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1996

Kapiti Island - A Special Place

Dave Hansford visits a long-abused nature reserve which played a key role in the establishment of Forest and Bird. Photogrpahs also by Dave Handsford.

Lisa Anson is trying to make herself heard. She's introducing two boatloads of visitors to Kapiti Island, explaining why this place is so special. At times, she almost has to shout above the chorus of tui, bellbird, kakariki and kaka, while weka are under her feet, trying to wrest lunch bags from unattended daypacks. Which, of course, is why the island is so special.

There are few other places where, with minimal planning and a 10-minute boat ride, you can step into a world stolen from the mainland by pests and predators, by axes and matches.

For Kapiti Island is pest free (depending on your view of weka) and the birdlife here is rampant. The chorus goes on long after dawn, and the choir - saddleback, kokako, stitchbird, kaka, kiwi - can go about the business of rebuilding their numbers in peace while around them the forest regenerates.

Only a few of Kapiti's ancient giants (pukatea, rata, matai) have survived the arrival of people, but today much of the island is covered in regenerating forest. Five finger, mahoe and kanuka border re-established groves of coastal forest; karaka, kohekohe, ngaio, whau and tawa.

Because it is so special, access to Kapiti is not an unfettered right - permits are required and daily visitor numbers are capped at 50. About 8000 make the trip each year and the Department of Conservation says the visitors don't seem to be causing any adverse effects. During summer weekends and school holidays, demand commonly outstrips the available permits.

On arrival, many visitors strike out determinedly for the view from the island's summit, but a more relaxing - and rewarding - way to savour Kapiti is simply to sit in the dappled, leafy shade of the kohekohe and let the island come to you. Whiteheads chatter and fuss their way through the canopy, gleaning insects off the branches, while the leaf litter flies as saddlebacks fossick on the forest floor. Overhead, the noisy, graceless crash of an alighting native pigeon, or the somehow anomalous screech of black backed gulls over the forest. It's only a matter of time before a robin or two hops up for a closer look, and some of the older kaka, who can recall a time when feeding the birds was encouraged, will still try and cadge an offering.

Kapiti's recovery from pest-ravaged remnant to one of New Zealand's pre-eminent wildlife sanctuaries formally began in 1897 when the bulk of the island's 1965 hectares was taken by the government and designated a nature reserve. But its journey began long before then.

Around 200 million years ago, Kapiti was just another ridge in a chain of mountains that stood high on the western horizon, fusing the North and South islands. Moa and kakapo wandered through giant rata, and towering groves of podocarps such as matai and miro stretched across a shallow valley to the mainland.

Maori say it was the paddle of Kupe, brought down with a mighty slash, that severed these ranges from the mainland. In any event, some millions of years ago, the sea took most of these mountains back, leaving an island of shattered greywacke, roughly 10 kilometres long and two kilometres wide. The sea still claws furiously at the steep western cliffs; on the other side, temperate rainforest tumbles down the gullies from Kapiti's 520-metre tip, Tuteremoana, onto the sheltered, stony beaches of the east. But millions of years of exposure to the elements were nothing compared to the impacts wrought by 200 years of people and their animals.

In 1823, Te Rauparaha led his Ngati Toa warriors on a raid from Kawhia, seizing much of the Kapiti Coast in the days when conquest meant ownership. He took Kapiti for his seat of power, from where he planned and launched his military strikes well into the 1830s.

The whalers arrived in the late 1820s. With Te Rauparaha's consent, they set up seven stations on the island and a few outliers. It's likely the Norway rats came with them. Today, artefacts like iron tripots, used for boiling down blubber, still stand on Rangatira Point, and the returning forest is creeping over old walls and foundations. Meanwhile, trade developed in flax and other commodities, supporting a community sometimes 4000 strong, though they remained dependent on the mainland for most of their food and, during the dry summers, water. When whale stocks succumbed in the 1850s, the whalers left and the island's Maori moved to the mainland. Land was leased or sold mainly to European farmers who brought cattle, sheep, deer, goats and cats and set torches to the forest.

Kapiti's decline ran unchecked but not unnoticed. In 1897, as exotic pests annihilated species after species on the mainland, the Kapiti Island Public Reserve Act was passed to protect the island's surviving native flora and fauna and prevent further private land deals. Apart from installing a caretaker in 1906, however, the Government did little. Famed botanist Leonard Cockayne was among the first to warn that introduced animals should be eradicated to protect native wildlife, while expressing his concern at uncontrolled public access. Meanwhile, pioneer ranger Richard Henry, newly arrived as a caretaker, began to develop his visionary thoughts on using islands as 'lifeboats' to protect native birds.

It was 1911, however, before his successor began eradicating the island's wild cats, goats and cattle. For Captain Val Sanderson, a veteran of the South African and First World wars, this was not enough. Dismayed to find the forest playground of his youth trampled, browsed to sticks and silent, he began pressuring the Government over its obligations to protect its wildlife. Sanderson was determined and well connected. At the behest of his friend and former Prime Minister Sir Thomas Mackenzie, he rallied his allies among the press.

(Photo: A North Island kokako chick on a nest. Nine breeding pairs have been released on Kapiti since 1995 from remnant mainland populations.)

Damning articles duly appeared. 'Kapiti Island - Fenceless therefore Defenceless', catchily chided the Evening Post in 1921. It accused the Government of running the 'sanctuary' like a comic opera. 'A sanctuary in little more than name,' chimed in the Dominion.

