Joe and Floyd are being towed from Coppermine island on a stunningly beautiful day. Photos / Supplied
Waking up at the break of dawn to the sound of seabirds thrashing through the canopy in a clumsy attempt to land on solid ground – that's how a normal workday starts for Kelsie Hackett, Floyd Howard, Joe Wesney and Gareth Davies.
The team have swapped regular 9-to-5 office jobs for a summer season off the Bream Bay coast to work on what most Northlanders call the Hen and Chicken Islands – a place where not many people have stepped foot.
Gareth and his group were hired by the Department of Conservation to carry out a pest control programme that was started back in 1995 and has since seen weeders and trappers visit the islands each year to keep habitats for native wildlife intact.
"The weeding programme has been running for 25-plus years, and they eradicated all mammalian pests off the islands in the last 10-15 years," Gareth explains.
It was Captain James Cook who gave the Hen and Chickens their names with the Hen, or Taranga as known by Ngati Wai iwi, being the largest island by a considerable margin.
The Chickens are an ensemble of Wareware and Muriwhenua islands – together called North West Chicken; the West Chicken or Mauitaha; Lady Alice Island or Motu Muka, which is also known as the Big Chicken; Whatupuke or the Middle Chicken; and the Eastern Chicken or Coppermine Island.
Gareth's crew heads out to the archipelago for 10 days at a time, setting up their camps and fighting their way through the dense bush to find remnants of prevailing weeds in the thick undergrowth.
Since it has taken years and a lot of work and sweat to eliminate pests, the group has to prepare thoroughly before heading out on their trips.
"We are starting Monday mornings at the DoC office with quarantining all our gear to check for pests and seeds – everything has to be spotless. We're going through everyone's stuff making sure there's no plant material in the pockets or anywhere," Kelsie explains.
Floyd adds: "You have to go through each other's undies. There are no secrets. It's pretty intimate. We're searching every little thing from the inside out. You'd be amazed if you put something in a washing machine, all it does is put the dirt really deep into the corner of the pockets."
No one is allowed to visit the Hen and Chicks without DoC permission, and all visitors have to go through the same rigorous quarantining procedure.
After a quick trip to the supermarket to stock up on rations – not all fresh foods, including tomatoes, cucumber and eggs, are allowed – the team heads out to Kissing Point to meet their skipper "Trev", an "all-around legend", as the group describes him.
"Trev is our favourite person," Kelsie says. "We forget something on almost every trip, and he always has something to replace it."
Trev takes the group on a two-hour trip across the Bream Bay, which can be a challenge for landlubbers as the sea tends to get rough.
Once Trev's boat nears the shore of one of the islands, the crew row across their gear – food, camping equipment, work tools and personal items – to set up their shelter for the coming 10 days.
Next to the mandatory gear, the crew can take whatever they desire and are willing to carry in their bags.
Kelsie says she would probably have the biggest backpack while the guys tend to travel light. When Gareth mentions that one pair of socks was plenty for him, it is hard to tell if he is joking.
Floyd has picked up an island hobby and brings along his violin. Although the crew assure him that it didn't sound bad when he played, he tends to look for remote spots to play.
"And I'm a spear fisherman," Joe says. "I probably take more dive gear than anything else – like two pairs of socks but then a wetsuit, two rods, a spear gun and everything else."
Because the programme has been running for so long, each island has some kind of set-up – be it a bench and shelves, gas bottles or basic kitchen gear. One island even has a hut, but usually, the group are in tents and sleeping bags at night.
Each camp has a water tank too, however the weeders keep dreaming of a proper toilet.
Instead, they use a poo bucket which has to be cleaned out at the end of the 10 days by one extremely lucky person.
"We're usually up at 6-6.30am to start our day at 7am, and we have a plan for where we want to go on the island," Gareth explains.
"We have a map of the island of where they have found weeds previously, and we'll make a little mission plan."
Together, the team heads out to specific points marked by GPS coordinates and start searching the area in a 30m radius around that spot to look for unwanted invaders.
Only once they have checked all their hot spots, the team scouts the island for unknown areas where weeds are creeping.
All weeding is done without the help of machinery: "We're digging and grubbing things out with little crowbars or bare hands. It's all manual labour," Gareth explains.
There are a few tracks on the island which the team follows as long as they can because the bush is thick and the terrain rough.
"Sometimes it'll take us three and a half hours to go less than a kilometre," Joe says.
All four have been trained at abseiling, which allows the team to access remote places.
Gareth says the days when they are suspended from ropes over steep terrain are usually the most spectacular ones, as they abseil from sheer cliffs right above the water looking out over the other islands and boats fishing down below.
The pest programme, which is also carried out on the Poor Knights, initially only targeted five plants: Mexican devil weed, mistflower, moth plant and two species of pampas, but has since been extended to more species.
"We are removing plants that will change the bush and remove habitat. Moth plants are a vine that will strangle shrubs, overtake forests and even take down trees. Pampas grass is a really common garden species, and we think that a lot of pampas that we find on the islands gets blown over from the coast. It forms dense thickets and stops regeneration of native plants," Gareth explains.
The programme also targets smilax, a creeping plant in the asparagus family which produces red berries that birds love and spread around the islands stopping endemic plants from germinating.
Gareth's group don't have to worry about chasing mice and rats anymore as the Chicken group had mammalian pests removed in the late 1990s and on Taranga the last mammals were eradicated in 2011.
However, they always have a watchful eye out for any sign of rodents which would spur a code red for the team.
Mauitaha in the Chicken group is the only island that is still home to the kiore or Pacific rat as they are viewed as a taonga species to the Ngati Wai iwi.
Since the removal of mammalian pests, native populations have recovered well and even spill over from the islands to the mainland with kaka, kakariki and grey face petrels now breeding on Bream Head.
On the archipelago itself, native wildlife is flourishing with tuatara baking in the sun, geckos and skinks sprawling around, little colonies of penguins nesting on the land and plenty of seabirds going in circles over the islands.
"A few months ago we had kiwi running through our camp, and I woke up in the middle of the night because there was one right next to my head," Joe says.
Even though days can be long and hard and the company is somewhat limited (luckily there is cell phone reception out there), Kelsie, Joe, Floyd and Gareth enjoy their job on the Hen and Chickens and appreciate the chance of combining their love for the outdoors with important conservation work.
"It's like a giant adventure. You're privileged going to these places where nature takes precedence over human exploitation," Floyd says.
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