How the Motutapu Restoration Trust is helping bring a Gulf island back to life

NATHALIE MORRIS I've been a trustee for about two years, and took on the role of Chair in December, so I mainly look after things like our planning  and finances now. But actually I first planted out on the island about 25 years ago! After that I kept abreast of what the Trust was doing and went out to volunteer from time to time, as well as doing other things like setting up the Trust’s first website and database. So I’ve been involved in various ways for a long time. 

BRIDGET WINSTONE I started as a trustee back in the end of 2002 and I've been working out there ever since. I'm involved in the ecological side, so I do weeding and planting and work in the nursery, manage volunteers, and I'm on the Trust board.

BRIDGET WINSTONE It's actually very ancient, dating back millions and millions of years by contrast to Rangitoto, which is only 600 years old, right next door. It was one of the early places that Māori settled, and then Europeans came along in the 1840s and they gradually cleared parts of the island for farming, and it has been farmed ever since. It was the centre of Auckland's Coastal Defence System during World War II, so there's three gun emplacements on the island and lots of other historic World War II sites.

In 1990, the pōhutukawa forest on Rangitoto was dying  from possums and wallabies, so the Department of Conservation decided to get rid of all the possums and wallabies on Rangitoto. As the two islands were joined by a causeway, they had to include Motutapu. Some university professors had the bright idea of starting a restoration project on Motutapu. So the Motutapu Restoration Trust was formed and started planting native trees in 1993, and we've been working out there ever since. There’s been half a million trees put in the ground, involving volunteers from the community. Prior to planting the native forest, the island was mainly bare pasture except for a very few patches of remnant forest. By starting to plant, we started to create habitat that is appropriate for NZ wildlife.

In 2009, DOC got rid of the remaining eight species of animal pests so they could start releasing threatened species of native birds like kiwi, takahē and saddleback. They are all doing well and other species have self-introduced, flying from nearby islands now that there's a habitat where they are safe and  have appropriate food sources and shelter. 

BRIDGET WINSTONE It's approximately a hundred hectares that we've planted in that time. It doesn't sound a lot, but when you actually go out and do weed control through it, which we have to do a lot, it's big!

NATHALIE MORRIS From the ecological restoration perspective, we look after the whole end to end process from seed collection to growing plants, planting trees and then weeding the forest. The species mix of trees we're planting has been specifically designed to provide a fully fruiting forest for the birds.

BRIDGET WINSTONE It's a typical coastal lowland forest like you would have found back in the day. We are basically trying to put back what would have been there originally. 

BRIDGET WINSTONE Rangitoto is a different kettle of fish, completely different geologically. Rangitoto is virtually all pōhutukawa forest, the largest pōhutukawa forest in the world. It's just rock, so there's a lot of species that wouldn't thrive. You just wouldn't get the right mix of food for the birds and other wildlife with forest like what’s on Rangitoto because it's such a one-species forest at the moment.

NATHALIE MORRIS And also not a very good environment for certain types of birds. So for example, the kiwi, you can imagine if you've been to Rangitoto and seen the scoria that's everywhere, it's not great for their feet and beaks. 

BRIDGET WINSTONE We do two kinds of planting. We start off with what we call pioneers, the tough hardy plants that can cope with being out in the open, the wind and the sun and so on. And then, once they get up to a certain height, we come along with what we call the final phase, the giants of the forest, that will be there for hundreds of years. It's quite hard to collect some of the seeds – for instance, rimu only seeds every seven to ten years. So we don't plant them every year. We plant them when we can get the seeds.

NATHALIE MORRIS The start of the process is the seed collection. Then we have a nursery on the island where we propagate the seeds. The trees are looked after in the nursery until they reach a particular height. During the winter we get into our planting season, and that involves teams of volunteers going out and getting the trees into the ground.

NATHALIE MORRIS We’ve now got a hundred hectares of forest, so one of the challenges that we face on an ongoing basis is that there are weeds encroaching on the forest.

BRIDGET WINSTONE Serious environmental weeds, not little daisies and dandelions.

NATHALIE MORRIS Moth plant is a really big one. Over the summer we really focus on the moth plant flowering season and trying to disrupt the cycle. But there's also others including woolly nightshade and rhamnus.  We go through the forest on an annual basis, surveying for weeds and then go back and take them out to protect the forest as it goes through its growth phase, particularly when the trees are smaller.

BRIDGET WINSTONE We love getting donations from Britomart because there are a lot of things we need to spend money on.  Essentially all of our volunteer time is donated, thousands of hours a year, but we fundraise to purchase all the things we need to support their work. We have to drive our volunteers from Rangitoto to Motutapu and around the island, so we need vehicles and those vehicles need maintenance. 

NATHALIE MORRIS We have a significant nursery complex that's got a potting shed, crop house, glass house and shade houses. So, the infrastructure for the nursery is another thing that we need to maintain. At the moment we're doing an upgrade to the irrigation in the nursery that’s long overdue. We also need all the supplies and tools to support the propagation, planting and weeding work. And we employ a part-time operations manager to coordinate everything, so that's something else the money will help us support.

NATHALIE MORRIS There’s hundreds of people involved every year. We have a core team of our regular volunteers, who'll come out often one, two days a week. They are great because they know what they are doing, and can lead other groups. We have corporate groups during the week. Then we have Sunday volunteer days, where we get a range of individuals and families.

Motutapu is close to downtown Auckland. Volunteers have a great day out taking the ferry from the city across to another world on the island. It's very common to encounter birds like takahē - we have 28 takahē on the island, and it's really magical for our volunteers to see them in the wild. 

Part of what we're doing is giving a range of different people an opportunity to get engaged with conservation volunteering. It definitely feels like we're creating a legacy for future generations, not just in a forest which is relatively accessible from Auckland, but also in inspiring people to get involved in conservation.