conservation

5 Simple Things You Can Do to Help Conserve Species

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It’s Conservation Week here in New Zealand. Fittingly, one of the kōwhai trees we planted years ago has chosen this week to flower for the first time.

Conservation week is a good time to talk about backyard biodiversity. I’ve blogged more than once about biodiversity issues. It’s a topic near to my family’s heart, and something we strive to improve all the time.

Our yard is, unfortunately, home to a wide variety of non-native weeds, but it also sports native plantings (and even a fair number of native ‘weeds’). Here are just a few of the simple things we’ve done to improve the habitat value of our back yard for native organisms. You could do these, too.

  1. Plant natives instead of non-natives. Here in New Zealand this is especially important, but it’s a good rule of thumb wherever you live. Native vegetation will best support native wildlife, because they evolved together. Choose plants that provide food and shelter for local wildlife—shrubs with berries for birds and lizards to eat, dense grasses that provide hiding spots for invertebrates, and flowers that provide food for insects.
  2. Create lizard refuges. A pile of rocks or a stack of broken terracotta pot shards makes a nice refuge for lizards—the rocks and terracotta warm up in the sun, making a convenient basking spot for the lizards, and the little cracks between ensure a quick, safe get-away when predators appear.
  3. Just add water. Birds, insects, and other animals all need water to survive. Provide a bird bath, a small pond, or an attractive water feature, and you’ll find many more animals drawn to your yard.
  4. Kill non-native predators. Less important in some places, but here in New Zealand, protecting native birds and lizards requires controlling invasive predators. Trap out possums, stoats, and rats to give native birds a chance to nest successfully. Put a bell on your cat and keep it indoors around dusk and dawn when the birds are most vulnerable.
  5. Learn what you’ve got. No matter how small, your yard teems with species. Look closely, and you may be surprised at the diversity. Though our yard tends to be quite dry, we’ve discovered half a dozen species of moisture-loving slime moulds on the property. Once you know you an organism is present, you can tweak your planting and maintenance to protect and encourage it.

And that brings me back to the kōwhai tree, finally blooming. It’s not enough, yet, to attract bellbirds or tūī, across the vast stretches of agricultural land between us and the nearest populations, but someday, our kōwhai and flaxes, along with the neighbours’, may very well support a healthy population of native birds. All it takes is for each of us to care for our own backyards, and collectively we can improve the habitat for all our native species.

Nīkau Palm Gully

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

img_3044-smWe spent the weekend on the Banks Peninsula. Saturday we kayaked around Akaroa Harbour all day, and today we hiked out to Nīkau Palm Gully.

The track out to Nīkau Palm Gully is easy walking, as it follows a farm track. It’s pleasant, but not exactly wilderness. The views out over Akaroa Harbour, however, are spectacular. And at the end of the track is the steep drop down into Nīkau Palm Gully.

The gully is a tiny V of land, hemmed in by cliffs, and sporting one of the few remaining remnants of original Banks Peninsula forest.

Most notable among the trees are the palms which give the valley its name. The nīkau palm is the southernmost palm in the world, and New Zealand’s only native palm. It is found in coastal lowland areas, and the Banks Peninsula is as far south as it ranges on this coast. There are nīkau scattered around the Peninsula, but the population of them in Nīkau Palm Gully is impressive.

Nīkau palms are slow-growing. They begin as clusters of leaves growing on the forest floor. It may take forty to fifty years before they begin to form a trunk, and up to two hundred years to reach their maximum height of 10-15 metres. There are individuals of all sizes in Nīkau Palm Gully.

People have been visiting the gully for many years. One tree still bears the mark of a visitor who carved the year–1907–onto its trunk. A pair of amusing (to a reader over 100 years later) letters in the Akaroa Mail in 1909 indicate that the gully was, even then, considered a special place. In the first article, a member of the Beautifying Association writes a scathing indictment of the Akaroa Boating Club for having cut down several palms in the gully to use as decoration for an event. In a subsequent issue of the Akaroa Mail, a member of the Boating Club explains that they only removed a few leaves, not whole trees. The letter writer then goes on to accuse the Beautifying Association of removing entire plants (seedlings) from the gully for their gardens.

Thankfully, the landowners whose farm once encompassed the gully understood its significance, and gifted it to the Department of Conservation (in exchange for one 10-cent stamp presented to them on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen). It is now protected as a scenic reserve, and has been linked to other patches of native vegetation through a number of land covenants on adjacent properties.