WORKING TOGETHER TO SUPPORT COMMUNITY CONSERVATION
NZ
2012
He Kōrero Pūrākau Tangata, He Kōrero Pūrākau Whenua
Stories of the People, Stories of the Land
CONTENTS FOREWORD
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INTRODUCTION
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STORIES OF THE PEOPLE, STORIES OF THE LAND
Cover image: © WWF / Dave Hansford
HEALING WATERS The Papawai Stream Restoration Project
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FRIENDS INDEED Oakley Creek/Te Auaunga Restoration Project
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RETURN OF THE KOKAKO East Taranaki Environment Trust
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LINKING LANDSCAPES Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust
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MENDING WAIKAWAU Moehau Environmental Group
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A HEALING TOUCH Hannah’s Bay Community Restoration Trust
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FOREWORD © WWF
By Chris Howe, WWF-New Zealand, Executive Director Between 2001 and 2008 I was part of the panel that made decisions on which community conservation projects WWF should support. I saw hundreds of applications and spent many hours assessing them with my fellow panel members. We could not support all the projects that needed our help, and we had to make difficult choices. Sometimes we saw projects that fell outside our normal priorities, but something about them stood out, and we funded them and watched with pride and admiration as they grew and succeeded. Other projects did incredible work with the funds we allocated, even if the amounts were less than had been requested. CHRIS HOWE, Executive Director, WWF-New Zealand
Part of my role at WWF is to meet supporters and community groups, and I’ve been privileged to visit projects throughout New Zealand. Everywhere I go, I hear people say the funding WWF provided gave them the hand up they needed to get their project going, and to really make a difference for their local environment. WWF can’t take the credit for their success – that belongs to the communities themselves – but I am proud that through our support WWF has been able to make a contribution to a better New Zealand for people and nature. The Tindall Foundation has been our partner in supporting community conservation since 2000. It is an honour and a privilege to work with such an inspired and inspiring organization. The Foundation challenges us to make a real difference for communities and the environment, and gives generous and unfailing support for our ideas to meet that challenge. When I look around at the success of the projects we have supported, and the recognition they receive, I am convinced the partnership has made a very significant contribution to community conservation groups and their important work. This collection of six stories gives a snapshot of some of the amazing work being done by communities around New Zealand. WWF continues to support community groups in partnership with The Tindall Foundation. We try to support innovative ideas that could create a step change in our conservation effectiveness, as well as the everyday needs of community groups, but demand still outstrips supply. WWF believes that community conservation groups have an ongoing and essential role to play in conservation in New Zealand, and that they must be supported. WWF, in partnership with The Tindall Foundation, will continue to do so, and we encourage others to join with us in this vitally important work.
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INTRODUCTION
By Marc Slade, WWF-New Zealand, Terrestrial Conservation Manager
WWF-New Zealand has been working with and supporting communities for over eleven years. For the first nine years this was primarily by providing financial support through the Habitat Protection Fund, in partnership with The Tindall Foundation. Recently, however, we have broadened our approach to grassroots conservation by supporting the sector more strategically. © WWF
Now, more than ever, we believe that communities have a vital role to play in the battle to protect New Zealand’s unique and irreplaceable natural heritage - our taonga. We believe that agencies such as the Department of Conservation (DOC) cannot hope to win this battle alone. We need the energy, passion and resources brought by communities, iwi and landowners to stand a chance of reversing our nation’s biodiversity decline.
MARC SLADE, WWF-New Zealand, Terrestrial Conservation Manager
WWF plays an important role as an advocate for the sector, and for nature. We continue to support communities to protect and restore habitats in their own backyard, but we have also developed a new conservation direction. In addition to the Habitat Protection Fund we now run the Community Conservation Innovation Project which will build the capacity of the community conservation sector and increase recognition of the vital role the sector plays in our national conservation efforts. WWF is also increasing coordination and collaboration between statutory agencies such as DOC and Regional Councils and communities, to improve the way we plan and manage the protection and restoration of New Zealand’s unique natural heritage. Protecting biodiversity strongholds is central to our approach. We work to help communities to safeguard what is left of New Zealand’s unique, special plant and animal species and prevent further losses in key “biodiversity strongholds”, including offshore and mainland islands, fenced eco-sanctuaries and areas that have retained their natural values. We will also focus on reconnecting nature, moving beyond protected areas to restore ecosystem functions and connectivity within a larger, living landscape. This approach will be necessary if we are to make headway against ongoing losses and the uncertain impacts of climate change. We will move beyond protected areas and reconnect people to nature, as well as reconnecting habitats by way of green corridors and stepping stones. These goals can be achieved by supporting communities, iwi and landowners through direct financial support and by providing resources. By convening conversations between parties to promote greater coordination and cooperation we hope to play a central role in securing more conservation successes for the whole of Aotearoa New Zealand. Partnerships with groups that support our wider strategic approaches will be built. However, grass-roots conservation groups, often comprised solely of dedicated and committed volunteers, will remain at the heart of WWF’s support for conservation. Providing inspiration and hope to others by sharing the stories of success and innovation is an important aspect of conservation. The stories that follow celebrate six of the groups that WWF has had the privilege of supporting and working with in recent years. We hope you enjoy their stories – and draw from them inspiration to continue the vital task of protecting and restoring our natural world.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
HEALING WATERS – THE PAPAWAI STREAM RESTORATION PROJECT
The Papwai stream, near Greytown, helped Peter Rewi's tipuna make Papawai marae a seat of Māori leadership and commerce. Now he's returning that support, nursing the ailing, polluted waterway back to health.
