Dear friends of Maungatautari

Kia ora koutou, here is your latest edition of Maunga Matters.

From the Chief Executive Officer
by Phil Lyons

Kia ora Koutou

In July, Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari received exciting news from the Jobs for Nature Programme. We have received funding for four additional Rangers for our Natural Heritage and Operational teams.

This funding will provide four Cadet Rangers with training and development opportunities in Pest/ Species management and infrastructure maintenance over a three-year period.

A Memorandum of Understanding has also been established with Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology to provide the Cadet Rangers with education in the Certificate in Conservation level 4.

Having completed the Level 4 Certificate in Conservation and Ranger work experience in year one, the Cadet Rangers will then have an opportunity to continue to develop their Conservation Skills and Knowledge in years two and three of the initiative.

SMM is also excited to announce that the Education Centre construction contract has been awarded to Waikato Builders ASAP contracting.

Construction will commence mid-October and is planned to be a 24-week project.

The Education Centre has been four years in the making and will provide amazing facilities for our education, wellbeing, and conservation programmes.

To date, the project has secured $1,019,000 of funding for the carpark, toilets, and stage 1 of the facility build. Sanctuary Mountain would like to thank MBIE, Trust Waikato, Lotteries, Waipa District Council, Transpower and our wonderful community for their amazing support.

Nga mahi

Phil

Curious about Kiwi? Summing up the Season.
By Craig Montgomerie

This has been the busiest release season the maunga has ever seen. A total of 111 kiwi have been released since October 2020 bringing the total kohanga cohort to 239 new founders since October 2018. Fortunately, my role with the kiwi has become a full-time position with the help from Kiwis for Kiwi and the Jobs for Nature funding they received late last year. This has enabled me to start monitoring and surveying the kiwi on the main mountain enclosure so that we can get an overview of what the population has been doing since the first kiwi were released there in 2013.

Kiwi Conservation Dog Survey
During Easter this year we had two kiwi conservation dogs and their handlers, James McLachlan and Tom Donovan, come in to begin a mark and recapture survey over the course of 30 working days to estimate the current kiwi population on the main mountain. What we do know is the number of founders on the mountain and that all of those kiwi are marked with a microchip. The target was to sample up to 60 kiwi and scan them for a microchip, thus giving us a ratio of marked birds versus un-marked birds. It was a fun 30 days as each day was truly like Christmas! How many birds will we catch today? How many will be microchipped? How healthy are they?

I am happy to report that we caught 47 kiwi of which 11 were microchipped. That gave us a ratio of 1 in 4 birds being a founder, meaning that there has been a lot of successful breeding on the maunga – not surprising given our pristine pest-free environment. But further to that result is that three out of four birds bred on the maunga cannot be attributed to the kohanga birds as they will only be beginning to breed this coming season. So, three quarters of the population is the result of the original 77 founders that were released prior to 2018, which is amazing!

We also attached nine adult transmitters to adults so I can begin territory mapping these kiwi. This will be another piece in the jigsaw that will help us work out how the population is tracking by measuring their ‘patch’ of forest.

All of the kiwi were in amazing condition and are some of the chubbiest birds I have ever handled. If fact the first bird that was captured was the last kiwi I released before the level 4 lock down, so was just over a year old when captured. It weighed in at 2.215kg which is an incredible growth rate. The well experienced kiwi handlers Tom and James assumed it was a full grown adult when in fact it was just a young juvenile!

Four of the kiwi found during the survey were some of the early 2013-2015 founders. Their names were Tongaporutu, Omahina, Ella and Ogo. I’m sure there are long-time supporters reading this that may have been at their releases. Omahina weighted in at a hefty 3.340kg!

We will be replicating this survey for the next few years annually to gage the growth rates on the maunga as we expect the growth curve to increase as the kohanga chicks become kohanga breeding adults.

Kiwi Call Survey
As I mentioned last month, we have just completed our first kiwi call count. This is an important piece of work that must be carried out annually at the same time of year. The result provides us with a relative abundance measure at designated listening spots. This year was all about laying the foundation for the future surveys that we will do. What a foundation we got!

The first three nights we experienced dream conditions; light winds, clear skies, breath- taking sunsets (not essential but it adds to the ambiance) and somewhat warm – well, for the time of year. The fourth night the winds began picking up, so all the noise from moving trees reduced the ability to hear the distant calls thus reducing the records taken in the field. Then unfortunately on the fifth night, the decision was made to cancel due to an unfavourable storm system traveling across the North Island.

