BayBuzz hears frequently from community groups undertaking one or another local environmental project, often related to tree planting, creating wetlands, recycling waste, protecting waterways and biodiversity.
What many of us don’t realise is how carefully and professionally this ‘amateur volunteer’ work is carried out. It’s not just ‘a day at the beach’!
Recently we received this update report from Save the Dotterels – Waipūreku . Extremely well documented and illustrated, it is well worth a read, both to understand the specifics of this project, as they take on the rats, but also to gain a deeper appreciation of the rigour our local volunteers, not just those working on this project, bring to the table.
Save the Dotterels – Waipūreku is a cadre of 23 banding, trapping, monitoring volunteers. Their enemy … rats!
“This year we realised pretty soon after the birds started nesting that we had a major rat problem. Our first 7 nests were all predated by rats, verified by trail camera footage, with another 2 nests disappearing within 24 hours of location, before we had even had time to set up trail cameras. By 30 September (six weeks into the nesting season) we had located 13 nests in total but at least 7 (possibly 10) of them were predated by rats, often within only a couple of days of the eggs being laid. While this was distressing for us as volunteers – it would have been even more so for the birds.”
Rats!
Thanks for your supportive comments, Tom, and for helping to publicise the struggles of these vulnerable endemic birds
Thanks, Marilyn, for your team’s great work protecting the Banded Dotterels at Waipureku/Clive. The Napier branch of this project monitors from Awatoto to Bayview, and, as Marilyn says, the threats are endless. Humans light fires, drive their off-road vehicles in nesting areas, allow dogs off leads in restricted zones, and deliberately interfere with obvious nests. Perhaps this is one area we can hopefully gradually guide to understanding the issues. Predators such as rats, mice, Black-backed Gulls, White-faced herons, falcons, hedgehogs, and domestic cats are the other line of threat. Some of those we can trap.
What spurs the volunteers on is the successes on the ground – the learning about the life of the dotterels, watching the determination of the adult dotterels by re-nesting if their eggs/chicks disappear, the adult dotterels chasing the bird attackers in the air with their warning ‘peep-peep’ (sometimes in groups of two or three dotterels), the chicks growing bigger, and with any luck ‘fledging’. And the beauty of two or three hours at the beach weekly. You are welcome to join us … 027 241 8124 (Lynne)