By Dave Hansford, Writer Peter Rewi still insists he was ambushed. A friend suggested he should come down to Papawai marae to hear about a project to clean up a nearby waterway. When he walked in that night in 2005, he recalls, “I’d never had any interest in Papawai.” When he walked out, he was the Chair of the Papawai-Mangarara stream restoration project. Back then, it was little more than a notion: a few concerned locals wondering how they could prevent the slow death of a once-cherished taonga. Like the first few flaxes they planted, the South Wairarapa project has prospered, bloomed.
Papawai Stream spends much of its early life in darkness. A child of the tumbling Waiohine River, it parts company somewhere in the Tararua foothills and flows underground, beneath Greytown, to burst, bright and bubbling, into the light some eight kilometres later. It emerges not far from Papawai marae, and in the mid to late 1800s, it sustained a community that became the seat of Kotahitanga, the Māori parliament movement. Rewi’s tīpuna, the Māori scholar Te Whatahoro Jury, and chief Hoani Rangi-taka-iwaho, helped immortalise Papawai as the turangawaewae of Ngati Moe: their “place to stand.” “My other great-grandfather was the mayor of Greytown for about 12 years,” he tells me, but sometime during the passing of years, his family’s bond with Papawai weakened. Today, he’s rebuilding it, one flax plant, one school talk, one landowner negotiation at a time. His people stationed small waka along these reaches, and used them to carry grain to a nearby mill, or fish for the tuna – eels – that once writhed through the submerged roots of tall kahikatea. People drew drinking water, clear and cold, from Papawai. “Traditionally,” says Rewi, “it was very important to the community. It was a source of food, of medicinal plants. It was a transport route to and from the Ruamahanga, and a place of recreation.” He shows me a photo of his father, now 87, playing as a boy in one of the waka. “For the last 50-odd years, you haven’t been able to do any of those things.” The kahikatea were felled long ago, along with most of the surrounding native forest. A vast wetland was drained. Today, thickets of willows crowd the brown stream, slowing it to a crawl. But the Papawai Community Trust is changing all that – it means to “return the stream to its former importance as a place of sustenance and play.”
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© WWF / Dave Hansford
The historic Papawai marae. The nearby stream was once an important source of transport, drinking water, medicinal plants and kai for the local community.
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WWF supports the Papawai Community Trust, near Greytown in the Wairarapa. This marae and community led project seeks to restore the mauri (life principle) of the local environment. It is part of a wider catchment project to restore the health of the Ruamahanga River. The project is driven by Papawai marae but has involved the wider community and local schools in taking custodianship of this precious resource – freshwater.
Discordance and disinterest got the stream into this mess, they reason, and it’ll be collaboration, and unity of purpose and vision, that gets it out again. “This project ticks all the boxes,” says Rewi. “There’s the ecological restoration, but it’s also got a strong cultural emphasis; that gets people wanting to support the stream.” Papawai has a much stronger pull than its sluggish waters would suggest, out into the Greytown and wider Wairarapa communities: Greytown Community Council, South Wairarapa District Council, Greater Wellington, have all stepped up to help the people of Papawai marae. Several Wairarapa schools have pitched in with replanting, and Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre sent students out to practice their new fencing skills. “The young guys learn how to put up a fence properly,” says Rewi, “the landowner gets his paddock fenced securely, and we keep stock out of the stream.” Win, win, win. Another backer, through the Habitat Protection Fund, is WWF–New Zealand. Terrestrial Conservation Manager Marc Slade says projects like Papawai are: “vital in restoring threatened lowland habitats. It’s part of a wider catchment approach – linking with initiatives to increase water quality in the Ruamahanga river.” Slade says WWF especially seeks to back projects that restore communities – through skills and network building – as well as ecosystems. Above all, Rewi needed the support of local landowners – and he got it: “We’ve had two or three landowners who have spent thousands of dollars of their own money. “Without their support, we couldn’t get anything done. They let us onto their land, they let us pull out willows that were offering shade for stock, and we’ve effectively stopped their cattle from getting to the stream for water. So it’s a big ask.” Another challenge is: “to get people back here, get them involved. We want them to see what we’re doing.” To that end, there’s talk of a public walkway along the restored sections of the stream, but people aren’t the only ones returning to Papawai. As the waters slowly clear, the tuna – long-finnned eels – are coming back to live. That’s gratifying for Rewi, but it throws up an interesting dilemma: “People stopped gathering kai here decades ago, so the restoration of kai was initially a project objective,” he says. But now the tuna are finally back, not everybody wants to eat them. Least of all Rewi: “It’s not an objective that I’m all that keen on – we don’t promote the taking of tuna.” In fact, in a quirky role reversal, people are now feeding the eels. Besides there are bigger fish to fry: wastewater from Greytown is treated in oxidation ponds, then discharged into rivers and streams, including Papawai. It’s a 40-year-old system that doesn’t just compromise stream health, but cuts across fundamental Māori values around mauri, or life force, and the sanctity of water. “There’s a much bigger discussion to be had about how we deal with sewerage,” says Rewi. “From a Māori point of view, we don’t want to see any effluent going to water,” says Rewi, “Treated or not. We want to see it irrigated to land.” South Wairarapa District Council is investigating just such a system, but Rewi says: “however much success we enjoy with this project, the job isn’t going to be done until we’ve reconciled that issue. It doesn’t matter how much we clean things up at this end; if somebody is pouring crap into it further up, it comes to nothing.” Rewi’s grandparents knew the concept as kaitiakitanga: a heritage of guardianship he sustains every time he picks up a spade.
