Welcome to the Friends of Flora (FoF) newsletter for May 2006, sent (a little late) to keep you in touch with our work of bringing the birdsong back to the Flora.

Good works. A joint DoC/FoF working bee spent the last Sunday in May swinging picks and shovels to maintain the Flora Rd between the Flora Hut and Horseshoe Creek. Drains were cleared, sumps dug out and puddles released to rectify the hammering the road has had both from the elements and the neccessary traffic associated with our conservation effort. Mark Townsend, Program Manager (Assets) at DoC Motueka passes on his thanks to all involved. All in all Sunday was a very social day, with most FoF-ers having left it to the last (and best) day of the monitoring period to check their traps, there were literally dozens of volunteers up 'on the hill'.

Whio-friendly Flora. Maryann, the translocated Pearse blue duck fledgling, seems to be settling in to her new home in the Flora, although she ocassionally makes herself unavailable for her fortnightly monitoring. Even her namesake, FoF Secretary Maryann Ewers, couldn't locate her transmitter signal last Sunday. However, Alec Milne wrote to say that "when staying at Gridiron shelter late April we heard two whio flying along the river just on dark. Both (were) whistling as they flew. Your work up their looks great - even robins right in the carpark." So Maryann has attracted at least two potential suitors...

Mixed flock. I recently observed a largish (20+) flock of brown creeper/pipipi in the canopy on E Line, roughly opposite the Horseshoe swingbridge. Not at all unusual, except they were joined by at least four kakariki. The Readers Digest Complete book of New Zealand Birds and Heather and Robinson's Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand state in almost identical words that 'yellow-crowned parakeets often follow mixed feeding flocks led by whiteheads in the North Island and yellowheads in the South Island'. Given the decline in yellowheads, maybe following the more comon warbler, the pipipi, is the next best thing to follow.

Witches broom. This is a tight clumping of the growing tips of silver beech (Nothofagus menziesii) that can often be seen on trees in the Flora. The brown clumps are sometimes taken by casual observers to be beech flowers, but are in fact a form of leaf and bud gall resulting from a tiny mite Aceria waltheri, whose infestation causes an abnormal growth response.

April pest stats.

Rats 50 (821 in total since Feb 2002)
Mice 25 (total 648)
Stoats 7 (total 308)
Possums 3 (total 196 since June 2004)

With no addition to the totals for weasels (7) and ferrets (1) or cats (1). That's nearly 2,000 pests removed in 50 months!

More from FoF later this month. For back issues of the newsletter and much much more, check out our website at www.fof.org.nz

Ivan Rogers FoF Committee