Little brown mascot's cry for help

A North Island brown kiwi pokes about for grass grubs in the paddocks of Mataka Station, Northland. Picture / Amos Chapple

The call of the kiwi is an ancient sound, an eerie, high-pitched cry echoing down from the mist-covered hills of Mataka Station as darkness closes in.

Over the next few hours we will lose count of the number of North Island brown kiwi we see here, poking about in the paddocks for grass grubs or trotting away from us in that awkward-looking, lopsided kiwi way.

Mataka Station is a new 1200ha subdivision covering about a third of the Purerua Peninsula on the northern fringe of the Bay of Islands, just outside Kerikeri. The coastal land boom is changing the peninsula, from a handful of large sheep and cattle farms to a mixture of farming and property developments.

Marketed as a "conservation and farm estate" - the developers don't like the term "subdivision" - each owner leases back most of their individual 20-50ha blocks to a fully operational farm, Mataka Station Ltd.

On around 4ha, they get to build their dream home. The 30 lots at Mataka sold for $1.2 million upwards.

Mataka is virtually surrounded by sea with two private, white-sand, pohutukawa-fringed beaches. Most house sites come with spectacular views over the Pacific Ocean.

But a key plank in Mataka's marketing campaign was the wild kiwi population that thrives beyond its locked gates.

Our two kiwi guides on this misty night, are Laurence Gordon, the man who put together the kiwi protection project here, and local Kerikeri chemist Kerry Walshe.

Tall and amiable, dressed bravely in shorts despite the weather, Walshe is that breed of keen amateur ornithologist who remembers to bring the thermos of coffee and a selection of fruit bars and cake. He has a small headlight strapped rakishly around his head and drives happily for hours over Mataka's rough farm tracks in the comfortable old four-wheel-drive vehicle his wife wants him to give up.

"I tell her it comes in handy for this sort of thing," he says.

Gordon is in his mid-forties and something of a maverick in New Zealand conservation. To some, his views on how to save New Zealand's most vulnerable native species are nothing short of heresy.

His first significant involvement in a conservation project came in the mid-1990s when he applied for a grant from State Insurance to help protect New Zealand's premier songbird, the kokako, in Pureora Forest Park west of Lake Taupo.

The increase in kokako at Pureora Forest is a conservation success story, their numbers rising steadily from 10 pairs in 1995 up to 36 pairs by 1999 and still climbing. So successful has the project been - with volunteer help from the Howick Tramping Club - kokako are now taken from the forest to colonise other sites.

After Pureora, Gordon became something of a folk hero among that group of loosely connected organisations and individuals who care passionately about New Zealand's wildlife but worry the Department of Conservation is losing the battle to safeguard it.

In his turn, Gordon became one of the department's harshest critics. He fires off the usual allegations levelled at Government agencies - it is hamstrung by its own bureaucracy, it wastes money and has its priorities wrong.

But the issue he gets really angry about is pest control. The thousands of traps used by DoC around the country to ring-fence kiwi sanctuaries and other wildlife areas against predators, and in particular stoats, is a laborious and expensive exercise in futility, he says.

The relentless decline of New Zealand's national bird is due in large part to this small, weasel-like killer. While an adult bird can successfully defend itself against a stoat, kiwi chicks have no chance and are usually killed with one swift, brutal bite to the back of the head. As a result, the survival rate of chicks in the wild ranges from 5 to 40 per cent.

Gordon says his pest control recipe is cheaper and a proven success: Brodifacoum, or rat poison.

Environmentalists, hunters and farmers have waged a strong campaign against the use of this bright-green, cereal bait, saying it continues passing on toxic effects for up to two years in the environment and can be passed along the food chain.

DoC slashed its use four years ago after traces were found in kiwi, weka and morepork.

Gordon calls all this "absolute nonsense".

The poison is, he believes, the only way to ensure the survival of native wildlife where New Zealanders can actually see it - on the mainland.

"DoC's pest control is a recipe for mediocrity at best," he says.

"They do heaps and heaps of monitoring and stoat traps but if you have rats in the forest you will always have stoats."

Here at this Bay of Islands peninsula, all the usual trappings of DoC monitoring systems - the leg bands, the radio transmitters, the blood sampling and other data gathering for research - are entirely absent.

