Students Go On Field Trip to See Blue Ducks
16 November 2009
More than 2000 primary school
children will this week take part in a northern Buller field
trip to learn more about efforts to save New Zealand’s
threatened blue duck (whio).
The Department of
Conservation (DoC), which operates eight national security
sites for whio around the country, is pleased with the
rapidly increasing level of interest from young people but
its rangers in the field are equally happy that the children
will only be “virtual visitors”, represented by LEARNZ
teacher Andrew Penny and his video camera, laptop and
cellphone. The whio field trip is one of a range of
curriculum-focused virtual excursions provided by
Christchurch-based LEARNZ.
Mike Slater, the Department
of Conservation’s West Coast Conservator, says the
national blue duck recovery effort illustrates all the
issues and resources involved in saving a species in New
Zealand. “Working with LEARNZ, we are able to discuss
these challenges with a very large number of young people
and show them all the elements involved, from bird surveys
and trapping predators to collecting eggs for captive
incubation and rearing,” Mr Slater says. “To do this in
person, at this depth, would take a huge amount of time and
really is just not practical.”
The northern Buller
recovery effort, centred on a stretch of the Oparara River
near Karamea in Kahurangi National Park, has been operating
since 2002. It was established in cooperation with Solid
Energy, which provides funds to maintain a ring of traps
protecting 48 kilometres of waterways in the managed area.
Since 2002, these tunnel traps have caught more than 600
stoats and 2500 rats. The energy company’s annual
$100,000 grant also supports a similar trapping effort
around a whio recovery area west of Hokitika.
This
spring for the first time, a number of Oparara whio eggs
were carefully removed and taken to the Isaac Wildlife
Trust’s Peacock Springs facility at Christchurch for
incubation and rearing. There, the young ducks are given
daily opportunities to learn watercraft and food foraging
and, once large enough to fend off most predators, will be
returned to the wild. This intervention has proven
successful in other whio recovery areas and DoC believes
that if the eggs are removed early in the nesting season,
the adult birds are more likely to lay a second
clutch.
The LEARNZ whio field trip begins on
Wednesday, 18 November.
ENDS