Bring nature and people to red zone
Just before the deadline for submissions on red-zone options, Colin Meurk advocates for an eco-sanctuary.
Imagine Christchurch city teeming with nature, connecting with people. Imagine being able to take your kids for face-to-face meetings with critically endangered New Zealand wildlife after school. Imagine tui, ka¯ ka¯ and kereru playing among the trees in Hagley Park and your local neighbourhood. Imagine an ecosanctuary like Zealandia or Orokonui in the eastern suburbs, bringing vitality back to our ecocity.
This needn’t be a fantasy. New native habitats are being created every year throughout New Zealand, some predator-free, and this has led to most of our major cities having access to, and providing sanctuary for, scores of native and endemic species that then spread out across the wider landscape.
Almost all our major cities, that is, except Christchurch – the odd one out with no dedicated sanctuary.
Living in Christchurch you can go to our largest urban parks or the surrounding countryside and see an abundance of introduced birds.
Depending on where you live, and how deeply you have explored your city, native biodiversity in a natural setting is hard to come by around here.
School trips away from Christchurch to prime natural locations on Banks Peninsula or in the mountains are major, costly affairs, and the students might get lucky to see a handful of the more common native birds. We are all missing out and Christchurch needs to do much better, ecologically and socio-politically, if we are going to contribute to a predator-mammal-free country.
We need to give our children easily accessible experiences of our natural and cultural heritage so that our place and our history comes back to life, so we can once again identify with what makes us special.
New Zealand is considered a global biodiversity hot spot and yet many of us have never seen nor can name more than a dozen of the species that make us so unique!
That’s where the Avon-O¯ ta¯ karo red zone comes in.
We have the technology to build a predator proof fence around just 50ha of the red zone land and the existing 120ha of Travis Wetland, linked with a wildlife bridge. Such a safe haven will provide sanctuary for many of our charismatic, threatened birds, reptiles, fish, and insects.
Although green spots of ecological restoration are progressively appearing all around Canterbury, none of these provide our wildlife guaranteed safety from mammalian predators, particularly domestic cats. This means there are only so many species that can survive within these habitat patches; no groundforaging birds like the Nationally Critical orange-fronted parakeet/ ka¯ ka¯ riki karaka nor takahe¯ , and very few lizards like our endangered geckos.
These species and many more should once again rightfully be able to call Canterbury their home, and the people of Christchurch should rightfully be able to see examples of these rare and unique fauna that Aotearoa has to offer.
A fenced sanctuary is the only practicable way we can achieve this for the foreseeable future. It will provide safe breeding grounds for these rare native wildlife so that people can visit and experience primeval Aotearoa. From there, the birds and butterflies can disperse to inhabit the restoration patches around Canterbury that millions of hours of both paid and volunteer work have painstakingly created.
This will be the sweetly deserved payback for that dedication and the reward everyone can share – and particularly for school children of our province.
We can translocate those species that can’t get there by themselves. We can end up creating pockets of biodiversity throughout the region that not only benefit ecological and landscape function, but also the mental, physical, educational and cultural health of our people. And it can boost the economy of the region – when everyone discovers that they no longer need to leave their home town to show visitors what ka¯ ka¯ , tı¯eke or takahe¯ look like!
An eco-sanctuary would be free to local residents and complementary to many other red zone proposals. If required it can generate income with an education centre, cafe and the like, as seen at many other ecosanctuaries throughout the country. It would allow the community to be directly involved with the red zone restoration: breathing life back into the area in the richest and most meaningful way possible.
It’s time to stop imagining the possibilities of Christchurch becoming a world-class eco-city. The foundations of an ecosanctuary for Christchurch have been in place for over 20 years with the progressive restoration of Travis Wetland by the Trust and Council in partnership. It is now time to take the decisive next step and utilise part of the red zone for the formation of a fully fenced ecosanctuary which will be a key part of ecological regeneration happening across the City. ❚