Ngunguru, home.

The Love Bittern Project travels into every region of New Zealand empowering people to raise awareness for Bittern, help protect Bittern and to restore their wetland homes.

Check out our Spring 2025 road trip here!

1 August 2025

Kia ora! My name is Wendy.. Home for me is on the Ngunguru awa, in Taitokerau | Northland...where I spend my time with my husband and family of Matuku-hūrepo.

The Love Bittern Project is a love child in a way, an expression of love for Bittern and love in action as I travel to help communities right around New Zealand take their next step to save Bittern from the brink of extinction here in New Zealand.

I couldnt do any if this without the love and support from home... So my journey starts here to acknowledge the loves' of my life

Hear the call

We've heard it told that Australasian bittern | Matuku-hūrepo once called the people of the land as they travelled from coast to coast, their boom a sign that eels and fish were plentiful up ahead and it was safe to move on... now it is our time to help them!

The Great Matuku Muster is just 7 weeks away as I write this. Last year was the first ever nationwide synchronised count of male bittern booming. It was a huge success with over 500 people out at 462 sites we collectively counted an estimated 223 individual male bittern booming.

We need even more boots on the ground this year - we should have at lease twice as many males.

The estimated number of individual males is used as a population index. This figure is currently doubled to account for non-vocal males and females. The jury is out on this being accurate. Research in the UK on a similar species (Botaurus stellaris) found evidence of females nesting in only 50% of the sites males were heard booming. We know there is a strong gender bias here in New Zealand, females are a bit smaller than males and look after the nest and chicks on their own so are more vulnerable we think to predation and likely starvation.

In response to this we have drafted our fourth program - 'Where the future sits' to hone our skills to detect female behaviour and influence nest success. The program will be piloted this year at strategic sites and ready to roll out in 2026.

We are making fantastic progress in raising awareness for Bittern. This year we have had 966 records of bittern being seen or heard around the country, 50% more records than the previous year.

If you havent seen it already, you can view our latest updates in our newsletter here.

LoveBittern Newsletter July 2025.pdf

Download PDF • 1.06MB

As encouraging as this all is we need to keep our foot on the throttle to save this species before, like many others it shares the "Threatened - Critically endangered' conservation status with, they need to be picked up by the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff .

We need to act now to save Bittern in their natural wetland homes.

With all of our tools and resources set, we are embarking on another campaign traveling around the country to build the capacity and capability in our communities to advocate for Bittern, to protect and restore their wetland homes and to be able to record bittern in a way that provides us data that is meaningful and can help inform strategies at a national level.

Wendy on a visit to Opoutama on the Mahia Peninsula in March 2025 -thanks Helen J for the pic!

How it all started, Wendy's story

It started with a girl, a wetland and 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).