Environment – Nurturing nature

As the year end approaches many of us look back over the past 12 months and recall the events which characterised the year. It’s been another eventful one for Shakespear Regional Park. 

Weather-wise we had cyclone Gabrielle and the floods. Together they scoured the vegetation, stripping leaves from the trees, flooding the lower parts of the park and washing away part of the sand dunes at Te Haruhi Bay. There were some adverse impacts on the plants and animals, but most are now well on the road to recovery. 

Sadly, the late October storms once again caused erosion of the Te Haruhi dunes and several dotterel/tūturiwhatu nests were lost. But dunes are a very dynamic landform and it’s quite likely that new sand will be deposited, and the dunes will slowly rebuild. Dotterels are also resilient, and some new nests were underway only about a week after the losses.

It appears that the stoats are no longer present inside the predator fence which should mean better survival and more offspring from our nesting birds. Saddleback/tīeke had been knocked back by the stoats, but they seem to be recovering quite well. Unfortunately for visitors, most of the current population is living in the defence land but, if you listen carefully, you can still hear their noisy chatter, especially in the gully running along the fence from the vehicle entrance gate down to Okoromai. 

Robins/toutouwai have had a good year and there have been more nesting pairs this season than previously recorded. The cryptic fernbirds/mātātā can also be heard widely around the park. Listen for their ‘chink-chink’ calls which sound like two stones being tapped together. A pair is nesting just inside the Waterfall Gully entrance.

The weather wasn’t kind during this year’s planting days, but many visitors still pitched in to struggle through the mud and get the trees into the ground. Thanks are due to the volunteers who work all year to get thousands of plants ready for the days. The planting programme is perhaps the most important element in restoring the park’s biodiversity. It takes decades to grow a new forest, but the effort is surely worth it.

Another major milestone has just been reached with the opening of the new workshops after six years in temporary accommodation (HM November 13).

Ngāti Manuhiri gifted us a name for the building, Hau Taiao, ‘the breath of the environment’. This reflects the role the building plays to sustain our ranger and volunteer team, to nurture the whenua/land and the taonga/treasures it supports, as well as the visitors we host.

That seems an appropriate thought to take with us into the coming year.