After plugging in all the recorded data from the various teams scattered around the maunga we landed with an average of 16.8 calls per hour! Each survey site listened for 120 minutes and peaked 60 calls at one site. And at that site 45 of those calls happened between 7pm and 8pm! I have a much more detailed report available on request if you wish to have a read.
Another big highlight of the survey was the interactions with the night life that many of the participants had on their walk out including myself. They ranged from observing kiwi foraging the forest floor, to mated kiwi pairs duetting either side of the track they were walking on and even a pair of males have a territorial scrap, or was it a pair of kiwi mating???? Whatever was going on it lasted for 15 minutes!

I must thank all my volunteers once again who helped me pull this survey off! There is no way we could have achieved this success without you giving up your evenings for us.

Kiwi Translocations
We are now over the halfway mark of the kiwi releases planned to take place over 5 years. Now the main focus has switched from the kiwi introductions to deciding what methods we will use to capture the kiwi that are destined to bolster new populations and also help create new kiwi populations across the western taxonomic region. One idea we have been playing with is to capture non-territorial adults on the fence line. As kiwi mature, they will naturally want to find habitat that doesn’t have a lot of kiwi, and naturally there is plenty of free habitat outside the fence. The theory is that these kiwi head towards the silent farm land and walk into our 47 kilometre long fence then walk along the inside trying to find a hole to get out. Prior to the breeding season I have noticed this in many places around the sanctuary where these trails (not unlike the trails sheep make when they walk across farmland) form indicating a kiwi or many kiwi trying to escape. It makes sense to capture these kiwi rather than chancing across a random kiwi within the sanctuary that would have the potential to break up some productive marriages.

To begin this analysis of the fence line kiwi we will be soon installing remote microchip readers on the fence line to gather data on who is on the fence, be it founders or wild breed birds. The readers will be partnered with a trail camera so that we can see how many individuals are in fact in an area. This monitoring will also go towards finding the hot spots where the kiwi densities are higher than others so that we can reduce them at capture time. The plan is to begin translocations at below carrying capacity so that we can keep the population as productive as it can be so we can maximise the reintroductions back into the wild sustainably.

The plan is to be removing 100-200 kiwi per year!
So, as you can see there is plenty of kiwi related stuff happening here at the maunga!

From the Education Team
By Tali Jellyman

The education team would like to thank all of the schools that have visited Sanctuary Mountain during Term 2, 2021. Together, the educators have hosted 875 students and 160 parents and teachers, a total of 1,035 people during this school term.

We have been highly impressed by the work that has gone into the organisation of the trips by all the teachers. The pre-visit work done in class has been clearly evident and this has enabled the educators to focus on providing a more meaningful learning experience in the protected forest environment on Maungatautari that is linked to the learning going on in schools. Visiting students from Year 1 (5 year olds) to Year 8 (12 year olds) have shared their prior knowledge, language skills, observation skills, curiosity, great questioning and all with lovely manners too!

We have been truly humbled by the waiata and haka performed for us and the maunga at the end of visits and the wonderful thank you cards, photos, letters and artworks received afterwards as well (watch the short video linked below to see some of this incredible student work). We love to hear about students’ reflections after their trips and the conservation actions that classes do when they get back to school. For lots of conservation activities and project ideas, check out this link on our website: Post-visit activity ideas

Letters, cards and artworks by Tirau school and cards from Te Wharekura o te Kaokaoroa o Pātetere Kura Teina

Up Front and Behind the Scenes on the Maunga!
By Freeman Ehu

Thank you to all of our visitors and supporters!
We at the sanctuary would like to thank all of our visitors and supporters of Maungatautari. This past year hasn’t been easy and many challenges have presented itself since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With borders closed to a majority of the world, the sanctuary, like all New Zealand organisations, took a hit with limited visitor numbers. In the eighteen months since the start of initial reports we can thankfully say that visitor numbers in May 2021 surpassed May 2019!

Our education visitor numbers doubled, meaning more students and parent helpers visited the sanctuary, as well as our general visitor numbers being more than double pre-Covid years too!

This is a great success and only something we could’ve achieved by the support of our communities and supporters!

By paying to visit the sanctuary you contribute to the upkeep of the fence, the planting of trees, studying the evolution of biosecurity as well as inching us closer to the dream of a predator-free 2050. Once again, on behalf of the Sanctuary Mountain team we say our sincerest thank you to all of our supporters!

National Volunteer Week

From June 20 – 27 we celebrated National Volunteer Week by showcasing the many stories our volunteers have created over the years. The sanctuary began on the backs of a group of people who came together over a common cause.

Maungatautari has a special place in many hearts connected to the project and it is through the hard work and dedication of our volunteers that helped preserve this taongā/treasure.

