Pim de Monchy – Programme Manager Moehau

Kiwi have pretty much taken over Pim de Monchy’s working life. As the Department of Conservation’s Programme Manager for Biodiversity Threats on the Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, that means taking care of the Moehau Kiwi Sanctuary.

Pim is also on the committee of the community conservation group known as MEG – the Moehau Environment Group. In this role he manages a further 7500 hectares of trapping carried out by MEG staff and funded by the Bank of New Zealand Save the Kiwi Trust.  The MEG Kiwi Sanctuary is an important buffer to stop stoats from invading the Moehau sanctuary to the north.

“The Moehau Environment Group is keen to make sure its new sanctuary is managed as well as it can be, and it’s very efficient for the department to be involved because we have the technology to load the trap information onto databases and produce maps and reports.”
 
In his role, Pim manages 15 staff and 16 contractors, and that means spending less time in the field than before he took up the Programme Manager’s role.  However, he still gets involved in kiwi monitoring, especially when the kiwi breeding season begins in October.  From then until mid-May the focus is on keeping the eggs and chicks safe from predators.
 
Stoats on the Ropes
“We’ve had great success with our stoat control,” he says.  “The first year we trapped 383 stoats, we got 299 in the second year, 134 in the third year, 107 in the fourth year, and so far we have only caught 42 in the first have of this year (2005 – 2006).”

The reason stoats are able to be so well controlled is partly because the sanctuary is on a peninsula – surrounded by sea on three sides, with just one border to guard.  And it is partly because, unlike the South Island kiwi sanctuaries at Haast and Okarito the tree species in Moehau’s forests don’t have such a pronounced ‘mast’ cycle, producing huge amounts of seed in some years.  That means the Moehau Kiwi Sanctuary doesn’t have to deal with huge explosions of mice, then stoats, which are so deadly for kiwi chicks.

Moehau is also blessed with relatively low possum numbers.  These introduced pests can also prey on kiwi eggs.  “Possums arrived relatively late in the piece, and have been controlled since the late eighties.” 

What Moehau does have is extremely high rat numbers – thousands are caught each year.  But while rats are hard on other species, they are not known as a major predator of kiwi.

Kiwi on the Coromandel
Pim came to Moehau from DOC’s Waikato Conservancy Office where he was a member of the monitoring team.  “We used to visit here but because the vegetation is in very good nick, there wasn’t much point monitoring its condition because it was hard to notice change from year to year.  So we did bird counts instead.”  The results showed that the Coromandel was a good bet for a kiwi sanctuary with good numbers of birds living in relatively healthy forest.  This proved true in 2000 when a proposal for funding was successful. 

Pim says Coromandel has a moderate number of kiwi.   A comprehensive baseline survey in 2000 identified 143 individual birds at Moehau, but he believes the population is probably bigger than that.  “The survey was done in September and October when male kiwi are on the nest which means they are silent at night, so the real number of birds may be substantially higher,” he says. 

The large-scale survey will be repeated in three-to-four years to see what difference the sanctuary is making to the Brown Kiwi’s population.  “By waiting a bit longer we should get four-to-five years worth of chicks born after the trapping began that are now breeding, and it should give us a good indication of the sanctuary’s success.”

In the meantime, from annual kiwi call counts done each May, Pim estimates the population is growing by about 12 per cent each year.  “I’m absolutely stoked with that.”

Why Kiwi?
Pim loves working with kiwi.  And he especially loves working at the Moehau Kiwi Sanctuary.  “There’s so much more here.  Archie’s frog and Hochstetter’s frog, and kaka, and it has a continuum of forest from the coast to sub-alpine.  It’s a cool place to work, even though it’s more complicated than some parts of New Zealand because two-thirds of the project is on private land.  A lot of stuff is feasible here because it’s surrounded by ocean on three sides.  This place is special.”

High Point
Establishing the Moehau Environment Group’s kiwi sanctuary is a definite high point on Pim’s radar.  That, and the birth of his first child, Marco, a true-blue kiwi, in September 2004.

Low Point
The reduction in fieldwork since his promotion to Programme Manager - but Pim says he is getting used to the idea that his new role has other influences on conservation.

The Future
Long-term, he would like to see the land between the Moehau Kiwi Sanctuary and the Project Kiwi Kuaotunu sanctuary made safe for kiwi by local communities setting up trapping regimes.  “By 2010 I would love to see the entire peninsula above Coromandel and Whitianga made stoat-free.  There’s already a lot of excellent work being done by locals on the Coromandel, and there’s a new Nga Whenua Rahui application in for Kennedy Bay.  What we’re doing here is really good, people are getting to hear about it and more and more want to get involved.”