A day of service on Motuihe Island
Călin / 07 October 2022
Today (Fri, Oct 7) I joined a few folks from our Google office to a trip to Motuihe Island volunteering for a nature conservation project.
Motuihe (Motu is island in Māori) is a small island of 440 acres in the Hauraki Gulf, about 16 km from Auckland. The island has a fairly colourful history, in the past being a quarantine station, a penitentiary with a famous escape documented in the Black Sheep podcast, and a military base.
Since 2000, the Motuihe Trust has been organising the restoration of the island to its native habitat. This involved removing all the predators from the island (possums, stouts, rats and cats – essentially all the mammals), bringing back some of the native birds, including the little spotted kiwi, and planting native vegetation. Nowadays the focus is maintaining, protecting, and continuing to plant, so basically gardening!
Our trip was organized as a midweek activity, led by a several people from the Motuihe trust. Simon, Graeme, Peter, and others have been doing this from the beginning. It shows – their charisma and experience was one of the highlights of the day.
For our tasks, we had a choice of spending the day in the nursery planting seeds in pots for planting them in the Fall (April!) or going out weeding. Our entire crew set out to weeding, since the day was truly gorgeous, and we were coming off a week of unstable weather. We paired up and received instructions on how to remove the woolly nightshade (Solanum mauritianum). This is an invasive species in New Zealand as it grows into trees that crowd out the native plants. Our job was to try to pull them out with roots – the plants varied from twigs (50cm height, 1cm diameter) to fairly large trees (2-3m height, ~5cm diameter). The soil was moist after a week of rains, so most of the trees were coming out once we got the hang of pulling them out. For the ones that didn’t budge, we cut them and used root killer on the stump to prevent them from sprouting again. While gardening is not my favourite activity, it was fun to be out in nature, stomping through knee high grass, getting into grouse bushes to find the woolly nightshades!
After a few hours we did get back to the nursery, which also had a kitchen attached, and enjoyed barbecued sausages and mandarins. We then went for a walk around the island to look for Fergus the tautara. Fergus was not in the mood for visits, i.e., the usual hanging spots where one could see him, but I had the chance to get a few other photos of the island.
The landing pier where the boat dropped us off.
The beaches are nice!
Rangitoto and Motutapu are just across to the North-West and North, respectively.
Waiheke Island is on the East side.
Downtown Auckland is not far.
And yet, the island is a refuge, peaceful and secluded.