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FRIENDS INDEED –
OAKLEY CREEK/TE AUAUNGA RESTORATION PROJECT
By Dave Hansford
For Wendy John, it soon becomes apparent, the glass never dips below half-full. When she first laid eyes on Oakley Creek, this serial optimist didn’t see a tangled thicket of weeds – a veritable ‘New Zealand’s leastwanted’ of pestilent vinery – she saw a community asset. She looked straight past the tagging, the litter, the shopping trolleys irreverentially dumped in the choked, brown rivulet, and saw instead the start of something worthy. So when, one morning, she met Helen Mellsop at the Mount Albert railway station, and conversation turned to conservation, the fortunes of one of Auckland’s most delightful surprises took a turn for the better.
WWF supports the Friends of Oakley Creek/Te Auaunga restoration project in the heart of Auckland, showing how a local community can turn a once weed infested urban waterway into a shining example of a restored ecosystem. This project demonstrates the importance of urban environmental projects in raising awareness of biodiversity and natural processes amongst the increasingly urbanised population of New Zealand’s largest city.
Oakley Creek – known to Maōri as Te Auaunga – meanders 15 kilometres from Hillsborough to Point Chevalier, and practically all of it, by accident and design, is bounded by public reserves. And while many urban streams have been channeled underground, out of sight and memory into culverts, most of Oakley Creek still runs free. Today, as the pair lead me along this tranquil reach, the sun is flashing off surprisingly clear waters, given the rumbling backdrop of heavy traffic on Great North Road, not 100 metres away. The weeds are still here – tree privet, tradescantia, convolvulus – maybe always will be, but their smothering supremacy is over. Nowadays, they have to squirm from under the shade of some 30,000 native trees, lovingly planted by hundreds of volunteers. Oakley Creek might still be taken for granted, were it not for the Waterview motorway connection, proposed in 2003. Suddenly this corridor of calm greenery, cradling urban Auckland’s only substantial waterfall, became something of a cause celebre. “For me,” says John, “it’s too much of a drain to spend energy fighting something. I wanted to get involved instead with something positive - planting and things like that.” A public meeting was called, and Friends of Oakley Creek was born, with what John calls “a constructive, restoration focus, rather than an opposition focus.” The group mainly looks after the lower 2.65 kilometres of the creek, working to a restoration plan that means to offer people a place before concrete and culverts, privet and possums. A portal back into the lowland broadleaf forest that once covered this isthmus. John muses on environmental generational amnesia: “As time goes by, people lose connections. For instance, what I understand nature to be, and what a young person
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today understands, are two completely different things.” As that understanding weakens with time, she says, research has shown that people become more tolerant of environmental degradation. The bar lowers with each generation.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
But not here, where locals instead pull on gumboots and gloves, and head to the creek. They pull out weeds, pick up rubbish, plant trees, count birds, and check traps set for rats, mice and possums. In the first six months of trapping, says John, they removed more than 150 possums. A few will always move in from outside, but their comparative absence shows up now as floriference: kohekohe and fuchsia – possum favourites – are flowering for the first time in decades. And the birds are coming back, says Mellsop. “There are so many fantails now. That’s a result of the pest control programme, as well as providing more habitat.” Tui chortle as they gorge on nectar the possums once monopolised, and grey warblers pick insects off the new plantings. John’s biggest buzz is to “see birds nesting in trees we’ve planted.” The public are back, too. “So many more people use and enjoy the creek now,” says Mellsop. “That’s one of the big rewards for me. Now, they have a sense of ownership. That comes from being involved in the planting and the weed control.” Streamside, mums with baby buggies watch teenagers whoop and shriek in the chill pool under the waterfall. Further down, a man sits and watches the stream burble by. Oakley Creek, then, is keeping people and nature in touch, and has become a focus for a renewed community Wendy John and Helen Mellsop of Friends of Oakley Creek, beside central spirit. Local schoolkids grow plants for the Friends, Auckland’s only significant waterfall. and take regular water quality checks. Residents at nearby Buchanan Rehabilitation mental health centre help out in the Friends’ nursery, and along the creek. Scout Venturers help out with pest control and monitoring, and corporates send their staff along on community volunteer days. Christian environment group, A Rocha, lends a hand, as does the local early childhood centre and the Wai Care water action programme. Auckland Council is a long-time supporter, as is WWF-New Zealand, which helps fund John in her role as part-time project manager. “The Friends are supporting our vision of reconnecting people with nature,” says the NGO’s Terrestrial Conservation Manager, Marc Slade, “and they’re highlighting the importance of urban biodiversity, both for its implicit environmental benefits, and for its value as an urban green corridor.” Back when there was an Auckland Regional Council, it bestowed a Sustainable Urban Communities Environmental Award, in 2007, on the Friends of Oakley Creek. In 2011, they won an Auckland Council Wai Care Award. We stand in the dappled shade, watching a school of inanga writhe upstream, and John beams with the sheer naturalness of it all: “Everything starts with small beginnings, I suppose.”