The Department of Lands responded by hurriedly commissioning a report from the Inspector of Scenic Reserves which said possums should be the next to go. (An article about that inspector, E. Phillips Turner, also appears in this issue.) Still the Government chose not to act. Eyeing opportunities for revenue from the possums' pelts, it said the animals were unlikely to become a threat.

Sanderson's campaign redoubled in 1922 when he visited Kapiti with a party of friends. They found 5000 head of stock running free, fences down, forest stripped and erosion accelerating. In three days of searching, they recorded just one pigeon and three tui. Incensed, he cranked up his press campaign, with an estimated 13 column metres of copy published. The following March, Sanderson gathered the faithful at a public meeting in Wellington, where he mooted 'a Native Bird Protection Society be formed to co-operate with the Forestry League with the object of advocating and obtaining unity of control in all matters affecting wildlife and also the advocating of a bird for our schools.'

The motion was carried unanimously. Sanderson was elected secretary, with Mackenzie presiding. (In 1914, MP and tireless conservationist Harry Ell had formed a group with similar goals, the New Zealand Forest and Bird Protection Society, but by the twenties it was moribund. In 1934, after Ell's death, Sanderson's group took the name for its own.)

Finally, in 1928, the Government gave Sanderson a solemn promise to carry out their custodial obligations. Goats were finally eradicated as were the last of the wild sheep. The possums, however, remained. The new caretaker, Stan Wilkinson, began replanting the ravaged island in earnest, helped by Sanderson, members of his fledgling group, and the Wellington Botanical Society.

But still the possums browsed virtually unchallenged, despite warnings from a 1967 vegetation survey showing that the animals were devastating the island's forests. Conservationists were therefore astounded when, the following year, the Government announced that all possum control would be suspended, so that the then Department of Scientific and Industrial Research could 'assess whether or not possum control will, in fact, increase or harm the vegetation or wildlife.'

When Peter Daniel, Kapiti's longest-serving caretaker - and a self-confessed 'hunting, shooting and fishing' kind of guy - arrived in 1976, the island was overrun with possums, but he was forbidden to do anything about them. Forest and Bird shared his exasperation and lobbied hard for an end to the moratorium. Finally, in 1980, after someone calculated that possums nightly consumed 14 tonnes of Kapiti's foliage, the traps came out again. And this time the talk wasn't just about control, it was about eradication.

While the then Forest Service believed such a notion was impossible, Dick Veitch, fresh from eradicating cats on Little Barrier, thought otherwise. As far as he was concerned, the hurdles were psychological, not physical. In 1982, work began on cutting tracks for the possum lines, heralding seven years of back-breaking, often dangerous work in which some 19,500 possums died in more than 1.3 million trap sets. A mopping-up operation with dogs and guns, plus a single aerial 1080 drop, ended the first-ever successful possum eradication programme.

(Photo: A shining spleenwort catches the sun below a returning canopy of coastal forest. The fern's Maori name huruhuru whenua, means 'altogether glowing'.)

The forest's response was immediate. Forest and Bird Kapiti branch chairman David Gregorie remembers 'a marked improvement in the state of the vegetation. I noticed particularly the rata and kamahi flowering spectacularly, and the boom in the whitehead population that resulted.' As the birds thrived, numbers spilled over onto the adjacent mainland.

With the possums gone, people's attention turned to the kiore and Norway rats. In 1990, the Pharazyn Trust gave $30,000 for a study to test the practicalities of eradication. A DoC officer, Raewyn Empson, spent the next two years determining how best to rid the island of rats without harming its native inhabitants.

Numbers of some bird species were taken off the island, and more confined to pens, before kiore and Norway rats were eradicated in September-October 1996 with an aerial drop of brodifacoum. The operation was a world first.

Photo: Dave Hansford

At last, Kapiti was completely free of introduced mammals, making it one of the nation's most important sites for threatened species recovery. Bird counts between 1999 and 2002 showed species such as kakariki, bellbird and saddleback - all hole-nesters - have rebounded since the eradication of rats. Kakariki are now seen feeding, safe, on the ground. From the 1980s onwards, stitchbird, kokako, takahe, brown teal, and saddleback have been transferred to Kapiti to join the weka and brown kiwi already in residence, and the island remains the sole stronghold of the little spotted kiwi, now extinct on the mainland. Weka remain a contentious issue, even within DoC. It's unlikely they were naturally present on Kapiti - the present population dates from introductions earlier this century. Some say their presence will make it harder to establish other threatened species there. For now, DoC has decided to let them stay. (Left: A North Island kaka. Kapiti supports over 1000 kaka, with indications that their numbers have doubled since possums were eradicated there in the 1980s.).

More intense has been the debate over development of Kapiti's remaining private land. In 1976, a landowner began advertising tours offering fishing and day trips, and weekend camps. In 2002, he applied for resource consents to offer overnight stays. A decision by Kapiti Coast District Council to grant consent has been appealed by Forest and Bird and other parties, and this is now before the Environment Court.

Surrounding the private land is a further 149 hectares of Crown land. DoC has hinted that the area may be tracked in future, and opened to public visitation. Some groups want to see this land added to the Nature Reserve, while iwi want no changes until five treaty claims over the island have been heard.

While various parties negotiate, the island is getting on with the job of healing itself.

DAVE HANSFORD of Origin Natural History Media is a Wellington-based photo-journalist specialising in nature and the outdoors.