Outdoors: Odd survivor of beach and bush

By COLIN MOORE

There is a touch of incongruity to the start of our walk in the Otama Block of the Coromandel Forest Park.

A sign at the road end announces that the bush we are entering on the Kuaotunu peninsula, north of Whitianga, is a kiwi sanctuary established and maintained since 1997 by enthusiastic locals.

The group has an extensive predator-trapping programme to ensure that kiwi chicks in Otama get a better than 6 per cent chance of survival - the going rate when stoats, ferrets, rats and feral cats are left to murder the defenceless chicks.

Since war has been declared on the predators it is estimated that 60 per cent of the chicks of the 40 breeding pairs of kiwi in the area have survived.

At the foot of the sign lies a long-bladed diving fin, encrusted with barnacles. Just what an old dive fin has to do with bush and the survival of the national bird is hard to imagine, except that this is the Coromandel Peninsula, where odd juxtapositions are often found.

The day before, on the unsealed Black Jack road to Opito Bay, I passed a couple a young hunters carrying a huge wild pig to their pick-up truck. Just a few kilometres from these Barry Crump characters, a large and affluent community at the Matarangi beach resort will soon tuck in to a Saturday night dinner with many of the ingredients bought from the supermarkets and boutique butcheries of Auckland. Their suburban holiday homes tend to be as different from the crude fibro baches that once dotted the Coromandel Coast as wild pork is from vacuum-packed fillets of salmon.

Change, predation and survival are pretty much the way of the Coromandel. The kauri forests, once slaughtered as ruthlessly as a stoat dispatches a kiwi chick, are slowly making a comeback in the 72,000ha Forest Park that encompasses much of the peninsula's main range.

So are other species, despite the voracious attention of possums that were first liberated in the Karangahake Gorge in the south of the peninsula in 1915. If the marsupial plague is under control you can probably thank a 1080 poison blitz somewhere, sometime, and on-going bait stations to keep populations down.

Coromandel folk are generally not the sort to welcome 1080, even if it is a naturally occurring plant toxin that is completely biodegradable. The young hunters may be relieved that pigs have an uncanny survival instinct to vomit when they feel any ill effects from food. But their dogs would not be so lucky. Neither, laments a fellow walker I meet in the Otama bush, are deer.

He is just back from a hunting trip in the central North Island and reckons the possum menace is highly overstated and the effort to kill them is doing more harm than good.

Maybe. But there is some pretty good research that shows that while some birdlife may initially fall victim to a possum-poisoning campaign, the populations of kokako, kereru and the like bounce back tenfold in possum and rodent-free years.

Not too far from the save-the-kiwi signs are some old goldmine shafts, part of the Waitaia goldmine complex. It was a rich strike and was worked much longer than the Try Fluke reef in the Kuaotunu area. Despite the continuing interest in gold, there is about as much chance of getting it out of these here hills as there is of coming across a sign in Coromandel welcoming GE.

Still, the miners and kauri bushmen, whose ingenuity and industry are grudgingly admired, left a handy legacy - the roads and tracks they benched to get ore and lumber out of the bush survive as footpaths for trampers.

It explains what that dive fin is doing in the grass at the start of the track along Waitaia Rd, just past Pumpkin Flat.

Follow the old road-cum-track and you will come out with the Waitaia stream to Waitaia beach, a typically charming Coromandel Coast bay.

There is often good surf on its pink-tinged sands, good enough to lug your board to if you do not have the wit to arrive by runabout from one of the more populous Mercury Bay beaches.

There is good diving, too - unless you lose a fin and it becomes encrusted in barnacles.

Some beach visitor no doubt found it and carried it back to the car, where a parent probably said, "You're not taking that home." Well, I did, and it is now decorating a post on my bach.

www.projectkiwi.org.nz

www.thecoromandel.com

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz