A couple with a shared love of conservation has devoted the last seven years to protecting the banded dotterel living on the shores of Kaikōura.
The birds nest on the sand, making them particularly vulnerable to predators - especially cats - as well as tide and storm surges, and disturbance from people who can't spot the well-camouflaged birds.
Dotterels, or tūturiwhatu, are critically endangered, with numbers estimated to be about 19,000 nationally.
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Last year, Ailsa McGilvary-Howard and her husband Ted Howard were honoured with a Queen's Service Medal for their conservation work.
The pair spends their time monitoring the nests and eggs, trapping predators, researching and tracking flightpaths, advocating for cat containment, and much more.
“The males are very colourful, their bands, and they’re a very small bird, about the same size as a black bird but slightly plumper. They’re amazing little critters, they can be incredibly trusting,” Ted tells Kathryn Ryan.
“I’ve got one bird that I was present [for] when it hatched, that will let me get up to within a metre of it before it will move off its nest. For anybody else, it takes off when they’re 10 metres away.”
Ailsa says they uncovered 180 nests over about 6-8km of beach within a study in the last year.
“What our study has shown us is their vulnerabilities so one of the things we can actually do, it would make one of the greatest differences, is advocacy, because a project like this, nobody can do it alone.”
Banded dotterel chick at almost 3 weeks of age. Photo: Ailsa McGilvary-Howard and Ted Howard
They try to build understanding within the community about the threats facing the species, including the importance of keeping pets under control and minimising disturbances near nesting areas.
“Getting people to contain their animals, their cats at night and keeping their dogs under control when they’re on the beach, it’s really difficult for some people, and we’re both cat lovers and dog lovers,” Ted says.
“Technology has increased people’s ability to access remote locations,” Ailse says. “If you look at four-wheel drive ads and all these sorts of things, you see these ads are on the beach.
“Perhaps for our European culture, our first images we think of are birds in trees and I know it was such a shock to me to see this little pudding on the beach, having a nest, and the thing that lured me in was the enormous energy that the bird put into raising offspring.
“There is a conflict between nature and what people wish to do, and what people understand as their rights to do.”
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“It’s getting that idea of responsibility, we must have our freedoms and we must enjoy them but at the same time, freedom without responsibility is necessarily destructive,” Ted adds.
Each year, the population declines, they say.
“It’s so shocking to see … The last season we got six [fledglings], but the previous [season] we got two [out of 126 eggs].
“Of those two fledglings we only would’ve had one except I found what I thought was a dead egg that had been broken by a cat … and for some reason, I put it to my ear and it was ice cold and, blow me down, it made a noise and said ‘could you please put me back under my mother?’ and I thought well it’s got a chance and it actually had.
“So, within this you can see there’s huge resilience within the populations, if we could support them, they could bounce back really fast.”
Dad protects chick Photo: Ailsa McGilvary-Howard and Ted Howard
The birds tend to concentrate in the same areas that people do for the same reasons, he says.
“They come to the areas of high productivity, we come here to catch fish, birds come to catch the things that the fish are feeding on.”
Another danger for dotterels is when quad bikes are driven up to the water’s edge, he says.
“One of the things the chicks do is once they hatch, when they’re disturbed, they will run to a hole and hide in the hole, and the quad bike tracks are the nearest hole, so they tend to run to where the greatest danger is.
“They’re just dying deaths from 1000 cuts basically. None of these threats looked at individually is a particularly high threat to them but there’s not just one but dozens, and all added together, they’re a very big problem.”
“We have to protect birds when they start to decline,” Ailse says. “We can’t wait until they’re critically endangered.”
