St Arnaud Blog

My entire allocation of annual leave in 2009 was spent in the South Island doing work for the Kea

Conservation Trust. This involved 2 trips to do nest monitoring then a brief stint in 2010 to do another survey. This is a story about what happened during these 3 trips.

The first trip was in August 2009 – in the heart of winter. The aim of this trip was to find Kea nests, have a look inside them and determine whether anyone was occupying it. The second trip was a follow up to check on what happened to the nests that I found on the first trip. The third trip was a big group effort to survey the St Arnaud, Mt Robert and Raglan Ranges to get an estimate of breeding success and population after the breeding season.

When I arrived at St Arnaud in August the weather wasn’t favourable: rain was in the forecast for the entire time I was going to be down in the South Island. But that was not all. I spent my time in August walking up and down the mountains either in the rain, hail or snow looking for obscure holes in the ground where Kea could be nesting. I did have reference points on a map to go by and sometimes some instructions. But even then it wasn’t always easy to find them. All the nests were originally found in the ‘90’s and I was there to find them again and use a GPS to mark where they were for future reference.

I was given a rental vehicle to get myself around the areas that I would be working. It was a 4 wheel drive but still not the most practical for the terrain. The car was low to the road and really struggled in the fords, especially when the rain increased and I attempted a ford crossing when heading up the rainbow ski field road. I was lucky that I didn’t end up floating down the stream towards the raging Wairau River. It was a close call and I found it hard to believe that there was no water in the motor by the end of it!

One day I was required locate some nests on the range across the Wairau River. I had crossed the same river once before – but that was in the middle of summer on a nice day. This particular day the temperature would have been about 8 degrees, the water temperature about that of freshly melted snow, and it was raining.

I decided to go bare foot and pants off so I had something warm to get into on the other side. Within seconds of putting my lower torso into the water it was all completely numb and I really had to concentrate on not falling in. Once on the other side and out of the water, feeling started to return to my extremities with an uncomfortable stinging sensation. I also had some noticeable scraps on my feet which began to hurt once the blood started flowing again. I did locate a nest that day with birds hanging around it which was good, but that also meant I would have to visit that nest on more occasions – and cross that river again.

My second river crossing did not go as well as the first. Again I was boots and pants off and half way through the torrent when I misjudgement my footing and slipped. It didn’t help that the river is riddled with didymo, which makes everything super slippery. My right arm and shoulder, my face and half of my body was submerged under the water briefly. Luckily it wasn’t too deep and I was able to push myself up with my hand. I was extremely numb and full of adrenaline by the end of the crossing. It would have been disastrous if I had fallen in and been swept away. Someone would have found my frozen, pantless body a few hundred metres away and wondered why I had no pants or boots on.

The accommodation I had was courtesy of the Department of Conservation. It was a historical building in the village of St Arnaud and being a historical building there was no insulation in it at all. It was in fact warmer outside of the building than it was inside. Luckily there was a fire inside and I spent all my time inside next to the fire, I even set up a mattress next to it so I could stay warm during the night and put extra logs on so it would still be going in the morning. The fire was also handy for drying all my gear that got drenched every day, by the end of the trip the lounge room smelt terrible due to the smelly clothes I had drying all over the place. The rain was relentless and didn’t stop the entire 2 weeks I was there. But I continued on and eventually found a nest that had a bird inside who was sitting on some eggs. Her mate was outside the nest busy defending it from another male who had unknown intentions.

I learnt on this trip that when descending a mountain it is not a good idea to rely on small branches to slow you down while moving. I learnt this the hard way and was lucky that there was a large tree to stop me falling of a bluff after a Kanuka branch failed to hold my weight. Who would have thought Kea nest monitoring was something that could cause your body to produce so much adrenaline.

On this trip I also spent a bit of time at the Rainbow Ski field. Because there are people there at that time of the year it means that there is food around – and if there is food around it means that Kea aren’t far. There was also a good coffee shop that provided a pleasant break from being outside. We managed to catch an old adult male at the ski field – the same male that had fathered the nest which I had found earlier. Usually the old Kea are weary of the traps we use to catch them but this time hunger seemed to override his judgement and he was determined to get the bait.

