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This month sees the end of a short, but extremely successful era for kiwi conservation group The Forest Bridge Trust, when five years of government Jobs for Nature funding via Save the Kiwi comes to an end.
The trust was founded 10 years ago by Glorit farmers Kevin and Gill Adshead with the dream of creating a vast predator-free land corridor, so kiwi and other native wildlife could spread from coast to coast.
It was a lofty goal, which many thought impossible, requiring as it did support from and collaboration with thousands of landowners and farmers willing to commit to trapping pests and other land improvements.
Unfazed and undeterred by the scale of the challenge, the Adsheads and a few supporters set to, taking on a strategist, talking to iwi, schools and community conservation groups, and providing support and education far and wide.
Steady progress ensued until five years ago, when the handful of staff and network of volunteers received an unprecedented boost – no less than $8.5 million from the government’s post-pandemic Jobs for Nature scheme.
TFBT chief executive Ana Christmas was one of the 20-plus appointments made possible by the windfall, which she says was elating and daunting for everyone in equal measure.
“It was quite incredible … one of those moments where it was like ‘Yay!’ and then ‘Oh my god …’,” she says. “But they pulled some really good people around them to help size up.”
Ecologists, predator controllers, fencing and planting experts, GIS and data experts were all taken on, but the biggest team was community liaison, which Christmas says was one of the most important aspects.
“We knew it was really important to inspire and engage community for this vision and mission, working with more than 44 community groups and volunteers to ensure that their work was acknowledged and supported.
“There are thousands of landowners across 130,000 hectares and the job needed to be done by everyone, and in a way that ensured we were all working together,” she says.
TBFT was suddenly able to organise and host many more community meetings, school visits and training sessions for pest trapping, planting, kiwi aversion for dogs, and fencing, all free of charge – and it worked.
Against all the odds, kiwi are now not only thriving on both coasts – in and around the Adsheads’ Glorit property and at Tawharanui – but also at Mount Tamahunga, where they’ve been introduced over three years. And they are spreading, with regular sightings outside their strongholds and at least two travelling more than a dozen kilometres west from Tamahunga to Kaipara.
In the past decade, TFBT has worked with more than 900 landowners, supplied 1047 properties with traps, educated nearly 900 school students, organised 117 events and workshops, put in almost 55km of fencing, planted 156,417 plants and trees, and trapped 114,566 pests.
But it seems all good things must come to an end, with the funding boost drying up at the end of June and any hopes of it being continued, even in part, by the present government completely dashed, as conservation budgets are slashed throughout the country.
“We knew we faced this fiscal cliff, but no one had any way of foretelling NZ would drop into such a deep recession and have such an austere government clearly doesn’t value the return on invest that conservation offers,” Christmas says.
The trust team has been frantically trying to source other funding streams, with many grant applications yet to be decided, but she hopes that between 15 and 18 paid roles can be maintained – which is at least twice as many as pre-Jobs for Nature.
“We’ve been working to diversify our revenue streams and, due to support from landowners and key partners, this has enabled us to move into the next chapter with a lot of strength and positivity; it’s certainly not the end of TFBT by any means,” Christmas says.
The trust has introduced a ‘fee for service’ model for traps and trapline maintenance, and has started offering spraying and toxin control for properties as well. There will also be fewer community hui and school visits.
Christmas says fee for service has been accepted really well by “our amazing community” and she urged more people to volunteer with local community conservation groups to help fill any gaps in the mahi and maintain the gains.
“The challenge for us at this stage is we’re without funding for a coordinator for our volunteers, so we’ve asked a lot of our volunteer groups to self-coordinate and we know that’s a big ask, but it’s important that there is self-sustainability with a lot of these projects,” she says.
“We’re all in agreement that we’re privileged to have had that $8.5 million investment, but we’ve been good caretakers of taxpayers money and over-delivered.
“Although we’ll be sad to farewell some of our team members, we are heading into a new chapter and there is excitement about that. We know the trust will continue to go from strength to strength.”
