Smuts-Kennedy — answering a call from the wild
Christian Smuts-Kennedy (Smuts) April 19, 1947 – November 21, 2018 ‘‘At night in Fiordland, you wonder why the great beyond is called Space – when it is so obviously full. On a clear night, on those tops above the tree line, the collective noun for stars
Christian Smuts-Kennedy, who has died aged 71, started his life’s work in 1966 with a four-year traineeship with the New Zealand Wildlife Service.
There is a photograph, taken in 1974, that has entered Wildlife Service lore.
It shows Smuts-Kennedy (known widely as Smuts), two colleagues, and a muzzled dog, in Fiordland on a sunny day.
Smuts is holding a critically endangered ka¯ ka¯ po¯ – a large, flightless parrot.
The men were there as part of a concerted effort to save the ka¯ ka¯ po¯ , whose numbers dropped to about 50 birds in the mid-90s. Each known ka¯ ka¯ po¯ now carries a radio transmitter and is intensively monitored and managed.
Although the bird now is thought to be extinct in the wild, Smuts returned to Fiordland 30 years later as part of a larger party for a second search. He told the Waikato Times at the time, in a selfeffacing way, that the expedition would be a ‘‘funny old situation with funny, dottery, old people looking for dottery, old ka¯ ka¯ po¯ ’’.
He felt the chances of finding ka¯ ka¯ po¯ were small, and he was right.
On his return, he told the paper: ‘‘I myself think there could be one or two possibly hiding in places we didn’t look… it still is possible.’’
Smuts’ time in the service was spent in diverse, remote locations working in sometimes primitive or harsh conditions on fabulous (mostly declining) wildlife from one end of the country to the other.
His first assignment was six months based at Queenstown; surveying trout spawning streams in the Haast River; living on venison back steaks and rice. His heels first blistered, then hardened. Then followed numerous other postings to remote places where he worked on diverse fish and wildlife including trout, takahe¯ , pa¯ teke, and ka¯ ka¯ po¯ .
In the early 1970s, Smuts spent several seasons in takahe¯ country, with teams surveying for ‘‘tarks’’, locating nests, and shooting the deer that were thought to be eating takahe¯ food.
A quietly spoken man with a dry sense of humour, he recalled in an article how, while on a trip, his team had taunted the ever-present keas by putting a knob of butter on the inside of a hut window.
However, the keas got their revenge when they gained entry to the hut through an unsecured door and pulled all the food cans off the shelves and removed all the labels.
Smuts was the DoC ranger at Mimiwhangata Coastal Farm Park in Northland, where his dog regularly dispatched feral cats that were predators of the pa¯ teke.
Wife Robin recalled that one day Smuts was walking out the back of the park and recognised a cat he had previously seen taking pa¯ teke ducklings. He was without his gun or dog so herded it into long grass and grabbed it, whereupon the wild animal, somewhat predictably, bit him. He killed the cat bare-handed, but the subsequent infection from the bite kept his arm out of action for weeks, so the cat got its revenge.
The Department of Conservation absorbed the Wildlife Service in 1987, and in 1990 Smuts and Robin became custodial rangers on Hauturu/Little Barrier Island, until 1995. This was five years of hard work, with little time off, compensated for by the backyard presence of kiwi, tı¯eke, hihi, whiteheads, ko¯ kako, petrels, bats, we¯ ta¯ punga, ka¯ ka¯ po¯ and tuatara, in probably New Zealand’s most complete faunal ecosystem. That said, he completed a Wildlife Management Diploma from Otago University, during which he reviewed the Ka¯ka¯po¯ Recovery Programme.
After Hauturu, Smuts and Robin moved to Cambridge from where Chris worked for DOC in Hamilton.
In 2002, when the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust outside Cambridge was formed, Smuts was the right man in the right place at the right time.
Smuts was perfectly qualified to help the Trust, because he had seen the decline of endemic wildlife first-hand; he understood how pest mammals contributed to these declines and was excited to see what New Zealand’s largest pest-fenced sanctuary could produce.
Through authorship of the first Maungatautari Restoration Plan and much other subsequent writing, he reminded those interested how unique New Zealand’s indigenous species were, and how different our forest ecology was compared to anywhere else in the world.
In subsequent years, in various paid or voluntary capacities, Smuts was the main source of knowledge about proposed species translocations to the maunga, and the main source of expertise in achieving those translocations.
He was a member of the Pest Eradication Working Group in 2004 and of every iteration of the frequently re-named Biodiversity Restoration Committee from then until his death, and a frequent contributor of think-pieces to the Trust’s newsletter Maunga Matters.
Past Maungatautari co-worker Gemma Green learned a few tricks of the trade while working alongside Smuts. ‘‘He taught me how to hold a tut [tuatara] so you didn’t get peed on and collar a tark [takahe¯ ] without getting bitten. However, I never adopted his method of holding mealworms in his mouth, especially after he showed us where one had started to gnaw his inner lip’’.
He was lead author of the two most significant ecological publications for the maunga project: The first was the ecological restoration plan completed in September 2004 and the second was a 2013 paper published with Kevin Parker in Notornis called Reconstructing Avian Biodiversity on Maungatautari.
Although Maungatautari is a very diverse project, ecological restoration is its core, and Smuts was the main ecological compass. Known to many as the mountain dictionary, Smuts’ quiet contributions were felt throughout the Trust. Maungatautari board member Robyn Nightingale once said Smuts was as vital to the project as the unseen electrical wiring in a home.
In his last years Smuts pursued the possible translocation of ka¯ ka¯ po¯ to the maunga.
Deidre Vercoe, of the Ka¯ ka¯ po¯ Recovery Group, said Smuts had nature in his blood.
‘‘And the sweet, musky smell of the ka¯ ka¯ po¯ seems to have had a strong effect on him – as he was connected with the ka¯ ka¯ po¯ recovery efforts throughout his career. From Fiordland searches through to being one of the great ‘hallmark’ rangers on Hauturu – he continued to look out for ka¯ ka¯ po¯ and imagine a better future for these birds.’’
Smuts’ natural history was not confined to the maunga, however. He was a constant source of information about wildlife in and around Cambridge.
Smuts wanted an urban biodiversity habitat rather than just a garden, so he and Robin planted their half acre with natives and exotics to support birds and insects.
Smuts was a writer – there was much of a Gilbert White, Aldo Leopold, Herbert Guthrie-Smith about the way he observed local nature and could write about it. In a recent publication on the Wildlife Service Smuts wrote of his experience in Fiordland. A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape the Waikato community. If you know of someone whose story should be told, please email Charles.Riddle@wintec.ac.nz