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Bird-Island New ZealandHomepage - Tiritiri Matangi Project
The Tiritiri Matangi Island is a nature reserve and one of New Zealand's most important and thrilling nature reserves. For a hundred and twenty years this 220 hectare island was freed from 94% of its indigenous shrub, but between 1984 and 1994 between 250,000 and 300,000 tree plants were made. Now 60% of the island is wooded, the other 40% are grasslands for open habitats, and birds and reptiles have been successfully imported, among them the airless cacao, one of the few rare bird populations in the rest of the island, and the Tuata.
New Zealand has few places where you can see and hike so many unique wildlife. It is led by the Department of Conservation in collaboration with the supporters of Tiritiri Matangi Incorporated.
There are 280,000 saplings - a tree town - into which many scarce bird and reptile life has been laid off. In view of New Zealand's biggest town. Now Tiritiri Matangi is a model for the recovery of the island and the conservation and conservation of threatened fishes. On the island, the charm begins before someone leaves the ferry: noisy, sounding birdcalls come from the forested slopes in front of us.
While the visitor walks down the quay, their gaze widens for joy at the unknown noises - that must have been what Joseph Banks intended when he described the "melodious savage musk" of early New Zealand. Bird ghosts are a diversion when the 150 Tiritiri Matangi spectators gather for a brief DOC guide.
Bird's everywhere. She pours her heart out of the tree, minute white heads scurry across the road, dust-bathing quails are driven up the road like lambs until the stupid little feather duster bullets have the purpose of drifting off into the underbrush. Bird voices arrive at a caescendo around a feeding bird, where sugared waters attract bell and stitcher.
These sugary sweet little animals tear in and out of the feeding machine, which their watchers seem to be unaware of. This large gray bird with shining bluish gills on its cheek and a dark brown face guard around its eye takes a break and then rises up to a cabbage plant close by with its powerful bill and feet. The big bird slides with its stumpy leaves over the group' s head, ends up on the course and resumes its walk.
At the top of the beacon, at the end of the hike, the visitor is amused by some of the twelve cacao of the island; large, strong, bluish and verdant bird with huge scarlet beak. There' re less than 250 of these people in the whole wide planet. Until 1948 they were considered to have died out, but on Tiri they wander around quietly and graze like flocks on the herbage.
As Tiri is an open shrine (which may seem like an oxymoron), anyone can end up there, and Hobbs Beach is a favourite destination for boaters. It'?s absolutely prohibited to feed the poultry, but Greg is skilled at assisting himself. A few condemn his behavior and say that it would be much better if Greg "behaved like a bird".
But for most of us Greg embodies Tiri, which has always been a shop window for them. Like the blackbirds and sparrows, our city flocks know how to escape from man. But because they lacked mammal robbers in the course of their development, the trustful natures of New Zealand's indigenous wildlife were their doom.
Fortunately, they are safely on the pest-free Tiri. Nature protection was fashionable when Tiritiri Matangi was planted in the 80s, and many local and local groups were interested in getting involved. From 1984-94 for ten years, several hundred voluntary workers came to Tiri, mostly in winters, which is good for the plantation of trees, but seldom ensures a trouble-free journey.
In the course of the last ten years, the "Spade Brigades", as they were called, grew 280,000 saplings - a tree town - and sown the seed of one of our most succesful nature conservation missions. Hauraki Gulf branches of Forest and Bird were the first group of communities to grow Tiri in a journey organized by Mike Lee, now Chairman of the Auckland Regional Council.
"And it rained, which gave the tree a good start," he remembers. "and for years we were planting in the Waiheke Valley. As every individual had chosen a different type, Tiri got some striated slopes. "However, the tree doesn't matter, the bird doesn't matter, and it's nothing a chain saw can't fix anyway," says Lee.
Though it seems ironical, these first plantations have become so thick that the Ranger now cut out groups of 10 to 12 plants to make bright wells and open the forrest. If you want to grow a tree today, you have to go to one of the other isles in the Bay of Tiri.
When the Tiri Waterway Tiri Waterway System gained a foothold, Craig and Mitchell proposed similar proposals for other Hauraki Gulf Rangitoto, Motutapu, Motuihe and Motuora Islands-and introduced them as "relief valves" for Tiri, just as Tiri was designed to take the pressures of Little Barrier Island. Imagining that if they thrived on pest-free islets, the bird would move to other islets and eventually show up in the back yards of land-based humans, would further disseminate the nature protection messages.
Twelve kilometers southwards of Tiri, the inhabitants of the island of Rakino were pleased with the arrival of a fistful of bellfowls. Cacariki was the first bird to be abandoned on Tiritiri Matangi 34 years ago and since then ten more uncommon or threatened bird populations have been imported.
