Despite a lack of physical barriers between the project area and its surrounds, Forest & Bird’s Tautuku Restoration aims to create "an ecosanctuary compared to the risk-laden forest around", where regionally extinct species could one day be reintroduced to the Catlins forest.
This year, however, Tautuku Restoration trapping would simply start to extend beyond the 550ha Land Environments of New Zealand (Lenz) Reserve at the heart of the project, Forest & Bird Otago project manager Francesca Cunninghame said. Tautuku Restoration is one of 112 projects across New Zealand that received a share of the $4.2million Department of Conservation (Doc) Community Fund announced recently. The $60,000 the project received would allow "riparian trapping" in the Fleming River to extend into neighbouring Doc land.
"It’s long-term in the future to get to the stage where we would be confident of saying we have got the landscape safe enough to reintroduce species," Ms Cunninghame said.
"It’s not something I would like to put a timeline on, because it really depends on the results from the monitoring, whether we can get to that stage and how long it is going to take us."
The multi-species trapping in the Lenz Reserve, Forest & Bird’s largest, had been under way along one centrally based trap line for "several years", focusing on rats and stoats, but in January last year riparian trapping began. One of the species the group was "potentially interested in" for a future move was the whio, or blue duck, which had disappeared from the area. And while it was not yet clear whether the Fleming River was "suitable habitat-wise" for the rare endemic duck, monitoring the habitat where trapping occurred was an ongoing part of the project.
While "predator cycles" were now well understood in beech forests, they were less so in the area’s lowland podocarp rain forest on the east coast of the South Island.
The chairman of the project steering committee, Mark Hanger, said the work the funding would allow would take the project to "another level".
In his 2015 Tautuku Project Concept, he wrote the area was now habitat for problem level introduced species: brushtail possums, Norwegian rats, stoats, red deer and feral pigs.
"Some of the [native] species that did persist in Tautuku are continuing to decline in the face of ongoing predation. It is clear that if we do not reduce the numbers of introduced mammals in our forests and elsewhere, further species would also disappear forever.
Only by working on a large scale, and by "drastically" reducing the numbers of predators and introduced browsing mammals "will we help ensure the conservation and restoration of their indigenous biodiversity", he said.
Ms Cunninghame said the aim of the project was to hopefully expand the project to local iwi and the wider community to protect "what’s still there" in the Catlins.
"It’s about enhancing what’s left there and hopefully being able to add to it rather than choosing a site somewhere and trying to start again from scratch," she said.
"It’s really important at a national scale that all of us really look after or value the native species that we’ve still got where they still are."
The Doc community fund, formerly the Community Conservation Partnerships Fund, was launched in 2014 with $26million to allocate over four years. In the first three years of the fund, about $22million was granted to more than 300 conservation projects across New Zealand. In its final year the fund gave $425,000, to projects in the southern area, including the South Catlins Charitable Trust for its Curio Bay Tumu Toku Ecological Restoration and Habitat Expansion Plan ($25,000); Ngai Tahu Maori Rock Art Charitable Trust for the Ecological Restoration at Opihi Rock Art Sites ($20,000); Landscape Connections Trust for Angel cats and urban predators in the Halo ($65,000); Orokonui Ecosanctuary for its Orokonui Weed and Predator Control Project ($40,000); Dunedin Amenities Society for its Dunedin Town Belt Collaborative Community Education Initiative ($15,000); Wakatipu Reforestation Trust for its Slope Hill Wetland Restoration Project at Lake Hayes ($50,000); Routeburn Dart Wildlife Trust for its Braided Rivers Project ($50,000); and to the Otago Peninsula Biodiversity Trust for its Pest Free Peninsula work ($100,000).
