Four endangered NZ takahe shot on Motutapu Island. What has happened to our Department of Conservation?

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 90

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds  

Takahe - Mana Island

We posted a story on the critically endangered takahe and their distant Australian cousin and more recent arrival, the predatory pukeko in May (Broadsheet 74). We included images from Mana Island, a protected offshore island that lies off the coast, south of Kapiti. After a bumper breeding season last summer we had around 300 of these birds scattered around the country. Now we have four less.

Takahe family - adolescent in foreground - Mana Is.

The Department of Conservation employed volunteer deerstalkers to cull pukeko, which predate takahe eggs and chicks, on  Motutapu Island in the Hauraki Gulf. They gave them a morning’s training and they’ve ended up killing four. The training would have included the directive that you can’t shoot pukeko unless they’re on the wing. (It's against the law). And takahe are a big lumbering bird that can’t fly. So the training has gone out the window, as the killing got under way.

But where should blame be apportioned, because this has revealed systemic problems over the management of DoC, that aren’t being aired in the press.

Takahe - Mana Island

The Department has previously been a staunch advocate for our endangered and at risk native heritage. Over the last 7 years however, a major attack by the Government on its funding and independence, has compromised its integrity. As other Government SOE’s have been cut free of governance (then floundered into insolvency. Solid Energy is about to be followed by Landcorp - though Air NZ set the bench mark on this…) - DoC  has been forced the other way and emasculated. It now has no significant input into major environmental issues, and is reduced to issuing media massaged, good news stories to the press. Then it has been press ganged into supporting the logging of windfall forest on the West Coast, along with a commercial monorail through a pristine National Park.

It has also been required to act like a business. In raising charges to Kapiti Island, the Government effectively stopped New Zealand families from visiting it, a situation reversed shortly before the last election (There's a surprise!). It has also been required to replace redundant staff with volunteers and build partnerships with organisations which it would normally see as destructive to our conservation interests.  This includes the Deerstalkers Association who have long opposed DoC attempts to reduce the populations of introduced deer, eating their way through our native forests.

Takahe - Mana Island

Then there is the issue of Ministerial responsibility. We now have a celebrity Minister of Conservation, in Maggie Barry a former media personality who fronted a TV gardening show. These guys are usually fighting to get themselves on the 6 o’clock news; but she’s nowhere to be found.

Rare and endangered - Hon Maggie Barry Minister of Conservation

Track we were listening to while posting this

Nina Simone - Compensation

Because I have loved so deeply

Because I have loved so long

God in his great compassion

Gave me the gift of song

Jill Studd’s Blog

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