SMM – Experts' transcripts

Meet Dan

I whānau mai au i te taha o te awa o Kirikiriroa, i raro i te maru o te maunga o Pirongia, ā, he uri ahau nō Scotland, nō Denmark. Kei te noho au ki Ōhaupō. Ko Dan Howie tōku ingoa. Tēnā koutou katoa.

Kia ora. My name is Dan Howie.

I'm sanctuary Operations Manager here at Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari. My job involves managing our ranger teams, which do a whole lot of important work out here on the maunga, which mainly involves things like keeping the sanctuary free of pests by monitoring and trapping those pests. It also includes maintaining our very important pest-proof fence, which helps to keep all those pests off the maunga.

Also includes things like maintaining our tracks and maintaining the roads around the mountain. And of course, it includes looking after our very precious protected species here on the maunga, things like kiwi and kākāpō.

I began working in the pest space and then have gone on to work managing our species, such as kākāpō, and now I get to work managing all of our awesome ranger team. To get here I studied, I studied a biology degree at the University of Waikato, and that was a super important foundation in the biological sciences.

And volunteering was so important to gain experience out here in the field. And it's something I really recommend that you do! Get out there in your community, get involved in local conservation projects. It's such a great way to get the experience that you need.

Meet Bodie

Tēnā koutou katoa. Ko Maungatautari te maunga, ko Ngāti Korokī Kahukura, Ngāti Hauā ngā iwi, ko Tainui te waka, ko Waikato te awa, ko Bodie Tihoi Taylor tōku ingoa. Ngā mihi rā ki a koutou.

I just want to just reiterate who I am. And so from this beautiful region of Maungatautari, and also from the Waikato River and the people of Tainui, and my name is Bodie Tihoi Taylor.

And just want to just let you know I'm the cultural advocate here in Sanctuary Mountain. And that job is all about networking and relationship, technology and making sure that we connect with different iwi across and communities across the breadth of Aotearoa, looking at translocation and other aspects to do with taonga species.

Kia ora.

Meet Will

Ko Tongariro te maunga, ko Tongariro te awa, ko Tūwharetoa te iwi, ko Will tōku ingoa.

Kia ora. I’m Will. And this is my conservation dog Tia. She's a, she specialises in tracking kiwi. I work for an organisation called Save the Kiwi, and so every day I'm out here with Tia locating kiwi that can be translocated; helping to save them, making sure that they're nice and healthy.

I've been doing this for ten years now. I started off working for DOC. But I actually started volunteering first, so I did a year of volunteering. Just giving up my time; getting trained how to do the work. And then I got a job. And so that's what I've been doing ever since.

Tia is two and a half years old, so I've only had her for, since she was three months old. She's almost finished her training. And, yeah, I get to take her to work every day, which is one of the cool things about my job. I also love sharing my work with people. So being able to take people out into the bush and share the taonga, watching people smile as they see a kiwi for the first time, is really awesome. Another cool thing about working out in the bush every day is that you're not always on tracks, so we're always walking off track usually, ‘cause that's where kiwi live. And some of the stuff you see is quite cool. You know, the really big trees, it's nice and quiet and all you can hear is birds.

So that makes me want to get up in the morning and go to work. I don't wake up and, you know, want to stay in bed. I want to be out here with Tia, just doing the hard work.

Meet Helen

Kia ora. My name is Helen and I work for Save the Kiwi.

My job here at Maungatautari is to manage the translocation project for kiwi. So kiwi get moved off Maungatautari to new homes elsewhere in the country, and I manage all that. We deal with three receiving sites and lots of volunteers, lots of iwi groups. So there's a lot of people to manage and keeping track of all the kiwi, so it's a big job.

What I like most about this job though is I still get to go out and work with kiwi in the field as well. So I do health checks on them, find them using the telemetry. So getting to do a bit of that in the field is my favorite part of the job.

I've been working with kiwi for around 30 years. So when I'm not here at Maungatautari I incubate kiwi eggs and rear the kiwi chicks. So I consider myself pretty lucky because I do get to work with these iconic birds all year round.

Meet Gaia

Hi, I'm Gaia, and I work with Save the Kiwi. My role is catching kiwi and organising volunteers.

So we're here just outside of the southern enclosure at Maungatautari, and we have a population of kiwi that lives on the mountain. So we have a whole lot of volunteers that go out and help us find them with kiwi dogs. And then we pop them in the southern enclosure for upwards of five days, and then we go and catch them on Tuesdays and Thursdays for translocation to other areas.

I got into this work originally by doing my Bachelor of Science with honours in zoology at Massey University. So I've been obsessed with animals my entire life, and that's what I wanted to do as a career. I then began volunteering with a kiwi organisation in Whakatāne called the Whakatāne Kiwi Trust, and through that I met Will from Save the Kiwi and got involved. Volunteered for about a year – learnt how to handle kiwi, catch kiwi, do everything kiwi, and then managed to get a job. And I've been here for four years now. So I keep coming back to Maungatautari each year for the translocations, helping find the kiwi, and moving them on to their forever homes.

So I didn't know, when I was at university that I'd become obsessed with kiwi. But I am fully obsessed with kiwi now. So I'm a crazy cat lady and a crazy kiwi lady. I love them. I have chicks that grow from an egg, and then I get to know them when they're really little, all the way until they’re over a kilo. I love getting to know them, seeing how they change as they get older, how much smarter and more wily they get – learning how to run away from me sometimes. I love getting to know them. I like having the siblings and seeing how similar or different they are, and just seeing a whole lot of kiwi each day, the differences in them, and it's just so rewarding knowing that we're being able to help these birds! And, yeah, I love kiwi.

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