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OAKLEY CREEK/TE AUAUNGA RESTORATION PROJECT Oakley Creek is keeping people and nature in touch. Once hidden by a tangled thicket of weeds, the 15km creek is now bordered by 30,000 native trees lovingly replanted by hundreds of community volunteers. Weeding, rubbish clean-ups, bird counting and trapping for rats, mice and possums have all played a role in recreating a lost habitat where fantails and tui now flourish. Photo: Wendy John, Co-founder of the friends of Oakley Creek Community Group relaxes in her urban oasis right in the heart of Auckland.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
FRIENDS INDEED -
RETURN OF THE KOKAKO
EAST TARANAKI ENVIRONMENT TRUST By Rosa Argent, WWF-New Zealand, Communications Manager “See here, this totara has been absolutely hammered by possums”, explains DOC Biodiversity Manager Darren Peters as we pause half way along a narrow forested ridge. “But that ends now,” he says, deftly screwing a lightweight piece of plastic to the side of the dying tree. The totara’s would-be saviour is a deceptively benign looking but lethal trap. It works by killing possums instantly with a blow to the head from a Co2 fired piston; the animal falls to the ground and the trap then neatly resets ready to deliver another fatal blow. And another. By minimising the need for people to check and reset the traps regularly, this new technology could revolutionise the way we conserve our precious native wildlife and their forest homes. My WWF colleague Marc, Terrestrial Conservation Manager, and I have travelled from Wellington, in Darren’s DOC truck, to a remote area of native bush about 50 mins drive east from Inglewood in Taranaki. The 5000 hectares of private and publicly owned land is managed by the East Taranaki Environment Trust, a community-led group that is blazing a trail for conservation. Once in the bush we can clearly see that it’s not just the once proud podocarps taking a hammering from introduced pests. Many native bird populations have one by one disappeared from this forest over the years. The roll call of the missing is depressing: Hihi. Bellbird. Saddleback. The haunting melody of the kokako was last heard here over two decades ago. So we are here – armed with more than 200 automatic traps - at the start of a mission to reclaim this patch of forest from the invaders and to ultimately bring back the kokako.
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© Taranaki Daily News / Cameron Burnell
Karen and Bob Schumacher, cattle farmers and founders of the East Taranaki Environment Trust, work tirelessly to “give something back” to the area they love. Their success in restoring the health of the local forest ecosystem the Trust purchased ten years ago is evident with the number of breeding pairs of North Island brown kiwi reaching 500.
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WWF HAS SUPPORTED THE EAST TARANAKI ENVIRONMENT TRUST TO HELP PROTECT NORTH ISLAND BROWN KIWI ON PRIVATE LAND IN TARANAKI. IN 2011 WWF SUPPORTED THE TRIAL OF AUTOMATIC, HUMANE POSSUM TRAPS. THESE TRAPS AND OTHER NEW TECHNOLOGIES HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO REVOLUTIONISE CONSERVATION IN NEW ZEALAND. IF THIS TRIAL IS SUCCESSFUL IT WILL RESULT IN THE REINTRODUCTION OF KOKAKO AND IS A GREAT EXAMPLE OF A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN FARMERS, LANDOWNERS, DOC AND THE REGIONAL COUNCIL.
Forests under attack “Hammered”, “armed”. The language of conservation is tough because our forests are under attack. Each night, as the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment’s report into the toxin 1080 reveals, 30 million possums are munching their way through our native trees and the nests of birds such as kereru and kokako. They have even been known to kill fledgling harrier hawks and fantails. The solution to the invasion of possums, stoats and rats has traditionally been poisoning (either by ground setting or aerial drops of bait) or labour intensive trapping. Most of these traps have barely changed over the last hundred years. What is needed is new, more efficient and cost effective ways to bring pest populations under control, or better yet, eradicate them entirely. The automatic trap we are trialling in East Taranaki offers hope. The non-toxic trap is the brainchild of three Victoria University industrial design graduates, who went on to form Wellington company Goodnature. Designed to avoid the accidental killing of native birds or other animals, they lure possums in with a sweet cinnamon scent and kill up to 12 animals before needing to be reset. Death is instant. It’s the only possum trap to meet the National Animal Welfare Advisory Board Committee’s A class humane standards. Conservation army Karen Schumacher, founder of the East Taranaki Environment Trust, has worked her coordination magic and about a dozen conservationists from DOC, the Taranaki Regional Council plus other skilled volunteers have gathered in the tiny settlement of Purangi to help set out all 218 traps in just one day. WWF, in partnership with The Tindall Foundation, has provided an initial $20,000 towards the purchase of these traps. We are split into three teams and after an early morning briefing are sent off to lay traps along different lines in the 277 hectare block identified for the trial. It is raining lightly. Marc and I are on Darren’s team, whose many years experience of pest control work more than makes up for our lack of bush skills. We walk our perimeter line stopping every 50 metres to screw the base of a trap to the tree, about a metre above the ground. The components are then easily clicked on. Traps are spaced twice as far apart on the internal lines. Marc’s role is to daub fera feed 219 or ‘smurf poo’ along the way – a sickly smelling blue goo that lures the possums in. The labour is over by 3.30pm, when all teams assemble at a central hut having successfully finished their set up. Ground poison operations will be conducted in an adjacent block to compare the results. The trial will be monitored and possum levels need to get to scientifically acceptable low levels over two consecutive years before kokako can be released in the forested area. Conservation is not an easy job; in rugged New Zealand terrain it requires a lot of leg work. Abandon any romantic notions about conservation being glamorous – it’s physical but also sociable and rewarding.
