Heart of the country: A kiwi heaven - with cows

By ANNE BESTON

The rolling green pastureland of southern Waikato is about the last place you would expect to find kiwi.

Yet they are here, 15 chicks hidden away in this small Karapiro valley where State Highway 1 is a distant roar and black and white cows graze just a few metres away.

Warrenheip is a kiwi kindergarten, the only one of its type in the country and because it is on privately owned land that the Department of Conservation is paying to use, it has blurred the line between private and public conservation.

"It's unique, there's no question about that," says DoC's Waikato area manager, Tony Roxborough.

Warrenheip belongs to former dairy farmer David Wallace, 62, and his partner, Juliette Chamberlain.

DoC uses the 16ha of pest-proof-fenced valley on the couple's 42ha Karapiro lifestyle block to raise 2-week-old chicks to a weight of about 1200g, big enough so they can fend for themselves when they are eventually re-released to their original home in the Tongariro National Park.

The chicks are raised through the Operation Nestegg breeding programme at Rainbow Springs before being brought to Warrenheip.

"David would say we're fattening kiwi like you fatten cattle," Mrs Chamberlain says. "But there is no supplementary feeding here. They immediately fend for themselves, running around doing the things kiwi ought to do.

The couple bought the land in 1995 and immediately set about trying to create a slice of pre-European New Zealand, planting 55,000 trees in the valley alone.

But pest control through poisoning was hard work - the pests just kept on coming. So they decided to build a fence.

They now market Xcluder Pest Proof Fencing in New Zealand and around the world (usual cost between $60 and $80 a metre, but up to $180 depending on the terrain) and Warrenheip is its showcase.

DoC is sensitive to any suggestion that Warrenheip is raising "pet kiwi".

"No private person owns native animals in New Zealand - they're public property - but David was happy to provide his land for a purpose and we're very happy to use it," Mr Roxborough said.



"Conservation is a business, a very expensive one, and the Government can't fill every conservation demand the public makes."

For Mr Wallace, Warrenheip is a big turn-around from the days when his father helped crush thousands of hectares of Waikato bush into farmland.

"One day you suddenly wake up to what was here before," he says.

He has sold his shares in Xcluder to avoid conflict-of-interest problems now that he is involved in a project to fence off more than 3000ha at the top of the 796m peak Maungatautari, just southwest of Lake Karapiro, so kokako, kiwi and tuatara can return.

Xcluder is one of the companies tendering to build the fence.

The Maungatautari project is Wellington's Karori Wildlife Sanctuary on a grand scale - 47km of fence compared to Karori's 8.6km.

It will cost $8.7 million but Mr Wallace says he and the other 15 members of the Maungatautari Ecological Trust are unfazed.

"It's very exciting - there are hands-on practical people involved and a lot of them are landowners," he says.

The kiwi chick population at Warrenheip could rise to 30 at a time if weekly monitoring of the young birds confirms they are finding enough to eat.

Mrs Chamberlain says the whole thing happened so fast it's still a bit hard to believe.

"When Operation Nestegg asked if they could trial having some kiwi chicks here it was beyond our wildest dreams," she says.

"But it's still very much at the trial stage."

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