Project Kiwi to feature on Country Calendar

 The longest running show in New Zealand, Country Calendar has been telling the stories of hardworking folk from the heartland for forty-five years.

 It was exactly forty-five years ago that Warwick Wilson bought four hundred hectares at Waitaia Bay on the Kuaotunu Peninsula in the Coromandel. Advised to clear the native bush and graze 3000 sheep, he decided instead to retain the original indigenous forest, plant a hundred hectares in pines, leave the rest as it was and take his holidays at the beach.

Then in 1995 he welcomed the chance to become part of a community initiative to protect North Island brown kiwi. In the subsequent fifteen years the Project Kiwi Trust has evolved to become one of New Zealand’s most successful kiwi conservation efforts.

Co-managers Paula and Jon Williams work and live at Waitaia Bay and have achieved over a hundred kiwi pairs along with a hundred kiwi juveniles in the two years they have managed the project.

The pair remove eggs from kiwi nests and send them away for a few months to be incubated, hatched and reared into young juveniles. When they are big enough to survive on their own the young birds return to Waitaia Bay and are released back into the wild.

The project requires a strong commitment to pest control because there are so many threats to kiwi or their habitat - including rats, stoats, weasels, feral cats, hedgehogs, possums and uncontrolled dogs.

These days, Warwick runs about a hundred sheep at Waitaia Bay to graze a coastal firebreak in case visiting boaties are careless about the environment. He laughs, now, about the advice he received in 1968 to turn it into a sheep farm because Waitaia Bay has three times as many kiwi as it does sheep.

 Don’t miss this unique insight into Project Kiwi Trust on Hyundai Country Calendar on Saturday 30 April at 7pm.