Is this New Zealand’s worst summer holiday job?

If you have a spare 2640 hours to volunteer in a hut on an uninhabited Auckland island this summer then the hihi bird needs you.

That’s the pitch of the Department of Conservation role for a volunteer to work 110 days on Tiritiri Matangi Island. The task involves protecting the threatened hihi during its breeding season.

The unpaid work is broken into 11 stints of 10 days. The job description specifies: “Ideally you will be able to commit to all of the below stints as it takes time to build skills and you will gain much more from the experience.”

The successful applicant will have to provide their own food, and live in a bunkhouse sharing kitchen and bathroom facilities with the public.

They will need their own sleeping bag, pillow slip, binoculars, and hiking gear suited to “hot weather, cold weather, wind, rain, and mud”.

One perk is free ferry travel to and from the island. Dr John Ewen has managed the DoC hihi conservation project on Tiri since 2007 and says, “I absolutely recognise it’s a massive commitment for somebody.”

In the 2017/18 financial year DoC used 16,737 volunteers.

Auckland University Associate Professor of ecology Bruce Burns says the “ideal” stint of 110 days volunteer work is “significantly larger than what people are doing elsewhere”. He did however understand the context for such a position.

“A long-term chronic underfunding of DoC has been going on for a long time.”

Volunteering Auckland GM Cheryll Martin said the crucial word of “ideally” in the position expectations meant it was not necessarily exploitative.

Ewen acknowledged the demands of the role, but stressed they should be viewed in light of the rewards.

“The positives of it are big, not only for hihi but for those people who do commit the time.”