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Karen puts people at the heart of her success: “It’s all about building relationships… We sit down and talk with local farmers and landowners over a cuppa. We always make sure that the people who volunteer for us are well looked after”. They throw thank you lunches for volunteers every year. Whether it’s her culinary skills, or background in financial accounting, Karen’s approach is certainly working. Cattle farmers from near Inglewood, Karen and husband Bob now devote all of their days – along with a huge amount of energy and their own money – to looking after the forest. Karen says their decision to purchase land a decade ago was due to a desire to “give something back” to the area. It’s a model that Marc Slade, hopes can be replicated across the nation. “Karen and Bob are a great example of how communities band together to save our wildlife and forests. While we hope kokako will one day sing again in East Taranaki, we are also excited to be backing new innovative pest control techniques that could benefit conservation efforts nationwide.” © WWF / M Slade
East Taranaki Environment Trust success The Trust has made some great strides in restoring the health of the ecosystem since it was established in 2002. The area now boosts an impressive 500 breeding pairs of western North Island brown kiwi. Kereru and robin have returned. And so do the volunteers, time and again, to check the lines, record the dead possums, count the kiwi calls and on this occasion, help set up the trial. At the end of our day in the bush, we experience an exhilarating ride out on quad bikes. There’s a chill in air but nothing can dampen our spirits. Karen has laid on hot vegetable soup for the crew and soon has a BBQ on the go. Tea is brewing. Talk turns to other trips into the bush, ill fated helicopter rides and the damage wild goats can do to the forests. Karen later tells me she is delighted with the day’s events: “It was awesome. I’m thrilled by how easy the whole thing was and how quickly the teams worked.’ Laying cyanide over the same area would have taken four days and a poison licence. Rosa Argent setting a trap
A local landowner once said the Trust could claim success for their save the kiwi project when the national symbol became so abundant they ended up as local road kill. “Well, a kiwi was killed on the road last November”, she says with a touch of sadness. The beautiful song of the kokako reverberating through the forest will be a happier indicator of success. And after spending time with Karen, Bob and the team I am left with a sense of optimism that this community-led group - when armed with innovative technologies, determination, and a nice hot cuppa - will win the battle for our forest in East Taranaki.
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© WWF / Dave Hansford
Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust covenants officer Brooke Turner in her element: “People need to be given time to decide just what it is they want for their property.”
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LINKING LANDSCAPES -
It’s mid-summer, and this bush is ringing with the strident love songs of a million cicadas. It’s so loud the tui can’t make themselves heard. Out there somewhere, it’s 24 degrees: in By Dave Hansford here, it’s cool, and very good for the soul. Verdant mosses and ferns glisten with gin-clear droplets carelessly flung by a tumbling waterfall, and fantails twist in and out of laser beams of sunlight.
BANKS PENINSULA CONSERVATION TRUST
Brooke Turner doesn’t hide her delight – this is her natural habitat too. A wetland ecologist by training, the bright, effusive Australian is now a covenants officer with the Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust, and this is why she goes to work every day. “Sorry if I talk too much,” she says. “My Mum and Dad always used to call me babbling Brooke.” But this idyllic dell, at the Peninsula’s Western Valley, is worth every word. The paradisal scene only goes to show, she says, the depth and diversity of the Peninsula’s natural values, and why they’re so worth protecting. Barring some catastrophic storm, these trees will only fall when they’re good and ready. That’s because they’re now protected by a covenant, a pledge on the part of landowners Annelies and Kees Pekelharing along with their 4 adjoining neighbours, that rules out clearance or development, even if they were to sell. Together with a covenant in the next valley, it will butt up to two Department of Conservation reserves, a virtuous pincer movement that will protect more than 700 hectares of land. They’re another two pieces added to a jigsaw: and the image that’s forming is of a greener Banks Peninsula, where natural, cultural and social values are being preserved, not by legislation, or Government agencies, but by landowners themselves. About a decade ago, the then Banks Peninsula District Council unveiled a draft district plan which resolved to protect nearly half the area’s rural landscapes. Many locals rebelled: they saw the plan as too prescriptive, too dictatorial. In 2001, a handful of them came up instead with idea of the Trust; born from a desire to see things done differently. No bylaws, no coercion. Just landowners taking responsibility for the nature on their properties in their own way. And today, they are. “It’s a huge undertaking,” says Vicky Parr. She and partner Chris run a hill country farm in Kaituna Valley. In 2008, they signed a covenant on 7.8 hectares of their land. Now, the pair mean to covenant another 330 ha, which is a big commitment when that land has stock on it. “You have to find a way to fund it without it biting into your income,” says Parr. Turner doesn’t pressure landowners to sign up: her job only begins once they’ve decided for themselves to do it. “The covenant is the founding document,” explains
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Turner. “I like to describe it to landowners as their own private reserve – the land is bound to the title, and to be managed only for conservation values. That means no stock, no grazing. “Then I go out and find the money and resources we need. After that, we get an ecologist out to the site to do a survey, and then we write a management plan, which gives everyday, practical advice to the landowner on how to manage it for the next five years.”
