Geckos in Her Letterbox

KATE WATERHOUSE

Jude and dogs on morning walk (Credit: Kate Waterhouse)

A tribute to Judy Gilbert, founding trustee of AGBET and Windy Hill, who stepped down as Sanctuary Manager in June 2026.

Judy Gilbert is irrepressible. This morning I am following her and her two fox terriers through the bush for a wake-up walk. She knows the trails of 800ha Windy Hill Sanctuary like the back of her hand. It began as a 230ha farm in 1972 when 19-year-old Jude thought it was a good idea to buy into it with other like-minded people wanting to stop subdivisions and more loss of bush. 100 rat traps first put out in the 90s to help the birdlife turned into a network of 6,000 devices today.

This morning under the oldest trees in the sanctuary, huge kahikatea and rata and pūriri, are handfuls of sweet fat taraire berries – not a rat bite on them and really delicious. It’s one reason kererū and kākā love Windy Hill. The seedlings here are popping up even though it’s late May. They have a chance to be trees thanks to Jude and the more than 40 field staff employed over decades. And yes, there are geckos in her letterbox—baby Pacific geckos, forest geckos and even Chevron skinks, getting to be big lizards at Windy Hill.

Jude has described herself as an accidental conservationist. I’ve known her since she and John Ogden hit me up in 2011 to join this trust – not an accident. I didn’t understand what I could offer as a trustee at the time, but I turned up to the first meeting, somewhat intimidated by Jude’s knowledge and choice of classic 80’s suit jackets which she wore to monthly meetings with a selection of equally striking high heeled shoes and earrings. Otherwise, she said, what was the point in having them in your wardrobe?

At that time she had just hosted the Sanctuaries New Zealand conference at Windy Hill and the trust had weathered years of criticism over aerial rat eradication and World Heritage proposals. At one point Judy and other then GBIET trustees were even banned from the land of a number of notable island families. Those days are long gone now, and so are the suits. Instead Jude is shooting off up the hill in her gumboots, the dogs on her heels, to show me the recently pruned and composted orchard in a clearing on her share of Windy Hill. She’s joined the Barrier Social Club committee (that fashion show no coincidence) because clubs she says, are so important, and she champions other causes like the ambulance too.

Well loved by her friends for her generosity, intellect, fun, and warmth, Jude is also loved for being the kind of person who will keep at the things that are important. And she will keep trying to solve the challenges, no matter what. That approach has not been everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s made Windy Hill what it is and benefited the island in so many ways.

Judy Gilbert gets on with stuff that needs doing. Like when she ran for and was elected to the Local Board in 2013, specifically to get more money for conservation and the environment from Auckland Council. At the time it was a fairly radical thought to have island-based council staff and a budget for such things – today we have three, plus many contractors and community projects. She got in behind the Ecology Vision process and that led to the Aotea Community Nursery, and to a (then) little project that we now know as OME, plus a third one which began life as the catchily named “Feral cat free North Aotea”. She was a founding member of the Aotea Conservation Park Advisory Committee, which took up the feral cat challenge and laid down the pathway for Tū Mai Taonga. She’s still a member of the Technical Advisory Group for TMT—there is simply no-one more attuned to the behaviour and control of ship rats and kiore in the forests of Aotea. And Jude was also on the team that designed and started the Aotea Bird Count 8 years ago. No surprise she was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal for Conservation in 2017.

She’s handed on responsibility for managing Windy Hill to a new team this year, but don’t expect her to take up knitting. A predator free Aotea is her dream and thanks in no small part to her efforts it is closer than ever. Jude has pushed current tools and budgets as far as they can go. It’s up to others now to help people understand how positive a rat and feral cat free future will be for Aotea, and it’s up to the innovators to get us the tools to finish the job.

Jude would love more things to happen, preferably tomorrow. To see kōkako back in Te Paparahi again and Rakitū flourish into a seabird and skink haven. She’d love to see the rats and feral cats gone, to have tīeke waking her up from the flax in front of her home, bellbird calls drifting over the valley, and definitely more geckos in her letterbox. Meanwhile, she’s hoping to be a grandmother in the not-too-distant future. Jude, maybe time for just a wee bit of knitting?

Read more from Jude as she reflected on 20 years of this trust’s work in 2023.

And there’s Barry Scott’s interview with her about Windy Hill Sanctuary in 2024 here.