Excluding hibernating rat and other predators, the bird has reared so diligently that the island is depleted of space and fodder for some sorts. It is a matter of "cultivating" the island, catching and taking it to other protected areas. Saddleback have been sent to Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua since 1992, spikebirds and saddleback have contributed to populating the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington, Whitehead and North Island robin went to the Tawharanui Peninsula in 2007, and spikebirds and white-heads breed in the Waitakere Ranges' Ark In The Park projekt.
Surely the gulf is seen by the bird as one unit: Besides the movements of the sea bird, caca from Little Barrier and Great Barrier flies to Tiri and are sometimes seen on the northern shore, and tomtit sometimes reach Tiri, probably Little Barrier Island. During April 2004, four workers captured and tied 32 bird species in two working day, floated them in separate pits through commuter service from Auckland and then flown them by heli.
However, after the first two week the release of the bird was rarely seen. The straight path would have taken a flight over 10 kilometers of open sea, which is an astonishing performance for a non-migratory 10 grams bushbird. "Although Tiri still shows some tom-tits from time to time, this move is not yet seen as a resounding achievement.
Supporter of Tiritiri Matangi Inc. Aside from two full-time DOC rankers, the SOTM members do most of the island's bodily work; the routes and promenades are constructed and run by voluntary workers who also help with the exploration and transfer of birds and reptiles and act as voluntary leaders. The SOTM has financed many of the new facilities in Tiri, such as the Ray and Barbara Walter Visitor Centre, which opened in 2006.
Since 1997, even the time-honored Little Barrier Island sanctuary, founded in 1895, has had its own Supporters' Trust. I started my own occupation with Tiri when I took part in a forest and bird work week-end on the island about 12 years ago. When I returned home after 20 years abroad, I was fascinated by the beautiful New Zealand.
After writing a Tiri books, I am often asked to speak to community groups about the island. Each group, even as far as Rarotonga and Iceland, I encounter people who are proud to have been planting people. Matangi Tiritiri is known in nature conservation groups all over the world, both for the miracle of his budding bird world and for his notable voluntary contributions, which continue to this day.
After working with Motuora Restoration Company for several years, Jenkins relocated to Tiri last year. The message that a rats is roaming free on Motuora Island, a kiwifruit, increased his concern about biosafety. On canceling the island excursion, the flight crews set snares that a big ratt.
" An uncommon species of Tiri in 2006 quickly eradicated a fourth of the valuable hhihi population. The aggressively introduced Ants will spread uncontrollably all over New Zealand's continent and eat anything that gets in their way. It is to be hope that Tiri will be pronounced ants-free before the end of this year.
The island's landfowl, which are almost exclusively on the wish lists, has shifted the emphasis to the reptile. Tuatara was transported by chopper from the Mercury Islands in 2003, in a version organized and financed by SOTM. In the past, the population of the lizard and the bird was suffering from Tiri:
The only reptile that survived this predator were believed to be mocca skins and cupric skins, but to everyone's pleasure the common getko, a small bay saurian was recently spotted on the island. "We also find geckoes on blooming pophukawa tree blossoms that lick them. "This phenomenon has almost completely disappeared from New Zealand's ecological system, but it is believed that many native plant varieties with nectar-containing blossoms were initially sprayed by beetles.
Marleen has unfortunately found no sign of the beautiful lush geckoes that were recorded by the Tiri light house guards until the 1960'. Mitchell said Tiri would have been an island of seabirds with a wooded bottom and a labyrinth of abyss. The seabirds would in many ways have created the basis for the island's ecosystems by transporting the ocean's fecundity via their feces (guano) and the nourishment landed for their offspring.
It' s this amazing fruitfulness, nestled in the countryside of thousand of years of marine bird nests, that probably made the tree that the volunteers on Tiri have been planting so quickly growing. However, today only a few grey-winged and scuba-divers still make their nests on the island. The open conservation area just south of Wellington has developed a technology whereby seabird chickens are taken to the island, placed in man-made caves and manually padded (on canned sardines) until they flee and flee.
Seabirds usually go back to where they were born and after a few years at sea some of the mana have come back to brood on their adopted island. The Tiritiri motherangi has established an area where our indigenous breeds can thrive, providing a window to our indigenous bird life and showing what conservation can do.
It has a bright outlook for the island's futures, although climatic changes are more likely to hit small, arid and vulnerable areas such as Tiri than continental protected areas. Over the past two low precipitation summer the shriveled berry shriveled in the hot weather and the floor was cooked until the robin could find no robin or insect.
Every spring was besieged by thirsome bird. Matangi is known for some of the strongest breezes in Hauraki Gulf (his name means "beaten by the wind"), but in July 2007 a squall of 180 km/h (97 knots) hit every one. She and her valuable residents are the responsibility of the island's caregivers, but as Ray Walter, the island's former housing director, said: "If we all left in the morning, the island would just go on.
" Meanwhile, the bell birds that moved from Little Barrier to Tawharanui and from Tiritiri Matangi to Rakino are the avant-garde of bird-watch. As Tiri's bird population increases and other shrines bloom, Hauraki Gulf is likely to return with "melodious fierce music".