Flying to the rescue
The Southland pilot behind habitat restoration projects worldwide Waikaia’s Peter Garden has been to the fore in efforts to reclaim islands from the predations of rats. He speaks to Michael Fallow.
Habitat restoration? Sounds like hard and worthy work, but of the sort that raises pulses through exertion rather than excitement.
Waikaia helicopter pilot Peter Garden has stories that prove that’s far from always the case.ewe
He’s been intrepid in the cause of liberating islands from subjugation to rodents – successes in such difficult environments and on such scale that they have more than once snapped conservationists worldwide to attention.
The stories recounted in his book Southern Wanderer are those of a disciplined problem-solver rather than a yarn-spinning blowhard, but in straightforward manner they describe the challenges and rewards of years of sometimes desperately highpressure, high-stakes flying.
Using relentlessly developed skills, and contacts developed through close involvement with the Department of Conservation’s Southland conservancy, he has become a world-leading pilot in some of the most tough-love tactics available – raining toxins on rodents.
The results have reliably been long-term transformations, restoring birdlife, native flora and enhancing human lives.
Occasionally, however, mishaps have provoked international furore.
Garden is a pilot who can look any conservationist in the eye, but he’s a man who places value on clear-eyed assessment of setbacks as well as successes.
So, for instance, he doesn’t flinch from what went wrong at Alaska’s charmingly named Rat Island in 2008.
After the drop of brodifacoum, scientists made the distressing discovery that the team had poisoned 46 bald eagles.
An official Island Eradication Advisory Group had peerreviewed the project beforehand and accepted that three known pairs of the bird, with endangered status, inhabited the island, and would succumb.
That much they were prepared for.
‘‘But nobody realised,’’ says Garden, ‘‘that the bush telegraph among the bald eagle community was so effective.’’
The most likely scenario was that the other eagles had flown to the island to gorge themselves on dead rats and on gulls that had themselves feasted on the rat kill.
Though usually nocturnal, rats that consumed brodifacoum could be seen in daylight ‘‘in a premortal state’’, exposing them to the day-feeding eagles.
After close and reproachful inquiry into not just into the planning process but also an ad hoc decision to accelerate the drop before an incoming storm hit, US agencies did increase their vigilance in following protocols and application rates.
Garden endorses the need for pointed scrutiny, but also believes factions within the US Fish and Wildlife Service opposing the use of brodifacoum used the case to further their arguments, to the detriment of some later operations.
And, small point, the Rat Island programme did work. That unlovely name is no longer required or in use– restored to the original Hawadax.
The year after the operation, scientists found seven new bird species returned to the island, including tufted puffins, song sparrows and snow buntings.
Plenty of bald eagles too. Garden isn’t all that surprised. Their protected status reflects the experience of the 48 mainland US states, and fair enough, but they are far from scarce in Alaska.
As for brodifacoum, everywhere else in the world, he says, its advantages are well understood.
It’s the most commonly used eradication bait, delivering
a single lethal dose. The downside is that it persists in the rats’ bodies and is equally toxic to non-target species that might eat them.
The alternative, diphacinone, is less toxic and doesn’t linger, but must be eaten over several days for a lethal dose to be delivered, heightening the risk of an entire eradication attempt failing.
So although brodifacoum is ‘‘not a particularly environmentally friendly product’’ it still plays an invaluable role.
Ask him about it nowadays and he put it this way: ‘‘It’s a bit like treating cancer with a chemo product.’’
But he writes: ‘‘It is not going to change the argument, but I have witnessed the results first-hand.
‘‘Everywhere we go in the world we come across people whose only interest is to create obstacles. They are often not directly involved in the project, but they want to see their name up in lights.’’
As for New Zealand’s future, he believes the key to achieving a predator-free 2050 lies in genome technology, and he expects not a lot of aerial work will be needed for that.
However it will be a politically difficult solution to achieve. Forest and Bird acknowledge the need but the Greens oppose it. Meanwhile, the alarming rate of biodiversity loss demands that we use what tools we have here and now.
‘‘If we don’t carry on with the tools we’ve got at the moment, we’ll lose all the gains we’ve made.’’
If anyone can come up with an alternative, Garden would ask them to bring it forward. Or shut up.
P eter Garden’s Waikaia childhood explains so much about him.The Southland town with a goldmining history isn’t one that people pass through en route to somewhere else. You have to head to it because you want to be there.
It has missed out on quite a bit as a result of that, but has also retained a lot of its frontier character. And as a youngster, Peter found that while his dad worked, and his mum had her hands full with his new baby sister, adventure awaited.
‘‘So I was off, wandering the world.’’
A local miner nicknamed him Captain Cook on account of his voyages of discovery.
