EDITORIAL: From Tataweka to Hikurangi, a Predator Free roadie

KATE WATERHOUSE (AGBET Chair)

There’s a humid northwesterly and we are slogging up the newly gravelled track to Tataweka a few days after Christmas. I first walked this way aged eleven, pushing through head high kānuka regrowth over the mining road that had bulldozed along the spine of Te Paparahi. These days the grandson of that bulldozer driver is employed by Tū Mai Taonga and monitors cage traps and trail cameras trackside as part of the largest feral cat eradication ever attempted in Aotearoa New Zealand. I’ve served on its steering committee from the beginning and I’m inadvertently about to spend two weeks on a tour of three of the most important conservation efforts in Aotearoa New Zealand – Aotea’s Tū Mai Taonga, Predator Free Wellington’s Miramar Peninsula success and the 150,000 ha Raukūmara Pae Maunga project to restore the remote ranges of Tai Rāwhiti.  

We leave the Barrier and head to a wedding in Wellington after New Year, staying in Miramar at the home of a Barrier Cooper whose father hunted goats in Te Paparahi. They have only praise for Predator Free Wellington who have eliminated rats, stoats and possums on the Miramar Peninsula. There’s an explosion of tui, and that has led to a much more exciting resident – not one but two pairs of karearea, or New Zealand falcons. Out walking on Signaller’s Hill I hear them before I see them – a staccato kek-kek-kek high overhead. They wheel and circle above the bungalows and winding streets, until one abruptly dives at an astonishing speed. There are so many birds here now that falcons too can thrive. Earlier in December I’d seen a single falcon near the summit of Hirakimatā while completing the Aotea Bird Count. It’s four years since a network of more than 200 A24 self-resetting traps were installed there. Monitoring shows rat densities are down and breeding birds look like they’re are up—hence the karearea.

Besides Tū Mai Taonga, there are only a handful of iwi led PF2050 projects underway. After the wedding we head over the Remutakas and north via East Cape, towards another one—the vast Raukūmara Pae Maunga project. It aims to halt the collapse of the forests of the Raukūmara ranges, led jointly by Ngāti Porou on the east side and Te Whānau-ā-Apanui on the northern side. Five times the area of the Barrier, these mountains stretch from the borders of Te Urewera to the East Cape, but are ravaged by deer, goats, possums, stoats and rats. Its birdlife and other species such as Hochstetter’s frogs, skinks and lizards are shadows of past abundance.

Forest & Bird awarded Raukūmara Pae Maunga its top conservation award at its 100 Year celebrations in July 2023. Accepting the award the joint project lead spoke of a nine day hikoi over the rugged traditional route across the ranges as a young person and of the kiwi and other birdlife she heard. The forest was almost silent when she repeated the journey 20 years later. Since then, these two iwi – previously foes rather than allies have, in partnership with DOC, secured long term funding to trap in and treat the Raukūmara with regular 1080 to stop the forest dying and restore its mauri.

Raukūmara Pae Maunga has become more important than ever after Cyclone Gabrielle attested, once again, that forested slopes are far less likely to slip during rain events than those in pasture or forestry. The evidence of this hits us squarely in the face as we set out on the tortuous route north from Napier. Steep farmed hills are pocked with thousands of creamy yellow scars and rivers gouged out by huge volumes of water and slash, taking roads, infrastructure, homes and sometimes people with them. Past Gisborne the slips are less numerous—but much bigger, as are the hills. We are heading for the greatest Raukūmara maunga, Hikurangi—at 1752m, the highest non-volcanic peak in the North Island.

We follow the widely braided bed of the Waiapu River, home of the great Māori leader and politician Sir Apirana Ngata. It is 130 kms in length and has the highest suspended sediment load of any river in the world—because of deforestation. Hikurangi hut is a solid 1000 m climb through Ngāti Porou-run Tapuaeora station, and a graveyard of bleached podocarp trunks – rimu, matai, tōtara, all that remains of the forests on Hikurangi’s northern flank. The hut sits on the 1250 m contour at the forest edge, and all the peaks of the Raukūmara surround us. As we recover in the cool of the evening more and more birds begin to call – bellbirds, tomtits, two duelling long tailed cuckoo, chased off by whiteheads, all doing better thanks to the 1080. But at dusk the possums are quick to arrive and there’s a group of about ten deer grazing the steep slope above us.

