WET, WILD & WINDY

If you haven’t been around in Oruawharo Bay for a while, you have missed the wettest looking wetland for a very long time. We had some enormous swells, coinciding with king tides which filled the wetland up and then immediately blocked the exit. This trapped a lot of brackish water for a few weeks until Aotea Contractors were asked to unblock the stream outlets in anticipation of a lot of rain potentially flooding the area further, affecting the causeway. This made for some awesome photos of what the wetland could look like with a bit more water as a permanent fixture.

OME have sadly had to let Annamarie Clough move on to pursue a career as Conservation Advisor for Auckland Council. She will still be involved with OME and will act as our main lead for communication with Auckland Council, which we are very grateful for, since she knows the project better than anyone. However, she will step back from her role as coordinator, so we hope we can live up to the high standard she has set for the work we will carry out in the future.

Lizards

You may have spotted some small squares of undulating roofing material in the dunes. These are Lizard Motels installed by OME. We will be monitoring these for lizards to see if we can detect a positive impact on lizard numbers due to our rat trapping. We know from prints in our tracking tunnels, that there are moko skinks & copper skinks in the area. We will let the lizards get used to these foreign objects and aim to carefully check them every 6 months.

Dotterels

In early April OME took part in the island wide dotterel count. We covered the southern end of Kaitoke as well as Medlands Beach and Boulder Bay. This work has been carried out every year for many years and data has been kept in meticulous fashion by John Ogden. He sumises there has been an overall upward trend of dotterel numbers on Aotea over the years.

Wetland Work

Work in the wetland continues to grow. We carried out our first quarterly Waicare monitoring in March with the second one just completed last week. Waicare is an Auckland Council initiative for fresh water monitoring and we feed our test result in to their database. We have 4 testing sites, 2 in each of the creeks at either end of the bay. There is an upper fresh water site and a lower brackish site for both creeks. We test for water clarity, PH levels, dissolved oxygen, phosphate and nitrate. We might have expected different results after the creek-beds had swelled at either end of the bay, but all our test results were well within the guidelines set out by Waicare.

OME engaged a contractor to start getting rid of the pampas in the wetland. They made good headway starting at the southern end, but all works have come to a halt due to the water level. We will resume this work in the spring.

Mosquitoes

Did you see some neatly placed tyres around the neighbourhood over the past few months? They were mosquito traps, designed to collect larvae in order to detect any potential exotic mosquitoes. Thankfully none were found, only plenty of local yokels.

Planting days

Some members of OME were able to attend a planting day organised by Aotea Brewing just on the other side of the causeway from the wetland. They had secured funding from the Waterways Protection Fund for a riparian planting project along Mason rd creek on private properties. We look forward to following their progress. Keep an eye on our Facebook page for updates on more planting days in the area.

Trapping & monitoring

OME carried out our quarterly rat monitoring in the first week of May. This time of year the tracking tunnels are expected to show a higher density of rats so we were not too disheartened with the result, which was very similar to our February round, except for the wetland which was slightly up. We still check the traps in the dunes, wetland and surrounds on a weekly basis, so it should start making an impact on the resident rodent population. This kind of work is ongoing and it is really important to be consistent, regardless of the challenges it may bring. Floating traps were a new and unusual one though!

This has made us wonder if there might be any interest in having a person check the traps on private properties if you are not here for an extended period of time. You could avoid rats and mice making use of your home when you are not around by keeping them in check all year round. This would be for a fee, decided by the contractor in question. Please get in touch if you think you would like to be part of this initiative or follow us on Facebook (Orawharo Medlands Ecovision) to be updated on any progress.

Enjoy your winter. Warm regards from the OME team.