Nature in the City Strategy – Hamilton City

 

Mangaiti Gully Restoration Trust's base camp. 

The draft has just been approved by the elected members of Hamilton City Council. It now becomes a strategy document. When the final document is available, we will post an update with a bit of the background that led up to this important strategy document that is going to underpin the restoration and protection of our indigenous and native biodiversity within our city. We would like to particularly thank Amanda Banks, Policy and Strategy Advisor, who pulled all the information and submissions together into the final document; councillor Sarah Thompson, mayor Paula Southgate for their understanding and enthusiasm for the importance of protecting and enhancing our biodiversity for our future generations and the environmental committee chaired by councillor Margaret Forsyth.   This link will take you to the Stuff website for an article summarising this occasion. https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/123574665/ten-per-cent-native-vegetation-target-set-for-city-nature-strategy

Spring tracking tunnel monitoring

 

For those that are unfamiliar with monitoring rats using tracking tunnels, these tunnels are left out all the time, so rats get familiar with them in their territory and twice a year in the spring and autumn we put an inked card in the tunnel along with peanut butter as a lure. If rats are present, then they leave black ink footprints on the card. This is a good way to record rat density. If no rats are recorded it does not necessarily mean there are no rats but it does indicate that the population is very low. We have 32 monitoring tunnels spread throughout the gully. This November we recorded 1 card with rat prints, 2 cards with mouse prints and 9 cards with hedgehog prints. Overall an excellent result and a credit to all those volunteers who service the 111 bait stations once a fortnight.  

A copy of the “Tracking Tunnel Register”, is available in the Mangaiti Gully Restoration Trust  pdf Library

Dead willows have been felled

Before 

 Thanks to a grant from Hamilton City Council (part of the $100,000 allocated for gully restoration in the last annual plan) we had two arborists from Green Footprint, working for six days felling many willows that we had poisoned in past years. The willows were becoming a problem as they were starting to fall. Uncontrolled falling was causing damage to the understory and there was a safety issue of the willows falling across public paths. Fallen willows also made access to do maintenance on the ground a problem. The heads of the trees worked a bit like a net making access difficult.

Eel deaths

Bad news. The gully systems of Hamilton have, over the years, been used as part of the cities stormwater infrastructure which reticulates rainwater from the roads and house roofs down to the Waikato river. However, the gully streams are also shared by many of our indigenous freshwater species. All this is fine and works well until some person spills or deposits a pollutant (poison) into that waterway that kills everything, as it flows downstream or until it gets diluted sufficiently not to be toxic.  This is what happened at the Haswell Street storm water outlet killing eleven eels. The small gully arm that runs up behind Sexton Road to Haswell place used to be well stocked with banded kokopu but of recent years they have all gone. It only takes one person to use the stormwater drain for the dumping of unwanted liquid toxins to clear life out of a stream. While we appreciate that this is not always intentional, there needs to be more publicity around managing our waterways. Anything other than fresh water needs to go into the sewer system via the laundry tub or the gully traps where grey water exits the house.

Rainbow skink found

A DOC file photo

 More bad news. There has been the first positive identification of rainbow skinks in Mangaiti Gully. A dead one was found on the concrete path leading off Sexton Road into the gully. The injuries to the skink that would have caused its death were consistent to a cat bite. 

We have had reports in the past from residents of Millie Place, which is in the same area, of skinks that fitted the description of rainbows, but this is the first positive ID.

Rainbow skinks are a highly invasive Australian self-import. They reproduce by laying eggs, unlike our indigenous skinks that give birth to live offspring. This enables the rainbows to reproduce much more rapidly.  There is no known means of eradicating them once they are established without also eradicating our indigenous species. The copper skink being our local one.

Wood pigeon sightings

 

There has been repeated sightings of kereru / wood pigeon in Mangaiti Gully in July, August, and September this year. These sighting were all in the northern arm of the gully in the vicinity of the Coleraine / St James over bridge and Sexton Road. This is the first time we have had persistent sights over a period of some months. This is very encouraging for the future. Many of you that live on Mangaiti Gully will remember that this was how tui started to populate the gully system not all that many years ago.

Book: Where Song Began by Tim Low

 

I purchased this book after reading an article in the winter edition of the Forest & Bird magazine, that related to tui. The book’s overall theme is that Australian birds are the origin, through evolution, of all the songbirds in the world. The earlier theory (1800s) was that songbirds evolved in Europe no doubt because they thought Europe was the centre of their early civilisation. However, DNA and LNA testing has exposed their folly. The book is in fact much wider than just songbirds. It delves into the origin of nectar feeders and parrots, both of which Australia has many. It investigated the relationship of birds’ unique habits with the equally unique Australian flora. Many trees and plants have adapted, in some cases to their detriment, to rely on their relationship with birds to reproduce either by fertilising their flowers or to distribute their seeds.

To sum up, a quote from the book,” Australia has the oldest songbird lineage as well as the wealth of form and behaviour that goes with tens of millions of years of slow and steady diversification. The evolutionary distance between a lyrebird and, say, a currawong, is larger than that between any two songbirds in Europe or the Americas.”

A you tube clip of a lyrebird calling by David Attenborough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ

I found this a really fascinating book. The only thing I struggled with was that I had little knowledge of the Australian bird (Baudin’s black-cockatoo, mallee emu-wren) and flora names but google helped me out with this as I went along. A good informative read.

9780143572817 (paperback) Penguin Random House Australia, 2017

Reviewed by Rex Bushell

Dedication to rat eradication

 

We received this email from a gully neighbour: “Last week a neighbour of ours who lives in Huntington saw a rat run from the gully across his section and across the road. He chased it and eventually killed it with a good old 4 x 2, three properties down. I wish I had it on camera.”

We wish you had a camera too! The rat was possibly a little groggy from snacking on a bait block from down in the gully!