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New Year’s Honours recipient Graeme Elliott liked native birds from a young age, and has spent a lot of his working life attempting to guard them.
While different youngsters had been mad about issues like soccer rising up, Graeme Elliott’s ardour was birds.
He later spent a lot of his grownup life working to guard them, and has been recognised for his efforts –changing into an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) on this 12 months’s New Year honours for companies to wildlife conservation.
Involvement in a kākāpō restoration programme was amongst his profession highlights, with the initiative serving to enhance numbers of the native New Zealand flightless parrot from round 50 within the 90s, to over 200 immediately, he mentioned.
“They’re still not out of the woods, but there’s a hell of a lot more kākāpō than there used to be.”
DOC
Nelson-based DOC Scientist Graeme Elliott explains the results of beech masts on native birds.
Normally primarily based in Nelson, the Department of Conservation scientist spoke to Stuff final week from a subantarctic island, about 500 kilometres south of Bluff.
Every 12 months, “for the last 30-something years”, he had gone to the subantarctic islands to trace albatross together with his companion Kath, who additionally labored for DOC.
“It’s sort of Kath and my project, and we’ve kept it going when the department can’t.”
Their analysis had recognized that numbers of albatross, which bred there, had been in steep decline.
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Department of Conservation scientist Graeme Elliott makes an annual pilgrimage to the sub-antarctic islands together with his spouse Kath, to assist monitor albatross numbers.
“There’s a big wandering albatross nest here on the Auckland Islands, and there’s another one, which is a little bit different than this, on the Antipodes Islands, and they’re both being killed in large numbers by fishing.”
The hen populations couldn’t maintain the losses, he mentioned.
“They’ve declined horribly, particularly since 2005 … there’s less than half of what there used to be.”
The albatross acquired caught in lengthy strains from boats, primarily fishing for tuna to the north of New Zealand, he mentioned.
Satellite tags placed on the birds confirmed them interacting with fishing boats, Elliott mentioned.
The pair would rely albatross this 12 months utilizing a drone – expertise that they had been attempting to get working for a few years, he mentioned.
They hoped the findings would assist change fishing practices.
“At the coalface of this stuff, is sort of international wrangling with fishing companies and governments to try and persuade fisher folk to do a better job.”
There had been “all sorts of things” fishers might do to guard the albatross whereas setting and hauling their strains, like flying streamers from the again of boats to scare the birds off, and weighting the strains in order that they sank rapidly.
Elliott was thought to be “a cornerstone” of DOC’s large-scale predator management programmes, the New Year honours itemizing mentioned.
His analysis knowledgeable the method utilized to South Island forests, which was tailored for the North Island, growing numbers of forest birds and bats there.
“It’s not been plain-sailing because sometimes it doesn’t work,” he mentioned.
“So we’re trying to find out … when it does work and how you make it better, and how you make it cheaper.”
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Elliott, “felt rather nice” {that a} bunch of his mates had gone to the difficulty of nominating him for the New Years Honours record.
Elliott was additionally concerned in restoration programmes for the native kākāriki, whio/blue duck and mohua/yellowhead.
He was humbled {that a} “bunch of his mates had got together” to appoint him for the New Years honours.
“They have to do quite a bit of work … so it kind of makes you feel rather nice that people have gone to all that trouble to do it for you.”
