SUPPLIED
New Year’s Honours recipient Graeme Elliott loved native birds from a young age, and has spent much of his working life trying to protect them.
While other children were mad about things like football growing up, Graeme Elliott’s passion was birds.
He later spent much of his adult life working to protect them, and has been recognised for his efforts –becoming an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in this year’s New Year honours for services to wildlife conservation.
Involvement in a kākāpō recovery programme was among his career highlights, with the initiative helping increase numbers of the native New Zealand flightless parrot from around 50 in the 90s, to over 200 today, he said.
“They’re still not out of the woods, but there’s a hell of a lot more kākāpō than there used to be.”
DOC
Nelson-based DOC Scientist Graeme Elliott explains the effects of beech masts on native birds.
Normally based in Nelson, the Department of Conservation scientist spoke to Stuff last week from a subantarctic island, about 500 kilometres south of Bluff.
Every year, “for the last 30-something years”, he had gone to the subantarctic islands to track albatross with his partner Kath, who also worked for DOC.
“It’s sort of Kath and my project, and we’ve kept it going when the department can’t.”
Their research had identified that numbers of albatross, which bred there, were in steep decline.
SUPPLIED/Nelson Mail
Department of Conservation scientist Graeme Elliott makes an annual pilgrimage to the sub-antarctic islands with his wife Kath, to help track albatross numbers.
“There’s a big wandering albatross nest here on the Auckland Islands, and there’s another one, which is a little bit different than this, on the Antipodes Islands, and they’re both being killed in large numbers by fishing.”
The bird populations couldn’t sustain the losses, he said.
“They’ve declined horribly, particularly since 2005 … there’s less than half of what there used to be.”
The albatross got caught in long lines from boats, mainly fishing for tuna to the north of New Zealand, he said.
Satellite tags put on the birds showed them interacting with fishing boats, Elliott said.
The pair would count albatross this year using a drone – technology they had been trying to get working for a couple of years, he said.
They hoped the findings would help change fishing practices.
“At the coalface of this stuff, is sort of international wrangling with fishing companies and governments to try and persuade fisher folk to do a better job.”
There were “all sorts of things” fishers could do to protect the albatross while setting and hauling their lines, like flying streamers from the back of boats to scare the birds off, and weighting the lines so they sank quickly.
Elliott was regarded as “a cornerstone” of DOC’s large-scale predator control programmes, the New Year honours listing said.
His research informed the approach applied to South Island forests, which was adapted for the North Island, increasing numbers of forest birds and bats there.
“It’s not been plain-sailing because sometimes it doesn’t work,” he said.
“So we’re trying to find out … when it does work and how you make it better, and how you make it cheaper.”
SUPPLIED/Nelson Mail
Elliott, “felt rather nice” that a bunch of his mates had gone to the trouble of nominating him for the New Years Honours list.
Elliott was also involved in recovery programmes for the native kākāriki, whio/blue duck and mohua/yellowhead.
He was humbled that a “bunch of his mates had got together” to nominate him for the New Years honours.
“They have to do quite a bit of work … so it kind of makes you feel rather nice that people have gone to all that trouble to do it for you.”
