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!

Kōura / fresh water crayfish

The North Island Kōura Paranephrops planifrons

There are two species of freshwater crayfish or Kōura in New Zealand. The North Island species, Paranephrops planifrons has been found in the Gordonton section of the Mangaiti stream. While kōura can often be found in native, exotic and some pastoral watercourses, they are generally rare in Hamilton city streams as they are quite sensitive to urban runoff. In addition to water quality, the presence of instream structural cover (logs, undercut banks, tree roots) is crucial for supporting the presence of kōura. Cover provides shelter from aquatic and terrestrial predators and helps to trap leaves and other detritus that koura feed on.  While eels are a natural predator, if there is plenty of thick cover and undercut banks they can co-exist. The trend tends to be that the higher you go upstream and the smaller the watercourse gets, and the harder it is for fish to get to, the more kōura you find. Streams like this also tend to have lots of leaf matter and small stable pools for the kōura to eat and reproduce. In some streams where formidable waterfalls with big overhangs prevent fish access, kōura can be very abundant. Under such situations, kōura can often be observed out in the open in the middle of the day, grazing happily away on litter on the bottom stream pools, with no fish to influence their behaviour. In streams that have fish, they tend to stay much closer to cover and to only venture out into the open to feed under the cover of darkness. They have been seen grazing on algae etc on bedrock sheets out of the water, but where they can be 
kept moist.  

                                                            Koura in the Mangaiti stream. 

Barn owls are coming

Photo by NBC News

Barn owls have become established in New Zealand. They are working their way down from the north, and there have recently been sightings as close as Pokeno. They are 2 ½ times the size of our ruru / morepork and have white plumage on the front. For those that did not see the article in the Waikato Times, this link will take you to their interesting story. Waikato Times link Sat 23 May 2020.

Eel signs and ongoing threats

New signs ready for installation

The threat to our eel population is ongoing. In March eleven eels were poisoned at the Haswell Place stormwater outlet. This would have been caused by some person putting a poisonous substance into the stormwater system.

We appear to have arrested the fishing of eels by installing signs. The temporary signs, erected some years ago, are being replaced with permanent ones with a QR code. When this is scanned on a smart phone, it takes the user to a DOC You Tube clip about longfin eels, and why it is important to give them protection. It is the longfin eels that have a classification of “at risk, declining”.

Click on this link https://youtu.be/8w0kgAwv1Ps  to see eels, including longfin, and giant kokopu. This was filmed in the Gordonton Stream section of Mangaiti Gully by a local resident. This demonstrates the importance of protecting the habitat of freshwater fauna as we restore our gully back to native flora cover.