In this newsletter we have items on:-
WekaWatch picnic BBQ, Our 2015 AGM, 2015 counts, Our banded birds – what we are learning from studying the banded birds, Our traps and trap lines, Another mainland home for NI weka, News from Nelson, Membership and subscriptions
WekaWatch picnic BBQ
A very pleasant evening was held at Phil and Nova’s in early February. It is good to have time together with no traps to check, no weka calls to record, just to have time to talk about other stuff. We had a visit from weka George and some of his family which is fun for WekaWatchers who do not have daily weka visitors. Thank you Phil and Nova.
2015 Annual General meeting
The 7th AGM of WekaWatch Kawakawa Bay was held on 18th April.
The formal business was quickly completed. We accepted Ruth and Dave Reffin’s resignation from the committee with regret; they have been involved in WekaWatch almost since the start. We welcomed a new committee member Denise Moyle who has boldly stepped into the breach as our IT person. Our website www.wekawatch.co.nz has a new look. Denise would love more photos and news items to post on it. She has also opened a WekaWatch Facebook page. Do visit it and like us!
The 2015 Rabbit awards went to Phil Coory and John Cotman for their huge effort building 31 new DOC trap boxes, all of which are out on the lines now .
” Community buy-in; Managing weka at Kawakawa Bay; “.
Following the AGM, Tony Beauchamp talked about what he has learned about our weka population after 10 years of regular visits to Kawakawa Bay. Crucial to his conclusions is his analysis of the data from more than 5 years of our colour banding programme. See below under ‘Banded Birds’. He concluded that without our local community taking ‘ownership’ of the Kawakawa Bay weka they will not survive long term
2015 count results
We have been counting weka now for 10 years. From the initial discovery of 16 birds in 2005 to recording about 130 from 2010 to 2012 we were excited to see the population growing quite quickly. Two drought years in 2013 and 2014 saw the numbers drop dramatically to 99 in 2013 and then crash to 42 in 2014. When we had another dry January this year we feared another poor count but rain began to fall during February and has continued since. We had excellent weather for counting this year and we recorded 67 weka which was a welcome increase after 2014.
There was a higher concentration of birds, and especially pairs, near the houses between Te Papa Road and Tuturau Bay suggesting that deliberate or inadvertent feeding and/or predator control by property owners may be assisting weka in these areas. We hope the offspring of these birds will move back into the hills to assist the population recovery there too. The map shows the results over the 3 nights of counting in the core area.
Weka numbers at Orere Point (6) were close to the 2014 count (5) and included two pairs this time (none in 2014) so this is an improvement.
The persistence of weka near the houses at Orere reflects the situation at Kawakawa Bay; establishing your home range near people is a very good idea!