We took him back to the car to measure and change his old faded bands... Well that was my intention. Kea are a lot stronger than you would think and he managed to escape the grasp of the person helping me and in doing so was free inside the vehicle. I managed to restrain him again only for him then to pierce my assistant’s finger. The only way to stop him doing this was to let him chew on something else, but I couldn’t find anything and had to substitute her finger with my thumb. I then decided to let him go as it would be too hard to continue processing him. Both my assistant and I came out of it with quite impressive bite marks and nothing helpful except lessons about dealing with adult Kea. We would have to wait for the next trip...

To be continued...

Part 2

The next trip came around fast and this time I had to take my own vehicle. I loaded up my Skyline, a vehicle not at all designed to be a work horse around the mountains, and headed towards the ferry terminal. After a day’s travelling I was back at St Arnaud and low and behold it was raining again. The accommodation was still the same old building but was a bit more comfortable this time around because of the change of season. I was able to recruit some fulltime help this time, Athena who helped me for a day in the August trip was in for some more Kea punishment. I also convinced my brother to help for one weekend, this was my chance to for revenge, after all those years of an older brother picking on me, his trip to the mountains chasing Kea wasn’t going to be an easy one and I was determined to make sure this was so.

The first day out in the field was beautiful and I used the opportunity to check the ski field to see if there were any Kea haunting the abandoned slopes. The Skyline struggled in the fords luckily they weren’t high and the only obstacle was rocks, there were a few scraping sounds coming from underneath came out unscathed. The ski field was void of Kea, people and anything resembling life so we left empty handed. I was hoping the weather would continue to be fine for the entire trip but the first day was just a tease and it rained continuously until the last 2 days. I had to make the best of a bad situation and think of how to complete the aims of the monitoring.

A major priority was to revisit the nest that had 3 eggs in it in August. We accomplished this one afternoon after a slog up a mountain side. Once again I was welcomed by a male Kea sitting in a tree outside the nest which was a good sign. After squeezing myself inside the rock cavity I was elated to see more than just the female Kea running about the nook. There was mum and 2 chicks, the 3 eggs had produced 2 living offspring which is a great success in Kea reproduction terms. This is where I realised that I rather work with Kea chicks than adults any day, they looked just as cheeky but they were so docile that I was able to catch them and bag them without any traps or rope. I caught one at a time and crawled them out of the nest. I did the typical measurements, put some coloured bands on their legs, and also put radio transmitters on their backs. One thing that I found interesting was that the fledging Kea were heavier than a typical adult. Both chicks were over 1000g and adults are usually under. It just shows how much effort must be involved in raising fledging chicks from eggs.

Putting radio transmitters on parrots isn’t an easy task. First off you need to make the harness. This takes about 20 minutes from start to finish and is done before you go out in the field. The harness is designed to fall off after the battery in the transmitter has run out of juice, this is achieved by having a natural cotton link holding together two nylon threads. The cotton gets damp from being out in nature and this starts a rotting process, the theory is that the cotton should completely rot about the same time as the battery runs out. When the two nylon links come apart the harness comes apart and falls to the ground, like taking off a jersey.

During this trip Kea sightings were so few and far between we decided to try our luck looking for birds at one of the Huts in the area. Kea visit human habitation because people can’t resist rewarding them with food scraps for their jovial antics. So for them it’s an easy way to get some food. We managed to convince people at the local DOC office to give us a ride up the lake in the boat ‘whio’ and made ourselves at home at the Coldwater Hut. We amused ourselves outside on the jetty trying to attract Kea to the area with loud noises and bright coloured objects. There was a family of ducks swimming around the jetty and were a good form of amusement for few hours. They made short work of my rehydrated dinner left overs which also attracted a bunch of local eels. They missed out on any food and decided that the ducklings would make a sufficient meal. They were persistent and continued to try and gobble the baby ducks from the depths but fortunately were unsuccessful. Not long after the duck/eel interaction we were visited by a male Kea, Arnie, who we caught at the ski field in August. He spent an hour or so amusing us and the visiting trampers at the hut, then he flew off up the lake. I took extra care to watch where he was going so I could find him and hopefully his nest the next day. It turned out that Arnie was nowhere close the next day, there was no signal at all in any direction from his transmitter. So we spent the day walking back to St Arnaud, it wasn’t a great walk and it took the majority of the day and was constantly raining.

