Heart of the country: Champions of the toheroa

By BRIDGET CARTER

Barry Searle and James Te Tuhi like to spend hours on the western coastline crouched down, rummaging through wet sand searching for toheroa.

Their fingers sift through fine, brown sand and lift out the lightly coloured or dark blue shellfish that flinch when pulled from the sand.

Mr Searle, 65, and Mr Te Tuhi, 71, from Dargaville, place the toheroa in buckets with sand and water and take them to a new home away from the north Kaipara coastline in an attempt to expand the number of places that they will grow.

The small creatures they love are among the most protected in the country, found mostly on the west coast north of Auckland and in Southland.

For more than 20 years the pair have put in endless hours of volunteer work, finding new ways to keep them alive.

Now they have toheroa successfully growing at Muriwai Beach, and others under way in the Far North.

This month, Mr Te Tuhi was awarded an honorary master of applied science degree from the Auckland University of Technology for his work.

Mr Te Tuhi and Mr Searle knew each other from their days in the Army, but the pair began working together around 1980.

Mr Te Tuhi, who is also a master carver - and the person who carved the marae at the Army's Waiouru headquarters - had retired and come home after serving in the forces.

He became the kaitiaki, or guardian, of the sea for the local people.

"I came back and thought, 'There isn't much toheroa around'," he says.

Mr Searle was living and working around Glinks Gully harvesting tuatua, a shellfish similar to toheroa that lives closer to the low tide mark.

Before that he commercially harvested toheroa for a toheroa canning factory. It later closed when the resource declined.

As they worked at their different ends of the beach, they found they shared a concern about the numbers of people they saw illegally taking away toheroa.

They started working together researching the toheroa, marking them out on the coast to see how quickly they grew and moving them around to find ways to increase the population.

They share jokes about the toheroa, calling them "fussy eaters" because they eat only about 113 types of plankton, and they say the male specimens are the envy of men because they have "80 wives".

These days, Mr Searle's garage, a treasure trove of items from the sea world, is a display room for toheroa research, with photos, news articles and research documents, including two theses on the specimens by university students.

The pair show some of this material to some of around 40 school groups they speak to about the toheroa each year.

And they have a strong appreciation for each other's work - the Erurangi Trust, which Mr Te Tuhi chairs, has awarded Mr Searle a korowai (cloak) with albatross feathers for his efforts.

Despite regulations put in place around 1980, when research showed that toheroa numbers had plummeted, the pair are still very concerned about poachers and people exploiting permits.

The Ministry of Fisheries issues several toheroa permit books to local marae, where they are distributed to allow a customary take of toheroa.

Mr Te Tuhi and Mr Searle believe much of poached toheroa gets sold on the black market in pubs and even flea markets in Auckland.

But they say their work researching the shellfish has reaped dividends.

A ministry survey on Ripiro Beach, on the Kaipara coast, has recorded a rise in numbers from 130 million in 1999 to about 400 million today.

"I want to make sure the resource is there for my grandchildren," says Mr Searle. "If we walk away now, in five to six years' time we will be back to where we were."