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Autumn in Oruawharo Bay

We have had some typical autumn weather this year with storms and lots of rain, and the creeks at either end of the bay have been blocked and unblocked on many occasions. This has created extra ponds for all the birdlife to thrive in around the wetland areas of the bay. OME has continued with our weekly pateke counts and counted as many as 25 birds on the big pond in the wetland around dusk when they all come out to feed. Autumn marks the end of the time of year where the pateke flock, prior to their mating season. There is currently a distinct difference between the males and the females. The males develop a green hue to the head and a more chestnut colouring on the chest to impress the ladies.

Weekly working bees have helped progress in the wetland immensely. We managed to free a small forest of native trees from grapevine strangulation, hand-pulled heaps of pampas seedlings, growing as thick and dense as grass along the waterways, and clearing kikuyu from around the plants we planted last year. The volunteer effort has been an inspiration, and has made such a difference to the area, making the transformation something we can all be proud of. We have now moved on to planting every Thursday till we have all the roughly 460 plants in the ground. Hopefully this years plants will thrive as well as last years have.

You may have noticed the absence of pampas grass in the wetland too, when you are passing. This is due to an enormous effort from Paradise Landscapes, who swept the area with scrub-bars, cutting down all the huge clumps of this incredibly invasive weed, before it takes over the whole area, leaving room for nothing else to grow. We will have to spray the subsequent regrowth in the coming weeks, but the spraying will be greatly minimised due to the lesser size of the remaining plant mass. If you are unaware of the damage the introduced pampas will cause if left unchecked, click here and here. Below are before and after shots from the same spot, with and without pampas.

Memberships, finances and a bit of structure

OME would like to thank all the people who have become Friends of OME over recent months. In case you were wondering where the money goes, we have an umbrella organisation (the Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust) which overlooks our finances, as well as providing advice and guidance for our project. They hold our funding money too, and have quite a strict system in place to make sure we stay on the right path in using up the money given to our group, so rest assured it will be put to good use. We have not yet decided just which good cause to put the membership fees towards, but we have quite a few good ideas for something that will benefit the whole community.

OME had a meeting with DoC at the end of March discussing, amongst other things, their role in installing paths, walkways, boardwalks and bridges in the wetland, which is DoC owned. They are hugely underfunded, and have just had their funding cut even further, which puts a dampener on them forking out for this type of infrastructure, but we still hope to find a way to make the wetland a public space, open for everyone to enjoy, so perhaps we can all work together as a community to achieve this for our neighbourhood in the near future, though this would require a fair amount more than we have amassed so far.

Do you know how OME came about? We were started on an Ecology Vision initiative late 2018 by the then facilitator, Rendt Gorter, and have been supported ever since by Taryn Wilks who took over Rendt’s role. The Ecology Vision is a Local Board project, intending to form and support very local, ecologically minded community groups across Aotea, in order to protect and enhance the ecosystems and special species of every area. OME has a page on the Ecology Visions website, check it out here.

The latest in special visitors

A white-capped/shy mollymawk made its way to our shores at the beginning of May. It had crashed at the northern end of Medlands beach leaving us enough time to have a good look at it before it got consumed. It had a wingspan of well over two meters, which is huge in comparison to the other birds we see on this beach. It left quite a lasting impression on us, just wish we had been able to see it soar above the beach, rather than flat on it’s face in the sand. It must have been quite spectacular.

Another unexpected visitor of a slightly different nature came from setting up a game camera to see the action on a bait station on a private property in the bay. The bait in the station in question kept disappearing without much action in nearby traps, so we thought it would be interesting to find out just what ate the bait. It could have been mice, rats, insects….well, you don’t know for sure till you have some sort of evidence. It turned out that it was quite the hive of activity, for both rats and mice, which was interesting with no takers for the traps, but one visitor we did not expect to find was in the image below wondering where its next meal would come from!!

We hope to see you over the winter months. Feel free to get in touch if you would like to join us for a working bee or two, whether it be planting or weeding. Hopefully we have not run out of steam by then. You can email us or keep an eye on our Facebook page for more info on time and place.

Enjoy your winter months wherever you end up.

Stay warm and dry, from the OME team.