The next day my brother arrived we spent 2 days hunting the area for Kea activity, Arnie found us while we were wandering around a rock slip. While we had our backs turns stole the whole bag of cheese I had in my pack and devoured it in the trees. We also crossed the Wairau river again, it was moderately high and had us all questioning why we were doing this as we were all waist deep in the torrent. I had high expectations that there would be more fledglings in the nest that we were going to and after 3 hours of exertions we were greatly disappointed with the lack of anything inside the nest cavity. It was a solemn walk down the mountain because I had promised everyone that there would be some Kea to see. We had to get ourselves back across the river again and head home to rest our aching bodies. After the 2 days my brother was absolutely knackered and requested to be let off for the next day, reluctantly I let him sit it out, I had pushed him hard enough. He missed out on another of rain and no Kea, but there was a fun ride across a cableway and a large boulder that narrowly missed my head after being dislodged from above by Athena. She assures me it wasn’t on purpose but I reckon she was trying to get me back for all the hard work I had made her do over the 10 days.

Part 3

The previous 2 trips happened to make the survey trip easier. There were lots of people involved including volunteers and bird handling experts. We were all based at Cummings Lodge which is the DOC accommodation, it was a bit of a tight squeeze but everyone managed to secure themselves a corner somewhere. I did feel sorry for the long term residents, all these people showing up invading their home and stinking up the joint but they didn’t mind too much. We were all deployed straight away. Each bird handler was paired with a volunteer and my partner was a Science Teacher from Kings College. He was very knowledgeable and had plans to take a year off from teaching to do some research on things afflicting Kea in the wild. We made a good team I walked then waited and he caught up. There is definitely something strange about meeting a man and then sleeping next to him in a 2 man tent all in the same day. Accommodation on the mountain was the tent perched in a flat spot as close as to the survey point as possible. Being the middle of summer you would expect it to be a pleasurable experience camping out under the stars but at that altitude the weather is very similar to that of winter at sea level. Surveys were conducted I by a team that resembled worms, wrapped up all tight with only our faces visible out of the small gap in the zip of the sleeping bags. This technique proved successful and it did attract Kea, they wanted to see what the gigantic, brightly coloured worms were doing at the top of the mountain. Each survey site was pretty similar to the last, at the top of a mountain with a magnificent view in all directions. There was one incident when me and Jules were walking over what I would describe as treacherous ground when Jules found himself struggling to find the way I had picked. I got to the top of the dodgy bit of ground and laid my pack down, safely and securely, I was positive of that fact. I then went back down to help Jules find his way up. I had been gone from my pack for about 10 minutes when all off a sudden there it was, going end for end down this precipitous cliff. All I could do was watch and look for anything that might have been flung off the pack and worry about what was happening to my camera that was right in the middle of the luggage. After flipping about 20 or 30 times down the hill it wedged itself tightly between two rocks and I proceeded to climb down after it. It had gone a fair distance and there were a few casualties in the calamity including my glasses case that smashed, the fruit that I store in the top of my pack exploded and unfortunately the transmitter/receiver was no longer in working condition. Luckily my camera that was nestled nicely in amongst my clothes in the middle of the pack was safe and sound. To this day I maintain that someone must have pushed my pack over the edge, it fell 10 minutes after I had left it and wind isn’t that strong is it?? Maybe it was a combination of slanted ground, slippery tussock grass and just a small breathe of wind, because when I got up to where it fell from there was anyone to see in all the miles around. I will not be leaving my pack in such positions again. After continuing surveys for a few days we finally made it to our last over night trip. There was a nice surprise awaiting us when we arrived at the parking spot, a helicopter was there to take us to our destination. It took 5 minutes to get from where we parked the cars to get to the top of the mountain, if we were walking it would have taken the whole day. Helicopters are amazing machines. After spending the windiest night ever perched at the top of the Raglan range we where then on the home run to the end of this years survey. The last hour or so involved multiple wasp stings and a river crossing but the rest after it all was well deserved. 2011 will be the last year of the survey and will no doubt bring about some more of the same experiences. I look forward to it.