Source: NZ Department of Conservation
By Tōrea Scott-Fyfe
My first few days working on Maukahuka, I felt out of kilter. I walked confidently into the bush and found everything was a little bit off. The īnaka shrub was particularly spiky, and it had a penchant for eyes. When I got into the scrub, I found I was stuck in a net of thin, interlacing myrsine trunks that held up a thick, matted ceiling at chest height. I could only get through it by crawling, my pack snagging every time I pushed forward. I saw some tussock in the distance, and aimed for it, excited for the easy travel it promised, only to find it was thick with crown fern and stubby shrubs ready to trip me. As I fell slowly but inevitably into the mud, my hand grasped for any kind of stability and caught hold of a strand of cutty grass. It sliced. I whimpered.
Getting to the tussock was like recognising a good friend across the street, running after them, and then realising they were a complete stranger. A stranger who definitely doesn’t like being accosted by random passersby. This land wasn’t the one I knew, intimately, from all my time spent working in Te Waipounamu.
I got up, because that is what you have to do when you work in the bush. You fall over all the time, but you keep getting up. I got up, but with a new understanding wedged into my being: This place is a stranger to me. I don’t know it. It doesn’t know me. And I felt very far away.
Maukahuka isn’t completely unknown to me. You could say the island is an old family acquaintance, one I’ve never met but have heard a lot about. My Kāi Tahu whānau are mana whenua here. And my Pākehā conservation roots have got to know Maukahuka in the past, too. When I was little, my dad did several long trips to the Subantarctic, researching pakake, New Zealand sea lions. My parents have a map of the Aukland Islands on their bathroom wall. I’ve spent cumulative hours looking at the shape of these hills, and such features as “a cirque lake damned behind a rock threshold” and “Fairchilds Garden — famous for spectacular and colourful megaherbs.”
I’ve heard the stories about the many shipwrecks here. During the 2019 COVID lockdown, my family read ‘Island of the Lost’ by Jane Druett aloud to each other, comparing the very different fates of the survivors of the Grafton, who shipwrecked in calm Carnley Harbour, to those of the Invercauld, who shipwrecked on the steep western cliffs. Then there were Neville Peat’s books about the Subantarctic, full of photos and stories of wildlife, which captured my imagination almost to the same extent that dragons and castles did. This was a real-life fantasy land, full of strange beasts and wilderness.
But perhaps my prior knowledge did me no favours when I arrived. Is it really the best way to get to know someone, to run up to a stranger and say, ‘Hi! You don’t know me, but I know all about you!’? You know nothing about me, Maukahuka seemed to say.
“He meroiti te ika i rāoa ai a Tama Rereti.”
This is a whakatauki about Tama Rereti, a Kāi Tahu rakatira who journeyed into Te Moana Tāpokopoko a Tāwhaki (the Engulfing Ocean of Tāwhaki; the Southern Ocean). He travelled down in his waka Te Rua o Maahu with seventy young chiefs and two tōhuka, to find the source of the Aurora Australis. They found giant walls of ice. Then Tama Rereriti choked on a shrimp and died. It was a small fish that choked Tama Rereti, the whakatauki says. A small thing can bring down the mighty.
I keep thinking about this whakatauki as I stumble about on unfamiliar land. It’s true. If something goes wrong here, we’re a long way from help. And if we’ve forgotten anything, then that’s it, we don’t have it. All the small details are important, both for our trip and for the bigger context of the Maukahuka restoration. That’s why we’re here, after all. DOC and Ngāi Tahu are working to restore the 46,000ha of Auckland Island by removing feral pigs, feral cats, and mice, which were all introduced onto the island about 200 years ago. We’re here in the planning phase to learn everything we can, so no small fish is missed that might compromise future restoration efforts.
Exhausted, covered in mud, scratched and bruised, and having achieved much less in the day than I thought I would, I arrived back at camp feeling dejected. I have to get to know this place, I thought, as I mooched past silly sea lion pups to the comfort of my tent. The mooing of the mothers kept waking me up through the night. How do you get to know a land? I wondered, trying to reposition my bruised limbs on my thin (but surprisingly comfortable) sleeping mat. I guess the same way as you get to know anyone, I realised, woken in the early hours by the calls of an unknown seabird flapping across the sky. Time. Time, and whakawhanaukataka, and some considerately asked questions
We are here for six weeks. We have time; hours of it every day. Every day, we head out to get to know Maukahuka.
I start the next day with a karakia. Walking around the coast, I introduce myself to the motu and the tai, to the manu and the pakeke, the rimurapa and the rātā. I feel better for it. Then I begin the job of getting to know this place in another way — using science and technology.
On this trip, we’re trying to get to know more about the feral cats and the mice. We get to know the feral cats through a grid of trail cameras that we’ve placed across the wider area of Camp Cove and Coleridge Bay. These cameras are our eyes in the landscape. We put different meat sausage baits in front of each camera. Our questions are: What type of meat will the feral cats eat? Will they eat the bait at all? Also, how many feral cats are there around here, and what habitats do they live in? We have our ideas, but by using this grid of trail cameras, we can come up with evidence-based answers. We can prove our assumptions wrong or find evidence that supports our hypotheses.
For mice, we use the age-old method of putting out mousetraps. But we do it in a very organised way, with three lines of mouse traps in three different habitat types, checked daily for three nights. By doing this, we can estimate their abundance in those different habitats. After putting our traps out, we come back with our human assumptions. ‘The ground is so wet in the tussock, no way they’ll be there,’ we say, and ‘that scrub is so horrible, nothing’s going to be living in that.’ We’re all convinced that the coastal lines will have the most mice, snuggled up under the shelter of the rātā trees. The next three days of trapping proves us wrong. We catch the most mice in the tussock and the scrub, and the least mice along the coast. We don’t know how to think like mice — yet. That’s why we need to be here, gathering the evidence.
We take eDNA samples from the mice’s stomachs. This way we’ll be able to work out what they’re eating. We can take a guess — tussock seeds in the tops, coprosma berries in the scrub, probably invertebrates from everywhere. But with eDNA technology, we can know more details, and we can know which species the mice are having the biggest impact on. Those are the species that will be able to flourish once the mice are gone.
Slowly but surely, we are getting to know Maukahuka. The more time we spend here, the more evidence we collect, the more we can be sure that the removal of pests will succeed, and that it really will have a huge benefit on the native flora and fauna.
As we do this work, it feels like Maukahuka is getting to know us too. We are rewarded, daily, by small but important things. Pakake pups play together, learning social skills in the pool near our base camp. Giant petrels take off from the beach, and a black cat runs away along the coast from where it was stalking them. Korimako watch what I’m doing, full of puffed up, chiming song. A kārearea swoops me as I walk through its territory. Curious pipits on the coast run along just ahead of me, turning to watch every step I take. On a lucky day on the tops, calm and clear, I hear albatross cutting through the air before I see them, majestic and otherworldly as dragons.
And one night as we head towards bed, the sky is full of the Aurora Australis, flickering above us. Like Tama Rereti, we have journeyed to the source of the aurora. Using all the ways we can, we will do our best to leave no small fish ignored.
What questions do you want to ask to get to know Maukahuka a bit better? What small details do you think might be vital to our success? To hear more from the field follow DOC’s Conservation Blog over the next five weeks.
Getting to know Maukahuka is the first step toward its recovery—you can be part of this ambitious endeavour by supporting the project through the NZ Nature Fund, you can help turn every trail camera checked and every mouse trap set into a future Auckland Island free of introduced pests and full of thriving native wildlife.
I would like to acknowledge Neville Peat, conservationist, author and photographer, who passed away on the first of March this year.
