Award for conservationist

PROTECTOR OF PLANTS: Mt Bruce's Trevor Thompson (pictured with a species of green mistletoe) has won Forest & Bird's Golden Spade Award for his commitment to plant conservation.

Trevor Thompson has gone from trapping possums with his parents as a youngster to winning a national conservation award.

Mr Thompson, of Mt Bruce, has been presented with New Zealand Forest & Bird's annual Golden Spade award for his volunteer conservation projects in Wairarapa.

At present, he is working on three major projects - with renga renga lilies on the Wairarapa coast, native species of mistletoe and the Coprosma wallii shrub.

Mr Thompson said he first developed a passion for conservation when he laid his first possum trap as a boy.

"Like many kids of my generation, I went possum trapping for a bit of pocket money," said Mr Thompson. "After that, I just kept going. I'm interested in nature and protecting it because my parents brought me up to appreciate it."

One of Mr Thompson's most involved projects is propagating various species of mistletoe throughout Wairarapa, which he has been working on for 25 years.

"I did some reading on mistletoe in Wairarapa and it said that the Tararuas should be ablaze with red with all the mistletoe plants," he said. "I knew that certainly wasn't the case."

There are currently nine species of native New Zealand mistletoe, but populations have declined since the early 1900s due to pests and a decline in native bird species, which act as pollinators.

At one point, said Mr Thompson, only three examples of Alepis flavida (yellow mistletoe) existed in Wairarapa, all living in one tree - but he since increased the number of host trees to seven and propagated a dozen plants.

He runs workshops for people interested in planting and propagating mistletoe, which he said is "quite an involved process".

For the past three years, Mr Thompson has also been working to conserve a population of renga renga lilies near Cape Palliser, at one of only two sites on the coast where the species can be found.

Renga renga lilies are rare in Wairarapa, especially in the coastal areas - as they were brought to the region by local hapu Ngati Hinewaka as a food source.

Finally, Mr Thompson is working to propagate the Coprosma wallii shrub, a rare species with only 12 plants growing in Wairarapa.

He has collected seedlings from a plant in Gladstone and will soon start planting them in legally-protected spaces. "We'd had a wet summer a couple of years back, so this one plant had really abundant fruit - and we caught at least 200 seedlings.

"It's really cool to be able to turn a rare plant into an abundant plant."

Mr Thompson, who works with farmers to help them protect natural and cultural features on their land, said he is "rapt" with his award. "But honestly, there are a heap of other people who do just as important and interesting things as I do, who just work away quietly without any recognition. So I'll be dedicating my award to them."