We shared stories from those who’ve been part of the project from the beginning, as well as asking our recent recruits why they decided to take up volunteering. From our educators and guides to our planting and weeding team, we share a glimpse of the work our volunteers do at the sanctuary.

Here is some feedback our Education Team Leader Tali has given in regards to how our volunteers contribute to her mahi on the maunga!

Volunteers from all different teams stopping to say hello to school children as we go past and where appropriate sharing what they do and why they love to do the volunteer work that they do.
The VC custodian team – keeping the area around the VC looking good for all our visitors including school groups.
Earlier this year, volunteer guide Liz jumped in and shadowed me with a group that I should have been able to manage on my own. Turns out, the group was bigger and had more little ones that expected so I was so grateful that Liz came along and helped manage the group from the back the whole way.
Volunteer guide Brian Bowell jumped in and shared his experience with doing the kiwi listening survey with a school group the other day as part of our introduction to the day. The kids were delighted and we tried doing the survey technique listening for any birds in the forest just as Brian described how he had listened for kiwi. The kids remembered the criteria he told them and were excited to try.
Sue Reid in her volunteer guide role as well when helping with the rifleman releases – she was so great with the groups of people including school kids and teachers. 😊
VC hosts jumping in and helping me to set up or pack things away before and after school groups! Thank you.

Such fantastic comments from our team and just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all the amazing stories we receive from the team! Follow our Social Channels for more awesome stories of our volunteer

Matariki on the Maunga!

Matariki is upon us and we have celebrated many ways at the sanctuary to showcase our festivities. As our takahē chicks are named after stars in Matariki, we decided to throw a gender reveal party near the start of festivities (more below). Being surrounded by volunteers and local school children made the start of our celebrations even better.

In our southern enclosure during the upcoming school holidays and colouring in entries in our Visitor Centre!
2022 Matariki will officially be a public holiday in the country and we wanted to get a head start in celebrating Māori New Year!

Takahē gender reveal at the Sanctuary.
Earlier this month, we celebrated the gender reveal of our latest takahē chicks Waitī and Waitā. The chicks hatched late last year and have been spending their infancy in the Tautari Wetlands enclosure at the sanctuary. Chicks are normally measured at one year of age to determine sex and conduct other health checks.
The gender reveal party at the Sanctuary included guests from Pukeatua School and volunteers and the newly formed takahē tucker team, which was created simply to take care of the takahē enclosure. Pukeatua School students assisted in the celebrations by pulling the strings attached to the gender reveal pinata and a balloon was popped by our Administration Manager, Sue. We’ve included the video for the reveal below so if you’d like to enjoy the moment please watch now, spoilers for the reveal are coming......

takahē gender reveal in the Visitors Centre earlier in the season.

We are happy to announce that both takahē chicks are female and are both healthy. By having both female chicks at the sanctuary it allows us to be involved in more breeding projects around the country - a project we are more than happy to participate in!

The Cadets are out in full force!
Throughout this year, we’ve partnered with Toi Ohomai to host a cadetship for their environmental studies students to participate in. Our Sanctuary Mountain Rangers accompany these cadets around the sanctuary to partake in varying projects to enhance their knowledge and in-field experience.

From track-cutting to tree and species identification, the cadets get experience to a large variety of work at the sanctuary that they normally wouldn’t in a classroom environment. One of our cadets also took part in the kiwi survey where she was able to experience an in-field health check, as well as snapping a quick picture with the taonga species as well.

These types of programmes give the next generation of conservationists an opportunity to get their foot in the door and experience the job from day one. Such passionate students come through these types of programmes and we are always supportive of sharing the mana and the mauri of Maungatautari.

This is a fantastic way to get students out of the classroom and get real experience in the industry. If you’re a student and are interested in environmental studies, check out Toi Ohomai’s website here.

Staff team planning day!
On July 9th, the staff of the Sanctuary partook in their annual planning day which was conducted by Jigsaw Professional Development. The purpose of the day is to look at the strategic goals we have made and how the team are tracking against their goals.

From biosecurity, volunteer management, species translocations and visitor experience improvements; the day covered many aspects that we were looking to progress through throughout the year.

Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari is the largest pest-proof fenced sanctuary in the world and we don’t always get the opportunity to have the team all in one room at the same time. Opportunities like this give our team the chance to bring their collective knowledge and expertise into a positive collaborative environment. As the Trusts’ internal practices evolve it means that we can provide more fantastic experiences for our visitors and supporters!

Follow our social channels for more updates on our plans for the next 12 months!