It started with a girl, a wetland a love for Bittern.
I have always been attracted to the beauty and secrecy of wetlands. Growing up in rural New Zealand in the 70's and 80's I spent a lot of time exploring the wetlands and waterways on our home farms. I felt connected to the wetlands and the cryptic species that called these wetlands home.
On my fathers side of the family there has been a keen birder in every second generation, so birds were always identified when seen or heard. The bird bug skipped me and landed firmly in the heart of my daughter. Her first word (after mum of course!) was bird and her early life revolved around what the birds were doing. Roll on a decade or so and I became taxi mum to a birder and company on many birding expeditions. I can still hear the excitement and matter-of-factness in my daughters voice when she announced their was a Bittern in a small wetland where she had been trapping predators in for a few years near our home. All we heard about for weeks was how amazing and rare Bittern were!
One of the locals - Helen Arthur perfectly captured the moment here in this shot of the Bittern in the wetland in Pacific Bay, Tutukaka.
A year later a new relationship led me to living alongside an amazing estuarine wetland on the Ngunguru River and a family of Bittern. To begin with I only saw fleeting glimpses of the Bittern on my daily walks and heard the boom of a male Bittern.
Armed with the knowledge that these birds were rare, I started to investigate what I could do to help them. Information was scarce and hard to interpret.
What was clear was that they needed protection from cats and mustelids, so I ramped up the trapping around the wetland with the help from a Northland Regional Council Biofund. I also checked fish passage into the wetland. A causeway interrupted the Bittern's wetland home and two culverts had been installed so water could still come to and from the mangrove swamp closer to the waters edge. Both culverts were well placed in sluggish water and open for fish and eels to come in and out.
At the same time I started to monitor and record the boom of the male Bittern in a project that I called 'Love Bittern!'. As my knowledge increased I extended the local survey to within 15km of our home site to see how many Bittern we could find, then approached Tutukaka Landcare to extend the survey along the Tutukaka Coast and spoke to the coordinator for Kiwi Coast about the project and findings. Kiwi Coast jumped on the Bittern bandwagon and reached out to their community groups to carry out acoustic monitoring around Taitokerau / Northland Region of NZ in 2023 .
One of our Bittern at the home site in Ngunguru photographed by Heather O'Brien.
At the same time 'The Love Bittern Project' started communicating with other groups around the country, corralled by John Sumich (Matuku Link) with the idea of joining together to collate data, information and apply for funding as a collective for Bittern conservation.
A few groups carried these discussions forward and together we formed the 'Bittern Conservation Trust New Zealand'. With my primary focus for the 'Love Bittern Project' of action on the ground, I left the Trust to find their feet while I continued on with a nationwide push for further community engagement around Bittern conservation
John Sumich had a vision for community led Bittern conservation and had been collecting what data he could from across the country in a ' OK Boomer' survey and sharing results and experiences with DOC and interested parties. Together we saw a growing need for the data to be pooled to give us a complete picture of how Bittern where using the wider landscape year round and for male Bittern Boom monitoring data to tell us where there might be likely breeding sites and to share this information to help Bittern conservation.
The Love Bittern project data was already being sponsored by and collected in The Conservation Hub, which was developed by 14all.agency (my son's business) and provided customised forms in the app to be able to record and store adhoc/casual sightings and monitoring data for Australasian Bittern. We went on to develop triangulation maps to help us see sites occupied and help us to estimate how many individual males we had in each project area - or in other words collect all of the data necessary to meet the DOC protocols for monitoring Australasian Bittern using the triangulation method.
The Conservation Hub mobile app (where field based data is collected) and website administration (where data can be edited, viewed and shared) was made freely available to all groups to record Bittern via the Love Bittern Project.
Ardy, testing using the Conservation Hub App alongside the paper based forms.
2023 also saw a surge in activity around Bittern Conservation and I started sharing information branded with the 'Love Bittern Project' in the form of community resources and started receiving invitations from community groups to share the knowledge and skills I had gathered with them.
In 2024 'The Love Bittern Project' went nationwide to gather and share information, tools and raise awareness for Bittern and their wetland homes launching its programs known now as 'Connect to Protect' , 'The Great Matuku Muster' , piloting 'Habitat for Hurepo' and 'Let's learn about Bittern!' (an education pack).
