Kereru © James Allan
12th December 2024
Three natural nests have been spotted at Lake Hayes, and the pair in Queenstown Bay are working on a nest on their man-made floating platform that is looked after by local volunteer Robert. Robert has been watching the Queenstown Bay Crested Grebe | Pūteketeke like a hawk, and has spotted them performing courtship rituals, and chasing other birds away from the platform, sometimes in a surprise underwater attack.
It’s that time of year when our braided river birds finish up their breeding and start thinking abut heading to pastures (or coasts!) new. You may have noticed a big flock of South Island Pied Oyster Catcher | Tōrea (SIPO) on the high school sports field in the last week or so. These birds are gathering for their post-breeding staging period, before they disperse for the coast.
This big group of 104 includes at least 21 juveniles (counted by local ecologist and Birds NZ representative Dawn Palmer). Having about one fifth of the flock as juveniles indicates the local population has done well and is undoubtedly benefiting from the landscape scale protection of the Whakatipu trap network. Well done everyone!
Last year a SIPO with a red band was seen – which means it was banded in the Coromandel. This year a yellow flagged SIPO was seen – indicating it was banded in Golden Bay/ Nelson. Seeing banded birds provides evidence that our local breeding population is very much part of the national population.
Time will tell if this year’s success leads to a trend of increase for our local populations. We can help them with protection of their favoured local pasture habitats. Availability and use of their traditional staging sites needs to be protected and others created, with short mown/cropped grass with soils rich in earthworms.
If you have notice pairs of SIPO on your property, we encourage you to trap for predators and discourage feral cat activity. Consider helping them out by leaving a buffer when mowing or cultivating around nests to avoid any damage or disturbance of the birds.
Let us know if you’ve had or seen a pair of SIPO on your property or regularly anywhere else so we can protect this highly mobile At-Risk species in the Whakatipu.
Our birding group have been out four times so far this spring, birdwatching at Tucker Beach, Jardine Park, Moke Lake and Lower Shotover.
Highlights include spotting two rare and cryptic Marsh Crake | Koitareke/Kotoreke. These small, secretive rails are very hard to spot, inhabiting dense wetland and generally staying under cover. We were incredibly lucky to see these on our trip. Their conservation status is “Declining” due to loss of their wetland habitat and predation by introduced mammals. There are predator traps all around Moke Lake, so the hard mahi of the trapping volunteers is making a big difference for our Marsh Crake!
On Tuesday the 3rd of December in collaboration with the Tucker Beach Wildlife Trust we were able to complete another Shotover braided river bird survey – a great success! This was last done in 2021 and prior to that not since 1993, so we are incredibly pleased to have completed the count this year.
This is a great example of community collaboration for conservation. We started with the fantastic Shotover Jet (thanks Nick!) driving us to Big Beach for our first transect, they then took us down to the Tucker Beach Frisbee Reserve where we met the amazing team from QT Rafting/RealNZ (thanks Morgan!) who helped us along the river all the way to the confluence, getting us across when the river was too deep to cross. We had other volunteers on land surveying other areas popular with braided river birds, such as Frankton and Queenstown Bay, the oxidation ponds and transfer station.
We had a good team of WWT and SLS staff, as well as some local trapping volunteers who knew the river well which was very helpful. Highlights for the day were seeing a flock of 40 Black Fronted Terns | Tarapirohe near the Tucker Beach Wildlife Reserve. These are one of our endangered braided river birds, their nests often predated on by rats, stoats, ferrets, feral cats and hedgehogs – well done to the Tucker Beach trapping group your hard work is paying off! We also came across a couple of breeding colonies of Black Billed Gulls | Tarāpuka – the most endangered gull in the world. More results will be out soon once we have been through the data more thoroughly, if you are interested in seeing the report once written, let us know.
We wouldn’t have been able to complete the survey without the kind support from both Shotover Jet and QT Rafting/RealNZ – huge thanks to these guys for their support. Also a big thank you to Thom from Film Radio for supplying radios for the team so they could communicate down the river, and to DOC for land access.
We hope to make this an annual survey, so we can track the populations of these threatened endemic birds and better inform our ongoing conservation efforts.
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