He grew into a teenager who rode in rodeos, hunted deer and trapped possums, the money helping him scrimp and save for flying lessons.
Marrying Margaret, a strong and highly capable southern lass, bought Waikaia Motors from his dad, took up an offer from Fred Andrews of Andrews Transport to fly an Enstrom F28 helicopter from him.
He put in time in live deer recovery in the days before net guns.
As an agriculture pilot he fronted up for all the extra duty that was expected – search and rescue, air ambulance, firefighting and firefighting, rescuing the odd flooded farmer standing atop his submerged tractor, learning how to maintain the right height to unload material for the Titi islands so he could simultaneously avoid 12m masts while accounting for the rise and fall of 4m swells.
And he learnt one or two social lessons too, like never again to rely on the interestingly erratic marksmanship of Tokanui Rugby Club members who had him drive cattle towards them for a sponsored cull on Raratoka/ Centre Island.
A busy farmer and small business owner, he was an early 1990s adopter of the US-based Trimble system that improved the accuracy of global positioning systems for aerial guidance particularly.
He credits a far-sighted Southland DOC conservancy for initiating the predator-control island work that followed.
Southland conservator Lou Sanson gave his team the freedom to be ambitious and innovative; project leader Peter McClelland brought together people with the right skills and passions, and the likes of Keith Springer and Don Merton brought invaluable background knowledge.
Early projects were gratifyingly successful, notably rendering Codfish Island/Whenua Hou predator free for the release of kā kā pō .
Encouraging signs of potential international cooperation emerged too.
In 1998, the Command coastal tanker spilt oil off central California, killing thousands of birds, most of which were found to have migrated from the Tītī /Muttonbird Islands.
Part of the reparation funding was directed to back to New Zealand as a result. An ‘‘unheard of ’’ gesture. But it was the ability of the southern team to work successfully in Campbell Island, 700km to the south, and at 11,300ha the most ambitious island restoration programme undertaken anywhere, that proved the quantum leap that really attracted the conservation world to the potential.
Renowned English naturalist Sir David Bellamy called New Zealand the only country that had turned pest eradication into an export industry.
In truth, says Garden, they didn’t export it – other countries came looking to recruit the Kiwis, who found themselves working in the likes of Seychelles, the Pacific Islands, Puerto Rico and the Aleutian Islands.
Yes, there were red-tape entanglements. Cultural ones too. In the beautiful Seychelles, a group of Hindu Sri Lankan workers believed in reincarnation.
They ‘‘were fearful the rats we would kill might be their ancestors.
‘‘After we dropped the bait, they would sneak around at night and pick up as much of it as they could find’’.
In Fiji’s Ringgold Isles, a group working on a new hotel had threatened to burn their helicopter overnight.
But the team pressed ahead and later, when Garden returned to the island, a tearful old women greeted him as he stepped off the helicopter.
For the first time in her life, she said, she could grow vegetables without rats ransacking her gardens.
Though each project in each location made a lasting impression – ‘‘they stay in your heart once you’ve visited those places’’ – the satisfactions swiftly gave way to restlessness, and a fresh challenge to focus on.
The granddaddy of them all proved to on the wild subantarctic South Georgia Island, in the Southern Ocean, spanning 12 years, stands as the largest island restoration project on record.
It was commissioned by the Falklands government, which had nothing like enough money to make it happen. But, to Garden’s abiding admiration, a small Scottish conservation trust picked up the ball. It raised, ultimately, £10 million to fund the hellishly difficult project.
Flying in frigid, turbulent conditions, the door off and helicopter systems freezing up, desperately trying to use narrow windows of opportunity to get the jobs done, and the last one back to base finished the day with a cold shower.
Decades of skill development were put to the test, in what proved an epic test of tenacity.
The project ended 2018 and the aftermath was a detailed examination on a job so demanding that a single surviving rat could have spelled it failure.
But on May 8 that year, South Georgia was officially declared rodent free, for the first time in two centuries. Its songbirds have returned. Garden’s book is in part a tribute to his late wife Margaret and his subsequent partner Bev Clark, who died last week. Two strong women, he says, whose support proved essential to his achievements.
In 2017, Garden was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, The citation acknowledges him as one of the world’s pre-eminent eradication helicopter pilots.
Until the Covid lockdown in early 2020 he had still been acting chief pilot for Alpine Helicopters agricultural division in Wanaka, but at 74 he then decided it was time ‘‘to hop out of the pilot’s seat’’.
In flying terms, it’s mission complete, but as Southern Wanderer shows, at a time when the mandate to defend biodiversity has never been clearer or more urgent, his legacy sets a critical example.
‘‘If we don’t carry on with the tools we’ve got at the moment, we’ll lose all the gains we’ve made.’’