Instead, there is a Brodifacoum station every 1-1.5ha, the bait made tasty by a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter and serviced every month at a cost of around $35,000 a year.

He is scathing of DoC's much-trumpeted method of rescuing kiwi chicks, through the Bank of New Zealand-funded "Operation Nestegg", whereby kiwi eggs are taken from the wild and the young raised in captivity until they have a chance of fighting off a stoat.

"If that's how we are going to save kiwi then let's give up now," he says.

"Imagine how much that must cost. It's desperation stuff and a sign you are losing."

So numerous have kiwi become at Mataka, they are spilling over to next-door Mountain Landing, another 300ha, 40-lot development.

Gordon is quick to give credit for the success of the Purerua project to volunteer helpers, including the New Zealand Kiwi Foundation, and to acknowledge kiwi have always done relatively well in areas of Northland. Theories as to why vary, from an abundance of the fat, succulent native worms they feed on to the relatively late arrival of possums.

At another site further south, just past Orongo Bay towards Russell, a kiwi protection project started by Gordon four years ago has seen a dramatic rise in numbers.

Over more than 3000ha of rugged bush country and farmland running down to some of the most beautiful coast in the country, a good chunk of it owned by some of New Zealand's richest families, kiwi call counts have risen between 100 and 200 per cent.

Those claims are made not by Gordon but by the 18 locals who do the call counts and a caretaker for one landowner who has become a passionate convert to the Laurence Gordon way of doing things.

The caretaker did not want to be named but on a piece of polystyrene board with a mind-boggling array of coloured pins stuck into a photocopied map, he has logged kiwi calls every night since 2001, a staggering 900 nights in all.

A resident here for 10 years, he believes kiwi numbers are back to what they were a decade ago: more than 500 birds.

He has persuaded his boss to pay for another six "kiwi boxes", after the excitement of finding kiwi feathers in the first four he put out.

All this is in stark contrast not only to the rest of New Zealand but to some other parts of Northland where call counts have historically declined between 6 and 9 per cent every year.

Outside Northland, the outlook for the nocturnal, ground-dwelling kiwi is bleak. One recent example - a kiwi population in the western Bay of Plenty will be extinct in four years, according to DoC's national kiwi expert, Paul Jansen. Just 15 birds are left when the population a decade ago was 50.

Jansen says he agrees brodifacoum is effective against rats and through them, stoats, but the department was hamstrung on its use of toxins by legislation.

"That's where we have some difficulties being able to use brodifacoum for what is essentially stoat control," Jansen says.

"Because of the way the legislation is, we have to declare exactly what we are going to do with any toxin and currently it is not legal to use brodifacoum to control stoats."

Instead, DoC had "registration" for 1080 against possums and rats but for every aerial drop of the poison there was always a pocket of strong public opposition.

A joint project was underway with Australian scientists to test a new poison, PAPP, for control of feral dogs and cats in New Zealand. Dogs regularly kill kiwi in places such as Northland. But it was hoped the poison might also be effective on stoats, Jansen said, although the research was still in its early stages.

Before humans arrived in New Zealand, kiwi probably numbered somewhere around 12 million. By 1920, that had dropped to around five million and now they probably number somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 birds.

But tonight, through the swirling mist, brown feathers ruffled by the wind, they are "bobbling" about, as Gordon calls it, here and there, sometimes noticing us, sometimes not.

One walks straight into crouching Herald photographer Amos Chapple, then, realising its mistake, beats a hasty retreat. There are kiwi running along in ditches at the side of the road or appearing as distant, brown humps feeding alone in the paddocks.

They move surprisingly quickly if they don't like the look of the approaching vehicle, disappearing like shadows into low-growing and dense stands of gorse and manuka.

For these few hours, we are cocooned in another world, the trees swaying in the wind, the sound of sheep bleating in the darkened paddocks.

Having spotted at least two dozen birds, it's time to head home.

The houses, gardens and driveways are yet to arrive at Purerua Peninsula, long hot days of summer barbecues and swimming togs are still just a dream for the families who bought their coastal places here.

If Laurence Gordon and his local supporters succeed, the cry of the kiwi will go on being heard here as it has been for eons.