WWF has long supported the Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust (BPCT), an innovative organisation promoting conservation across the whole of the Banks Peninsula. The Trust was set up by the local landowners and residents, as a grassroots response to Council imposed conditions on land-use. WWF has recently supported BPCT to set up the Kakanui Maori Reserve – a first in New Zealand – a reserve that encompasses Maori values and protects natural values. This project demonstrates a whole landscape conservation approach, and it is a great example of a genuine partnership driven by community and landowners, working with Maori to exercise kaitiakitanga of an important local taonga.
If they wish, Turner puts new covenanters in touch with other landowners – mentors who lend advice and practical support. Turner’s easy style offers a less-daunting alternative to what some perceive as bureaucracies: “Originally, we looked at selling the land to DOC or the council,” says Parr, “but no-one wanted it, so we did it ourselves.” The Trust is interested in practically any property, so long as it’s on the Peninsula. And while, ecologically, it refers to a landmark biodiversity survey of the area in the eighties and nineties by Hugh Wilson, Turner says there’s no agenda in terms of pursuing representative sites. She’s more interested in seeing isolated bush remnants linked back together into functioning networks and corridors, as they are at Western Valley. Landowners are increasingly buying into that vision. In the last five years, 48 of them have covenanted a total of some 440 ha. Turner has another 10 covenants on the books, a further 20 landowners interested in the idea. One of them is the hapu and whanau of Koukourārata, or Port Levy. This gentle bay was historically a seat of Ngai Tahu culture and commerce. Behind today’s marae, nearly 90 ha of scrub and hill pasture – in mixed ownership – rise steeply. Wilson gave this block one of his highest biodiversity rankings, and, in gullies still cloaked with remnant forest, lie venerated wahi tapu sites. “This was once a tohunga training ground,” says Peter Ramsden, Te Runanga o Koukourarata project manager. “There’s a lot up there that’s precious.” He’s leading the effort to secure the property under a BPCT covenant – a “super-scary” undertaking, given that it has some 2000 landowners. He chose the Trust because, he says, it represented “the right mechanism.” From the beginning, he was adamant that “if the whanau’s interests weren’t protected, I didn’t want a bar of it.” To that end, the proposed covenant carries a 25- year review. “As kaitiaki,” says Ramsden, “we don’t want to lock out future generations.” No problem, says Turner. “People need to be given time to decide just what it is they want for their property.” That no-pressure approach to conservation is something WWF-New Zealand appreciates too. The conservation NGO has supported the Trust for several years, says Terrestrial Conservation Manager, Marc Slade, because it recognises the critical role of landowners in protecting values outside the public estate. The Koukourārata project, in particular, he says, represents an exciting new direction. “We heartily endorse the Trust's support of tangata whenua – in partnership with communities – to exercise kaitiakitanga of their local taonga.” Nature has a special resilience on the Peninsula, says Turner. By the end of the 20th century, it had lost 99 per cent of its forest. Today, some 15 per cent of it is recloaked in native vegetation. And while some of it has been re-planted, most simply regenerated after stock were fenced out and browsing pests removed. “It comes back if it’s given an opportunity,” says Turner. “It’s about giving it a hand.”
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© WWF / Dave Hansford
The hills behind Koukourārata, or Port Levy, scene of a new direction for conservation on Māori land. “There’s a lot up there that’s precious,” says covenant co-ordinator Peter Ramsden.
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MENDING WAIKAWAU MOEHAU ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP
By Dave Hansford
Waikawau Bay, almost at the end of the Coromandel Peninsula, might still be nestled in the fifties. For one thing, this gleaming white stretch of sand still hasn’t been concreted over. For another, lying behind the dunes is a comparatively healthy wetland – a rare thing in this day and age. It’s healthy largely thanks to the efforts of the Moehau Environment Group, an alliance of like minds trapping pests, pulling weeds, planting native trees and generally watching over the surviving natural assets of the northern Coromandel.
WWF-New Zealand has supported the Moehau Environment Group (MEG) over a number of years. WWF has recently funded the Waikawau Wetlands project, a project to restore this valuable coastal habitat - home to a wide range of rare and threatened species. MEG is working closely with DOC to provide a 13,500 hectare buffer zone between the important Moehau Ecological Area and the rest of the peninsula. This approach illustrates the effectiveness of working across a whole landscape, and demonstrates how communities, working with DOC and Councils, have a vital role to play in protecting and restoring our indigenous biodiversity.
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Wayne Todd is showing me round the bay, explaining as we walk that this wetland is a stronghold for a number of native birds – fernbird, bittern, banded rail – either missing or sadly depleted anywhere else. That’s because he and partner Kathi Parr have been trapping predatory pests here for the last six years. “As a consequence,” he says, “we’re getting incredible increases in birdlife in the estuary.” The most spectacular comeback has been staged by the brown teal, or pateke, an endearing little native duck that once thrived across the country. In 2002, there were perhaps 20 left on the peninsula. In 2007, a handful made their way to Waikawau, and Todd can’t help skiting: “As of last March, the count here was 146.” But a healthy wetland is more than just birds. Todd and Parr are looking out for the crawling, slithering things here too: crabs, cockroaches, cockles, skinks and geckos. Mice might seem harmless enough, but they take a heavy toll on the smaller residents of a wetland, and rats are notorious predators. So the pair invented special rodent traps, set high on posts, that don’t get swept away or filled with mud in a flood. As we wade through a swath of ribbonwood, Parr explains that rodents are, in some ways, more pestilent even than the murderous stoats. “Our work on the peninsula has shown that you can knock stoat numbers down to acceptable levels and hold them there, but rats and mice are back to full strength within six months.” Another down-home invention tells them when they’re winning the war: a network of monitoring stations – which is a grand term for a bit of closed-cell foam tied round a tree. Insects and lizards are always on the lookout for ideal habitat, and these “tree wraps” are prime real estate. If they find plenty of residents in them, Todd and Parr know they’re keeping pests under control. Possibly their toughest adversary, though, has no claws, no teeth. Paspalum vaginatum – saltwater paspalum – was introduced to New Zealand from the southern United States as golf course turf, thanks to a peculiar property. All a greenkeeper has to do to keep it free of weeds is spray it with salt water. The weeds soon wither, but P vaginatum thrives in salty conditions – it was genetically destined to become a wetland weed, and it’s loving Waikawau to death.
