A huge thank you to all who volunteer for us – we couldn’t do it without you!
This is a special feature to acknowledge those wonderful volunteers who have helped make our field work and our education programme as good as they can be over the past year.
From WCPT Ranger, Lucy Waller
Scrambling through brambles and vines, sliding through thick mud on your knees and climbing up steep muddy, difficult terrain and then back down again, hours of patience searching, listening, looking and waiting through all hours of the night and day, and all this in adverse West Coast weather conditions of relentless driving rain.
Not to mention the soupy, stinky, fishy penguin guano (or less exotic and more real name – penguin poo!) that gets everywhere and the smell that never seems to go. Looking out for ticks, tape worms, and hissing, angry penguins in burrows. Clearing dead rats and stoats from traps and occasionally, sadly, penguins from burrows. Clearing bushes and tracks and technology issues that always seem to bring a new mystery and the not so exciting filing, reporting and website work.
The busy dissection classes that always bring fascinating discoveries. The hours of preparing classroom sessions, building boxes and much more. The difficult, sometimes sad, exhausted, grumpy or fed-up moments and the laughs that come before, during or after those moments – we must say a huge thank you to our volunteers! We literally could not do all our valuable work without you!
We cannot list you all by name individually, but you all know who you are, and we thank every single one of you for all your efforts and time!
Hundreds of students from different schools and classes and their teachers up and down the West Coast have helped us to spread the word and advocate for our penguins and seabirds, as they use all they have learnt through our penguin education sessions. With your help, we reach literally hundreds more people! Some incredible teachers have put so much effort and their own personal time into preparing amazing penguin projects for their classes, including nest box building, theatre, poster making, planting sessions, trap making and nest box installations. We even had a penguin ramp designed, built and tested by former Westland High School Deputy Principal and Conservation Class leader, Peter Brailsford, to help the penguins in the severe erosion we had last year, along with their nest boxes and traps they built and donated to us. And we cannot forget the parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles that have showed up to help us at the beach and in the classroom. Thank you!
One high school student, Grace Lockington, won an international woman in science scholarship last year and we were lucky enough to be the project that she chose for her scholarship. She, single-handedly sourced, prepared and built bespoke, pre-packaged nest box pieces for groups at Kaniere School to build and with the help of a motivated, passionate teacher, Maria Lockington, who has been leading penguin projects with her classes for some time, they successfully managed to donate to us, 12 nest boxes ready to put out this last season.
High school biology teacher, Sharon Macleod, spent hours in the bush with us the last two seasons, helping with trapping, monitoring, PIT tagging and our foraging study GPS trackers deployment. Teaching topics such as adaptations and animal behaviour, at the time, made for some interesting and thought-provoking questions and observations in the field, which could then be taken back to the high school classrooms. Dissection classes have always been a favourite with the level 2 and 3 students at the local high schools and a huge thanks to local vet Marjan Sprock, who gave up her time to make these sessions a huge success, and for some students, life-changing.
We have had visitors and volunteers from far and wide helping us. Ellen Richardson gave up 8 days of her busy schedule as Zoo Keeper in Wellington, to come help us in our remote colonies and for our foraging study. She even did an all-nighter at Camerons Beach with us, sitting in the bushes, waiting for a particular penguin to come home with our GPS logger attached and kept a smile on her face for the whole time.
We had a lot of equipment failure this season and we could not have got through the season without the patience and help of Chris Collins, Head of Mathematics at Westland High School. Thank you, Chris, for the last-minute, late-night burrow scope fixing sessions on our old gear for us!
We appreciate you all and know that our valuable work could not be completed without you. Thank you for a great season and we look forward to the upcoming year, working with you all again and any new volunteers that we are lucky enough to welcome.
Ngā mihi nui ki a koe!
While materials were chosen that would stand up to the harsh coastal conditions, those same coastal conditions are conducive to plant growth! Occasional checks of the fences have been carried out by volunteers and rangers so that any maintenance needs can be identified and remedied. The never-ending need for maintenance is managing the vegetation that can grow through the fence, for example gorse, blackberry and hydrangea, pushing it to breaking point in places, or flop over causing damage from the weight of rank grass, rushes and weeds such as montbretia.
Volunteers recently spent a few hours tidying up the main fence along Woodpecker Bay north of Punakaiki so a big shout out to them - thank you Fiona, Jony, Reef, Katrina, Mandy, Marty, Teresa and Deb! Flax had been pressing down on the fence, but now the fence has been freed up by these wonderful volunteers - and they picked up a fair bit of rubbish too.
Volunteer Natassja Savidge has offered to check and help maintain the Hokitika penguin protection fence and joined Ranger Lucy Waller and Manager Inger Perkins in May to inspect the length of the fence. Some minor issues were found but the main finding was the extent of the vegetation growth that was damaging the fence in places. Big thanks to Natassja!