When the sun rises out of the sea the maunga are bathed in an orange glow. It is breathtaking, but it’s two hours or more to the summit and this mountain makes its own weather. We climb through knarled beech festooned with lichen to a high terrace of tussock, spaniard and dozens of alpine plants. It’s magical. But the deer damage is obvious in eroded patches and dead trees and I see stags descend a skyline ridge. As we sidle around the north flank of the peak the mists arrive and looking at the steep rocky gut to finish the climb we turn back. Maui’s waka is said to rest in a tarn on Hikurangi’s summit ridge and Ngāti Porou artists have erected magnificent carved pou below the hut. Groups can be guided here to watch the sunrise and the stars. We are grateful for the experience of this place and continued public access to their sacred maunga.

We pass through Te Araroa in time for burgers at the Kai Kart and spend the next few days absorbing the string of marae and remote communities, and the increasing bush cover that replaces the farmed chalky coast after Hicks Bay. At Maraehako we camp and swim in the river and weka call up the valley. I wake at 5am to the pure tones of scores of bellbirds – not the deafening chorus I heard as a child at Waikaremoana, but loud enough for Rohan to think it’s the alarm going off.

State Highway 35 is glorious here— there is a marae in every settlement in the space the mountains have left between their forested skirts and the sea. Past Te Kaha I see the first weka run across the road. At first I think it’s a pheasant, but it has that unmistakeable weka shape. We cross the great bridge over the Motu river, flowing like a blue green beast from the heart of the Raukūmara to the Te Whānau-ā-Apanui rohe and the Bay of Plenty. Suddenly, another weka bolts in front of the car. Then, at the tiny village of Opape where the beaches open out and begin to stretch towards Opotiki, there’s a yellow and black road sign. It’s just like the Pāteke signs on the Barrier, except it reads: Caution – Weka.

Weka were introduced to Rakitū by the NZ Forest Service, who thought they would disappear from the East Coast in the 1950s. But now they are a risk to seabirds, skinks, geckos and other species on a rat-free Rakitū. If agreement can be reached with the iwi of the rohe that those weka came from 70 years ago, then it seems the time has come for them to return there.

Dactylanthus, the wood rose, pua o te Reinga, flower of the underworld is still found in the Raukūmara, despite the flowers being delicious to possums and needing long tailed bats or pekapeka for pollination. Like the Longtailed bat and Hochstetter’s frog, the wood rose is expected to benefit from predator removal. There were once dactylanthus on Aotea—Fanny Osborne painted them from her home above Mulberry Grove in the early 1900s. They are incredibly hard to spot unless flowering, but like the Raukawa gecko emerging on Rakitū, and the hundreds of lizards reappearing on the Broken Islands now that rodents are almost eliminated there, the wood rose may still be holding on somewhere in the forests of Aotea.

Ecosystems are so changed by the removal of vegetation and the birds, reptiles and insects that live in them. If forest clearance was the first environmental tragedy for our country, the mass colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand by small mammals was the second.

Imagine the grief of tangata whenua as they watched the transformation of forests, wetlands, food sources, and their own lands and seas over the course of the last two hundred years. This is one of many reasons why tangata whenua leadership of conservation on Aotea over the last two years is a significant step forward for our natural environment. The pressure to succeed is considerable and is shared by Raukūmara Pae Maunga, but there are no short cuts to the end goal. I am enormously proud of the Tū Mai Taonga team and grateful to Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea kaumatua and trustees for their leadership, mātauranga, patience and commitment to the kaupapa to restore Aotea.  

Kate Waterhouse is Chair of the Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust, Deputy Chair of the Auckland Conservation Board and a member of the steering committee of Tū Mai Taonga. Kate’s companions on this roadie were her husband Rohan and daughter Evie, pictured above.