Looking after the rarities of the bush
TODD Jenkinson, Pukaha Mt Bruce Wildlife Centre’s new conservation manager, has been getting up very early recently – often before most the birds he looks after – to carry out a census of kokako.
The day starts around quarter past six, when the team sets out looking for the birds.
‘‘We’ll around five hours out on the path looking for birds,’’ Jenkinson explains. ‘‘You stop every 200 metres then sit for a bit and try to call them with a prerecorded call. If you see birds you’ve got to follow them and try to identify them, whether they’re a pair or singles.’’
It’s common to walk six or seven kilometres in a morning, Jenkinson says. ‘‘And it’s not all on the flat – it’s up and down and crossing the odd stream.’’
The kokako census takes around four weeks. It keeps him fit, he says. So too does the kiwi count.
‘‘That means going out after dark, listening for kiwi and trying to identify how many we have got here,’’ he says.
‘‘We don’t know for certain – it’s hard with kiwi because you can’t actually sight them. You’re basically going on their calls.’’
Not every day is spent counting birds.
‘‘Sometimes the only exercise I get is up and down the stairs for coffee,’’ Jenkinson laughs. But with 940 hectares of reserve, a huge array of wildlife and around 35,000 visitors a year, there’s always a lot to be getting on with.
Jenkinson came to Pukaha from Auckland Zoo where he’d led the bird team.
‘‘I was looking after the captive bird side of things and field related programmes as well,’’ he says.
‘‘I spent a lot of time on the islands in the Hauraki Gulf doing some kakapo work on Little Barrier, and some other work on Rotoroa Island.’’
Jenkinson has worked at Pukaha before.
‘‘I was down at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown at the time,’’ he says.
‘‘Pukaha has always been the place to come and learn about captive management – and I got the chance do a couple of weeks volunteering here – about 14 years ago. So when this position came up, I jumped at it.’’
Pukaha Mt Bruce sits on SH2 about 20 minutes up the road from Masterton. Just a few kilometres south lies the former of home of conservationist Elwyn Welch, who was heavily involved in bringing takahe back from the brink of extinction.
‘‘He’s one of my heroes,’’ Jenkinson says.
‘‘Back in the 50s, when they rediscovered takahe in the Murchison mountains, Elwyn was sent to collect some birds. They had no portable incubators back then so he’d trained a clucky bantam to sit on eggs in a backpack. He took the bantam down, collected the eggs, walked out with the bantam sitting on them and brought them just down the road from here to be raised.’’
‘‘That was the wildlife service back then and he became more and more involved in a lot of native captive breeding programmes – it was moved some time after that to this site and it’s been here ever since. So there’s a long history here.’’
Jenkinson’s passion for birds goes back a long way as well. Growing in inland north Otago, he was given a small book on birds – which he still has - and an incubator.
‘‘It was bucket science back then,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d go and steal eggs from the chooks, and as soon as they hatched that was the fun part done – I didn’t want to do the handrearing – so I’d chuck them under a clucky bantam and then I’d steal some more and start over.’’
It was good practice for later on – a lot of Jenkinson’s work has centred around the incubation and hatching of eggs, although from species a bit more endangered - and a lot more native - than chickens.
His first job was at the Kiwi and Birdlife Park down in Queenstown, where he did papers in captive management, and then he went to Auckland Zoo, where he met his soon-to-be wife.
‘‘She’s Australian, so we went for a honeymoon in Cairns,’’ he says.
‘‘It was winter, so we thought it would be good to live there, then came summer and I lasted 8 months.’’
Jenkinson worked in zoos in Northern Queensland and had seven years at Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, NSW – an open range zoo – before coming to Auckland.’’
At Pukaha, one of the focal species is whio, the blue duck. Its natural habitat – fast-flowing rivers – is under threat from hydro and other developments which in turn hits the whio population. But the breeding programme is making headway.
‘‘One of our breeding pairs has just had seven eggs,’’ Jenkinson says. ‘‘We’ll remove them and incubate them, which means they’ll clutch [lay] again so we can get double the amount of ducklings out of them a year. Then once the ducklings have fledged, we send them down to Turangi – where DOC has built a pre-release facility - and then they’ll be released into a fast flowing river.’’
It’s a job that can have its ups and downs, Jenkinson says.
‘‘Sometimes it doesn’t always work and things die. I know it’s a cliche –but you have to figure out what went wrong and move on. The problem is it’s sometimes threatened native wildlife so there’s a lot more at stake – and that’s a concern.’’
Two particular successes stand out. The first is when he was at Auckland Zoo and there’s been two unsuccessful sessions attempting to breed whio.
‘‘Finally we got some fertile eggs, we’d incubated them and they’d hatched – I remember the zoo director Glen Holland walking up to me and saying ‘Don’t let them die!’ I couldn’t sleep for three nights wondering if I’d turned the brooder up high enough, or too high. Would I go back and the morning and find I’d fried them?’’
‘‘But at the end of the day we fledged them and they were released – and that was a real highlight.’’
The second involved the release of a kiwi on Motuora Island. Jenkinson had been involved all the way through the process for the first time.
‘‘The egg had come in from Northland where 95 per cent of kiwi chicks die before they reach six months old because they get killed, mainly by stoats but sometimes cats,’’ he says.
‘‘I’d been entrusted with this egg – being able to incubate it, rear it and see it released – it was very motivating.
‘‘You don’t do this sort of stuff to get rich – you do it for the satisfaction,’’ Jenkinson says.
‘‘And hopefully with sustainable tourism we can grow the importance of conservation. People are getting it more these days – when we were growing up we didn’t as much.’’