Stories of the People, Stories of the Land
Parr points out the green swathe swarming the shellbanks, altering and impeding the flow of water, and offering shelter to pests. The pair run measuring plots which reveal the weed is spreading by up to 1.2m a year. “The estuary itself is only 400 metres wide,” she says, “In 50 years, you’ve lost most of your estuary.” She and Todd have set up trial plots on the shore, where they’re testing different control options – alone, and in various combinations – to find a foil for the paspalum, which is ousting native plants such as sea primrose, selliera and native rushes. What’s more, thick beds of the weed trap silt, raising the shellbank level. “The mangroves like that,” says Todd, “so in the last five years, we’ve seen a lot of them begin to establish.” And that’s a whole other dilemma: mangroves are a native plant, and make a great nursery for baby fish. They’ve always grown at the back of Waikawau, but just how this new spread might alter the dynamics of the wetland, nobody’s sure. “This is where it gets really tricky,” says Todd, “when you start fiddling with the balance of nature.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
“We have a suspicion that the ground temperature is increasing. That means the paspalum, which likes a warmer climate, will expand at a greater rate. That in turn means it’ll accelerate the seeding of mangroves – as the place gets warmer, every seed will become viable.” Climate change, then, is just one curve ball coming at the Moehau Environment Group. The recession is another. Defending this wetland takes more than hard slog: it needs money, and the downturn has hit community conservation groups hard. So when they’re not pulling weeds, or emptying traps, or checking monitoring stations, or organising volunteers, the pair chase vital funding. As the scale of the project has broadened, so has its costs. “In 1995,” recalls Todd, “it was a major celebration when we got $500. Nowadays, I’d be disappointed if we didn’t get $5000.” In 2008, WWF-New Zealand, in partnership with The Tindall Foundation, stumped up for baseline surveys Kathi Parr and Wayne Todd inspect a tree wrap, designed to provide a and educational material to support the project. Last home for, and information about, invertebrate life in Waikawau wetland. year, it put up more money for predator and weed control, and planting of native species. Terrestrial Conservation Manager Marc Slade points out that New Zealand has already lost 90 per cent of its wetlands, and there's very little legal protection for the fraction that remains. “Even those are still under threat from invasive plants and animals, and from upstream land-use practices that impact on wetland ecosystems.” Slade says community and iwi restoration groups play a crucial part in giving the remnants of our biodiversity “a fighting chance of survival. We believe they need greater support and recognition for their work, so we're proud to be able to provide this investment.” And investment is the right word. Wayne Todd points down into the glittering stream mouth: “When I first came here in 1983, I remember the estuary mouth was absolutely dead. Now it’s wonderful; we get mullet, flounder and great schools of trevalli coming in, and we're getting heaps of parore. Sometimes, you can see them feeding along the edges of the estuary half out of the water.”Among the tide wrack, the clear footprints of a foraging kiwi. Nature has a way of repaying a kindness.
Stories of the People, Stories of the Land
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MENDING WAIKAWAU MOEHAU ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP New Zealand has lost 90 per cent of its wetlands, and there is very little legal protection for the fraction that remains. The Moehau Environment Group has restored the Waikawau Bay wetlands to a relatively healthy state again, an alliance of like minds trapping pests, pulling weeds, planting native trees and watching over the natural assets of the northern Coromandel. Photo: Community conservationists Wayne Todd and Kathi Parr measure the growth of Paspalum vaginatum, a virulent introduced weed, at Waikawau wetland, on the north-east coast of Coromandel Peninsula.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
A HEALING TOUCH -
HANNAH’S BAY COMMUNITY RESTORATION TRUST
By Dave Hansford
When she was five, Denise LaGrouw used to donate her pocket money to World Vision, “because I didn’t think it was fair those kids had nothing to eat.” That congenital sense of social justice gets piqued every time she looks around her native Rotorua and sees disaffected, disillusioned kids, isolated, fragmented communities and lives at real risk. But she’s helping to change all that, one mind, one connection, at a time.
WWF supports Hannah’s Bay Community Restoration Trust in Rotorua, a successful urban restoration project that combines sustainable living through permaculture and food production with ecological restoration of a local wetland. The project also demonstrates how conservation projects can achieve results that go beyond the environment. This project is as much about restoring community cohesion and building local skills as it is about restoring ecosystems; it’s an inspirational project that recognises the holistic nature of our relationship with nature.
