A crossing, Colenso and conservation
The Battle for our Birds is the Department of Conservation’s epic predator-eradicating project. Carly Thomas re-traced a historical Ruahine track to see the project in action and to reflect on how times have changed.
The first river crossing sends a snake of cold from my toes up to my head. There is always an instinctive hesitation before having to get your boots wet and there is no going back once you have.
By the fifth time across the Makaroro River, my legs are numb, but it doesn’t matter. I am in a beautiful spot, I have good company and we have a mission to get on with. It’s a tiny one compared with that of a man who passed this way in 1847. We are trying to find a monument with William Colenso’s name on it. And his mission? Well, he was trying to make the unknown, known.
Colenso was a botanist, maverick explorer and, in his work as a missionary, a colourful character. He traversed the Ruahines northeast of Palmerston North, collecting native plants and recorded his findings as he went. With him were two Ma¯ ori guides and before him, uncharted and wild territory.
The river that I am zig-zagging my way up probably looks the same as when Colenso and his men passed this way. A stand of native bush lets my thoughts take a step back in time, but the things that are not there leave a silent hole.
Birds. There are hardly any birds. Brown kiwi, whio, ka¯ ka¯ , parakeet, whitehead, ka¯ rearea, kereru, pipit, North Island robin and rifleman were all noted in Colenso’s journal of his crossing. The soundtrack of his time was full of birdsong. The things I hear now, when I stop and listen, are the flow of water, the lone crash of a heavy kereru and not much else.
When Colenso passed through this way in 1847, he had entered at Mo¯ kai Pa¯ tea. He encountered wind that was so great he ‘‘could scarcely stagger against it’’, as well as thick fogs, steep ascents, concealed 40-metre drops and swollen rivers. What he didn’t encounter was possums, hedgehogs, stoats, ferrets or red deer.
The introduced animals, we now know, were one of the early settlers’ greatest mistakes, an entirely faulty legacy. Possums have destroyed large areas of the forest canopy – hedgehogs, stoats and ferrets eat bird eggs and chicks, and deer feed on forest plants, trees and seedlings – changing the composition of the forest understorey. Many of our native birds – birds that Colenso would have seen, heard and noted – have become extinct from the Ruahines. Others, like the whio, are critically threatened.
Doing nothing in this stretch of wild terrain is not an option for the Department of Conservation (DOC). It has a plan and it’s an ambitious one. Battle for our Birds is part of its Predator Free 2050 project and here in the Ruahines, it has begun.
The woman whose long legs I am following fills me in as we walk against the flow of water. Janet Wilson is a conservation stalwart. She is the Ruahine Whio Protection Trust chairwoman and the first person I thought of when I concocted this plan to find Colenso’s hidden-away monument. She rang the right people, got permission to get us on to this river and she was the one to decipher a wonderfully cryptic map drawn by hand. ‘‘Any excuse to get out into the hills,’’ she tells me as she takes one stride to my two.
‘‘So autumn is the bad time for predators. They feed on the beech seed. A pre-feed has been dropped already and when there is a window of good weather, a 1080 drop will happen.’’
The pre-feed is a non-toxic bait that entices the predators to eat the 1080, a pesticide that uses sodium fluoroacetate. It’s a controversial method, with opponents saying it is cruel and that it kills more than just pests. There have been threats made against Manawatu DOC staff and Wilson says 1080 isn’t perfect, ‘‘but something drastic needs to be done’’.
We stop off at a predator trap on a pest control line that was laid down two months ago. Inside is a surprise and a smelly, in-your-face reminder of the predicament New Zealand’s native birdlife is in. A ferret, the first that Wilson, a seasoned trapper, has ever found, has squeezed itself into the trap.
She takes a photo, not for her Facebook page, but for DOC records. It’s a happy, but equally sad moment. How much damage did this lone ferret do before it was stopped?
We troop up the river for a few more crossings, a faint whiff of ferret tagging along. Wilson stops. We backtrack to a bit of the river that looked like the last bit of river and she says, ‘‘ah, yes, I thought so’’. I don’t see it and then I do, an old-school DOC sign, one of the green and yellow wooden ones, stands back from the river. Colenso’s Spur: A sign and a track and a moment of silence as our minds drift to that 19th century renegade.
‘‘Colenso must have felt a bit tired of walking up the river at about here,’’ says Wilson. ‘‘He came to that confluence there and went ‘hmmm’.’’
We haul ourselves off the river and on to the track. It goes straight up fast and we spend a few minutes wondering how on earth Colenso and his men did this with all their gear.
Colenso came from the other way, approaching the Ruahine Range from Matuku, not far from Taihape. They crossed the Rangitı¯kei River and followed the lower slopes of the ranges without tracks. They then worked their way up, according to Colenso’s journal, ‘‘scrambling and crawling on all-fours up a nasty narrow stony and steep mountain watercourse full of obstructions – uprooted trees and shrubs lying across it brought down by the winter torrents, slippery stones, deep pools’’.
We stop wondering out loud about what kind of footwear they had, what they ate and how much they carried, because talking is hard when you are pulling yourself upwards.
Colenso’s monument is in front of us. It is made of rough stone and is suitably attired in moss. He deserves this, I think. I am walking the tiniest part of an epic journey with the smallest pack and the promise of chocolate cake at the top. Colenso encountered a forest so thick with rotting trunks that sometimes he would, he rocorded, ‘‘sink down so far – crashing through the fallen rotten timber and yet without touching the earth’’.
I am jealous, however, that he may very well have seen and heard ka¯ ka¯ po¯ , huia, ko¯ kako, and piopio. The $21.3 million the Government is putting into this national operation seems like a drop in the ocean when weighed up against what has already been lost.
We reach what we decide is the top and I eat my chocolate cake and spot an old machete-made arrow cut into a tree. Wilson tells me some recent good news on her conservation quest. Kiwi have been found in the upper reaches of the river we have just walked up and acoustic recorders have been put in place to monitor them. Whio have also been spotted in the river and the water quality is pristine.
It’s a huge mission and being predator-free by 2050 seems like an unachievable goal, but then again Colenso survived a treacherous crossing by drinking water squeezed from moss and eating the tips off cabbage trees – so maybe, just maybe it is possible.
I follow Wilson back down the way we came and, pushing Colenso to one side for a moment, I appreciate what this woman does, too. She is one person in a vast expanse of rugged terrain, but she cares deeply about her environment.
The way home seems easier now that our crossings go with the downward flow of the river. The beauty of this place gets no less dramatic the more time you spend in its domain and we arrive happy and tired back at the car.
A threat hangs over our wildlife. If Colenso’s time was a time of discovery, then our time needs to be one of discovering how not to lose the battle for our birds.