Calling night owls

This is a media release thing we just sent out about morepork monitoring...

During this February and March volunteers from Bluff Hill/Motupohue Environment Trust will be embracing the night with torch, compass and clipboard to get some more data on the morepork population on Bluff Hill.

The Trust has carried out morepork monitoring for the last 2 years so they’re keen to see if there are any noticeable changes this time around. There are 5 ‘listening points’ spread over Bluff Hill that will each be ‘listened at’ four times over the period. Morepork monitors head out to their listening point on still nights about 1 hour after dark to listen and note down the calls they hear. “Sometimes there’s nothing” says Lex Beal, the morepork monitoring organiser “But that’s still data”. In the last 2 years of monitoring volunteers have heard a few birds and some have been sighted in the bush and hunting insects in lights around the town. “A lot of places don’t have morepork anymore” continues Lex, “We’re really lucky here and we want to keep them”.

The Trust looks forward to the day when all Bluffies can go to sleep hearing the calls of the morepork. This is not an unrealistic dream as pest control especially benefits bird species such as morepork who often nest on the ground or in holes in trees where they and their chicks and eggs are very susceptible to getting eaten by pests such as possums, cats, rats and mustelids(stoats & weasels).

Luckily for the morepork, Bluff Hill/Motupohue Environment Trust has traps for mustelids spread over the whole of Bluff Hill and possum traps and rat poison covering about 100 hectares, “That’s got to make a difference to their breeding success” says trustee Mitch Bartlett. “The morepork are similar to many native birds that nest in easy to get places, in that their gender ratio is totally out of whack due to the females getting eaten while sitting on the nest. It’s pretty scary, all we can do is keep hammering the pests to help protect them“.

The rat poison that the Environment Trust uses contains the toxin ‘diphacinone’, especially chosen to lessen the risks to Bluff’s morepork of dying from eating the carcasses of poisoned rats. “Diphacinone is a ‘first generation’ poison” explains Mitch, “It has low toxicity and doesn’t store up in the rat’s carcass as much as other poisons, therefore poses low risks to anything that eats the dead rat. If we were to use another poison like Brodifacoum on Bluff Hill we could end up killing many of the very things we are trying to protect, not to mention putting dogs and cats at risk too”.

Bluff Hill Motupohue Environment Trust is looking for more people to help with morepork monitoring. Four out of the five listening points can be driven to and the monitoring doesn’t require any fitness, special skills or equipment, “Just ears and the ability to stay awake” says Lex, “I like taking a camp chair and a midnight snack with me”.

The Morepork is not found anywhere else in the World and is our only native owl since the laughing owl became extinct in the late 1800s.