LaGrouw believes that much of what ails society can be healed by Nature. That much of what was forgotten can be remembered, re-learnt. “Empowerment, commitment, respect… those basic principles that we learn as kids, or should do ... we try to apply in all of our dealings.” By “our”, she means the Hannah’s Bay Community Restoration Trust, a group she founded a decade ago. It all started when she and some friends began planting native trees in the local reserve. Most passers-by did just that, but some stopped, and LaGrouw started a conversation that’s still going: about giving at-risk kids another perspective, about re-kindling kaitiakitanga, about teaching people how to feed themselves again. Here on the Ohinemutu shore, beside the Utuhina Stream, courgettes are erupting out of old tyres filled with compost. Raised beds cradle corn, silverbeet, carrots and kumara. LaGrouw can’t believe how well they’re doing, given that nobody that planted them would call themselves a gardener. “I grew up with all this,” recalls Tuhipo Kereopa, who lives just across the road, “but we have to re-learn it.” Too often, says Kereopa, her people simply stop by the supermarket or the nearest fast-food joint. “They think this is too hard.” But she reminds them that Māori were always gardeners. Youth at risk – gang prospects, teenagers struggling with drug and alcohol addiction – come here and learn to care about something, anything, again. “I tell them that if they can grow dope, they can do this.” The transformation, she says, can be remarkable. “To see the care they put into nurturing these plants... you’d never believe it.” She’s quick to credit LaGrouw. Her encouragement, her energy, her nouse, she says, got people to their feet and digging. That’s very much LaGrouw’s style. People often introduce her, not by her official title of Sustainability Educator, but “mentor”. The Restoration Trust has no prescription. “You achieve so much more if you support a community’s natural processes, rather than trying to dictate the order of events.” So when someone comes to her with an idea, she backs them all the way: shows them how to set up a group, how to get funding, where to get materials from. “It’s about waking up the community – harnessing that energy,” she says. “While it’s flowing, our job is to keep it flowing.
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“Here in Rotorua,” she says, “the two biggest sustainability issues ... are our youth at risk, and our water quality. So the obvious way forward is to try and weave outcomes for those together.” Ohinemutu, then, might be textbook LaGrouw. With the gardens up and running, people are thinking now about restoring the lake shore around the marae. Already, Rotorua Primary schoolkids have planted rushes, donated by the district council, at the mouth of the Utuhina, and the council came down and lopped some willows.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
Volunteers from the Utuhina Manaaki Trust, which runs a drug and alcohol unit, and the Community Max skills and training programme pitched in. Just off shore, a floating wetland – an island made from recycled plastic drink bottles – represents the start they’ve made on water quality. Aboard it, rushes and grasses trail roots into the lake, removing nitrogen and other pollution. It’s the sort of flax roots, community-building approach that WWF-New Zealand likes to back. The conservation organisation has funded LaGrouw for the last two years to run community workshops, where she shows people how a healthy environment can nurture a healthy society, and vice-versa. WWF's Terrestrial Programmes Manager, Marc Slade, says research has proven that: “Supporting community-led conservation groups isn't just good for nature, it's good for economic and social wellbeing. A healthy ecosystem sustains us all.” Not everybody gets the concept straight away: a few years ago, LaGrouw took an organic stall and wetlands display into a Rotorua health expo, “and I got absolute crap for it, because they couldn’t see how that connected to social anything. Now everybody wants it. I’m not saying I did that on my own, but it shows that shift in our community, and to me, that’s magic.” Denise LaGrouw of the Hannah’s Bay Restoration Trust, and Tuhipo Kereopa of the Ohinemotu Women’s Health League at a community garden near Rotorua. Kereopa has involved local primary schools, and at-risk youth in establishing and running the garden. “It’s about teaching people to feed themselves,” she says.
In October, Zonta - an organisation that advances the status of women worldwide - saw the connection, and celebrated it, presenting her with a women’s achievement award for sustainable development.
Meanwhile, there’s the beekeeping workshops to get going, the water quality testing programme and organic growing workshops for the local schoolkids, and the school mentoring programmme, some willow stumps to get rid of at the Hannah’s Bay planting, the Sir Peter Blake youth leadership project, or giving Ngakuru School a hand with their pest trapping programme, working with the Challenge Trust, the Rotorua Newcomers Network, IHC, Steiner community, Rotorua youth centre, the environmental action mobile unit. It’s all proof positive of LaGrouw’s belief that “if you offer the community what they want, they’ll come. “It’s about trying to bring that peace back into people’s lives. The sharing of doing it together, and the relationships that come out of it – that reopening of the heart. You can only love what you know, and you will only protect what you love.”
Stories of the People, Stories of the Land
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HANNAH’S BAY COMMUNITY RESTORATION TRUST Rotorua’s two biggest sustainablity issues, according to Denise LaGrouw, “are our youth at risk and our water quality. So the obvious way forward is to try and weave outcomes for those together.” The success of this twin approach is visible on the Ohinemutu shore, beside the Utuhina Stream, where an abundance of vegetables - courgettes, corn, silverbeet, carrots and kumara - are erupting from the earth. They have not been planted by gardeners, but by at risk youth, who often experience a personal transformation as the natural one blossoms in front of them. Photo: Denise LaGrouw of the Hannah’s Bay Restoration Trust, plants heritage spuds with her son William in a community garden on the Rotorua lakeshore.
© WWF / Dave Hansford
A HEALING TOUCH -
STORIES OF THE PEOPLE, STORIES OF THE LAND
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