DOC's Senior Biodiversity Ranger for Nelson Lakes, Melissa Griffin admits it's early days, but the signs are looking positive after working with OSPRI to plan a predator control operation prior to the breeding season.
"Seeing eggs and even chicks this early in the breeding season is not unusual, but the big difference is our monitoring shows no sign of rats, stoats or feral cats in the area following the aerial 1080 operation OSPRI did for TB possum control in May.
"We know from experience, when predators visit nests, the adults will abandon their eggs or chicks, which then get eaten. Often there's no second attempt made to raise chicks for the season.
"The feral cats recorded on our cameras have dropped from 36 before the 1080 operation to nil after, with rats and stoats similarly down to nothing.
"The results so far are positive, but we'll have to wait until the end of summer to see how successful the breeding season has been for kea, and only long-term monitoring will tell us if the kea population is trending back upwards," Melissa says.
The kea population around the Wairau/Rainbow valley has taken a big hit since the late 1990s, largely driven by the big peaks in stoat and feral cat numbers that occur following beech seed fall or masts in the forests.
Predators like stoats and feral cats kill adult kea which spend a lot of time foraging on the ground year-round. For the kea population at Nelson Lakes to grow, we need to be protecting adult kea and their nests, Melissa says.
Additional funding since 2021 from the Kea Conservation Trust, World Parrot Trust, New Zealand Parrot Trust, and most recently, the Nelson Ski Club, to purchase more traps and monitoring equipment on the ground around nests has made a real difference, with some well-known pairs of kea breeding successfully over the past three seasons.
That led to 15 juveniles from monitored nests being banded and dispersing from the valley. However, with predators still being detected and relatively low numbers of kea being recorded across the area year-round, there was a need to do more, and on a bigger scale.
Melissa says it's important that everyone does their part.
"Kea have been seen on the Rainbow Ski Area this winter for the first time in years and everyone there has been doing the right thing – basically ignoring the birds and not leaving food around that would encourage them to scrounge.
"If we can get our community on board with that and continue using all the tools we have available, including regular well timed and landscape-wide predator control, there's every reason to believe kea numbers will go from strength to strength in Nelson Lakes National Park and surrounds in the future."
