Rangers Report - September 2013

Kiwi Call CountsThe Trust is celebrating its tenth anniversary this month on the 19th September, 6.45pm at the Whangarei Heads School – everyone is most welcome to attend and enjoy the evening. It will be a fantastic opportunity to look back over the past ten years – to see how far we have come and what has been achieved. Children from Whangarei Heads School will talk about their involvement with the project and the ecological activities they are involved with. Another high light of the evening will be a talk by Ben Barr, local Herpetologist, speaking about the newly discovered skink at Bream Head, the significance of the find and what lies ahead.

KIWI CALL COUNTS: The Whangarei Heads community has been actively looking after their kiwi in association with the Department of Conservation for the past ten years with numbers steadily increasing over that time. Each autumn members of the local community man listening sites as part of a national survey of kiwi activity recording kiwi calls over four nights.
The graph shows the mean number of kiwi calls per site for the Whangarei Heads overall and specifically for the Bream Head sites.
Intensive management began in 2010 and since that time kiwi numbers appear to have grown strongly, reflected in the call counts shown here and also anecdotally by signs of activity seen by Trust contractors working in the Reserve.

Read the September 2013 Rangers Report in full (138kB pdf).