the native vegetation that I've planted around. There's always tidy-up work to do, and I'm still planting, so there's watering and things to do, and there are always weeds.

I've probably got only one more plot to do. When I started, I was going to get all the planting done in the first few years, and then relax. And that was 20 years ago.

I get at least one hunting trip a year. During the last few years, we've been alternating between Stewart Island and Fiordland. I don't claim to be a salmon fisherman, but I enjoy being away with mates. I like fly fishing, and I've got back into that in the last year or so after 15 years or so, and realised I've missed out on a lot.

I always wanted to be a marine biologist, before it was fashionable, but then Jacques Cousteau came along, and everybody else wanted to be one, and they were smarter than me, so I ended up being a freshwater biologist.

Fish and Game can be tarred as greenies, but generally once we have made contact with opposing parties and they see that we are able to work with them – we're not constrained by a hierarchy that says this is what we have got to do – we can move, we can negotiate. I think we have a good relationship with those who might consider us the opposition.

In terms of feedback, it's hard to say. Very rarely do you get people saying they are really pleased with what we are doing. It's a lot easier to find people who think we're not doing it right.

It's not a job where you get much individual thanks. It's about job satisfaction. If you feel you have done a good job, that's the important thing.

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