About
Spread around the country, our Trustees are all actively working on the bittern monitoring, protection, enhancement, and advocacy projects.
Coordinated Monitoring
Our original plan in 2024 for undertaking large-scale coordinated surveying of bittern booming, was to begin with a manageable chunk of the country - Coromandel to Whangārei, as a preliminary trial for future nationwide surveys.
This quickly blossomed to the National scale with Wendy Ambury’s Love Bittern project promoting the ‘Great Matuku Muster’, with great success.
The Bittern Conservation Trust coordinated counts in the Auckland and Coromandel regions, with Trustees also monitoring sites in Hawks Bay and Canterbury, with data fed back to the ‘Great Matuku Muster’ data base.
Weed Control
At Te Henga, Matuku Link gained funding (DOC Community Fund) for a 3 year program to eradicate Crack Willow from the 160 ha Te Henga wetland.
Willow is an invasive species that has steadily encroached on this wetland and is not suitable habitat for matuku hūrepo. From a small trial done 12 years ago with helicopter spraying, killing the willow allowed the native species; raupo, flax, carex, cabbage trees etc to thrive. This time we have used an agricultural drone over all the willow apart from a small area where we have agreed with neighbours, to drill and inject the herbicide.
Follow-up overflights will show any willows missed during the main control period while we will also be doing plant surveys, and assessing freshwater invertebrates and fish life over the next years.
Separate funding is allowing us to install additional predator control around the perimeter which will have a benefit to all the wetland birds.
Our annual surveys of puweto / spotless crake and matuku /bittern will be done and may show in time, improvement in the numbers of these indicator species.
Identification
In Canterbury, Trustee Peter Langland’s has been working for many years to understand and protect the regions remaining bittern population.
Current projects include photo identification techniques - determining wether photos could be used to identify individual bittern from their markings, as well as investigating the number of male and female birds and recognition of juveniles. This will provide useful information about the structure of the small bittern population in Canterbury, estimated to be down to thirty birds.
Environment Canterbury has since provided funding for Peter to further research the Canterbury population and in 2024 DOC provided trail cameras, allowing insights into the bitterns otherwise secretive lives, including nesting success!
Darwin200
During the 2023 bittern breeding season, the Trust partnered with the Darwin200 project, hosting young filmmakers who were given the challenge of creating a three part documentary series on how to save bittern from extinction.
During their stay the Darwin Leaders learnt about wetland restoration, participated in the annual Matuku survey at Mangawhai, and participated in community wetland workshops.
We eagerly anticipate the release of the short documentary series that will be a great resource for bittern advocacy and conservation.
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