Mangaiti’s very own Jurassic Park

The pine trees in the north end of Mangaiti Gully behind Rototuna Primary School have several pairs of white-faced herons nesting in them every season. Watching the activity of these three looked and sounded very prehistoric. Double click on the video to enlarge picture. This video was taken on an old iPhone. It would have be so much better if taken with a good video camera/phone with a zoom lens.

A duck nest in July

Our weeding team came across this mallard (or a hybrid variant) duck nest of fourteen eggs. Birds that have the most breeding success in a predator environment have evolved to have either large clutches or nest several times in a season or both. This ensures they maintain or increase their population. Because our New Zealand indigenous species did not evolve with predators, or very low predation, their nesting frequency and number of eggs per clutch tends to be smaller. This, with other environmental pressures, all to often puts our indigenous species into the “at - risk / declining” in the DoC category. The biggest threat to this duck brood would be hedgehogs, pukeko and domestic cats.

Moving into another restoration area – The Pines

This season we have been opening up another space to add to our restoration area. Called “The Pines” it is the area behind Rototuna Primary School where there are very old large pine trees. General access is from the end of Cabernet Close. Service tracks are being built (photo, before and after), and early plantings have been done by the cubs and scouts on the easier to access parts. Ultimately, we are aiming to create a tawa forest under the pines. We have over 100 seedlings being raised in pots for this. Tawa are frost tender at their early stage of growth so the pines should offer them frost protection, and being tall and old the pines will allow plenty of light through to ensure good growth of the young tawa. The pine trees can be seen in the top back ground of the photos

Eel platform over popular

The Mangaiti eel feeding platform was listed on several Facebook pages over the school holidays as a free activity to do with kids. Unfortunately, this overwhelmed the facility. The eels could not eat all the food that was being offered, which resulted in large quantities of food littering the stream bed. Our Trust volunteers had to remove the surplus food using a net. One of these extractions resulted in removing 2.7Kgs. If you are at the platform and there is food littering the stream bed, please do not add to it. Our security camera, put up to protect the eels, had so much activity that the solar panel could not keep the battery fully charged, which meant the panel had to be upgraded from 3.2W to a 6W.

Community engagement

One of our Trust’s objectives is to have community engagement. In this past year we have had Sam the Trap Man “walk and talk” which was organised by HCC. Sam is so knowledgeable and a great storyteller. He can make little things so interesting. We hosted the Green Pavlova conference field day. This conference was attended by a number of council employees from around New Zealand. They showed a lot on interest in how our Trust worked and were particularly impressed with our achievements. National Tree Cropper Association’s conference also had a gully visit to Mangaiti as one of their field day options. There was an impressive amount of interest considering our restoration project was a bit outside their sphere of interest. The Kids in Nature programme run by HCC had numerous school class visits to see the eels. Three students from Rototuna High School chose our trust for their community project this year and have been attending our Wednesday working bees each week. We hosted the scouts and cubs (Photo)with a planting each this season. It was fortunate that this season we had suitable planting areas for this type of group planting. It was done between 6.30 and 8pm in the evening. We put up a temporary light and most had head lamps. They were all so enthusiastic.