Here again is the Friends of Flora (FoF) newsletter, sent each month to keep you in touch with our work of bringing the birdsong back to the Flora.

Book review – "Whio" by David Young. Chris Potter has perused an advance copy and prepared this review for us:

Subtitled "Saving New Zealand’s Blue Duck", this book is hot off the press from Craig Potton Publishing. If you don’t have time to read the rest of the review, here’s a summary: include it in your list of hints for this Christmas. The book is beautifully illustrated – of course! – and very easy reading. Its stated aim is to raise the profile of the whio and will surely do that. There are excellent, informative photos of whio, their environment and the people working to save them. The author neatly interweaves the natural history of an amazing bird with the history of human interactions. And as we know that history is still being made. David Young clearly knows his subject first-hand and has taken the issue to heart. "No species living on these islands ought to be allowed to die on our watch... The whio is particularly special... a bird whose home symbolises the very heart of natural New Zealand – a clean, forested land laced with fast-running rivers of vitality. Its disappearance would quickly come to symbolise how degenerate the idea of natural New Zealand has become." There’s so much good stuff in here: from an introduction to the science of Energetics (to measure the habitat quality of a river) and the conclusion that we humans have forced the birds to occupy habitat of lower quality than they would choose, to the fact that a pair of whio have flown 140km back home after being relocated (in Taranaki). The author has been up to the Flora on a monitoring day and this is reflected in good coverage of the Friends of Flora project. Of course the Flora is only a small part of the picture and the book has detailed coverage of all of the last refuges of the whio in both North and South Islands. Informative, uplifting, depressing, inspiring, "Whio" is all these. We can only hope that when we lift it off the shelf in 20 years’ time it will be a record of the start of a great recovery, not an epitaph.

Get your copy of Whio through FoF. Thanks to a generous offer from Craig Potton Publishing, FoF can offer copies of Whio for $34 – a 15% discount on the retail price of $39.99. (FoF also benefits from the deal, so there are wins all round.) Add $1.50 for postage and packing if you can’t take delivery in person. Please enclose a crossed cheque with your order and post it to Friends of Flora Inc., 35 School Road, RD 3 Motueka.

Flora's Femme Fatale. The Flora Stream's sole female whio, Maryann, continues to act as a magnet for unattached males. She has been seen in the company of no less than four or five single males since her translocation in March - Alo, Pat, Roy, possibly F16 and another unnamed and unbanded duck. One or more of these birds can usually be seen in the lower Flora, around trap I90.

The Cosmopolitan Pipit. Enough of whio, lets have a quick look at one of the Flora's less conspicuous, but no less fascinating native birds, the pipit/pihoihoi. This is a bird of the open spaces, so in the Flora you will find it above the bush line on Lodestone, Mt Arthur and the Tablelands. It resembles very closely in appearance the introduced skylark but is completely unrelated, a result of convergent evolution - two organisms arriving at a similar conclusion through different paths. While this bird is found throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Australia (where it is called Richard's pipit) and must have literally hundreds of names in local languages, everwhere it is Anthus novaeseelandiae, the Anthus of New Zealand. The pipit and the skylark are readily distinguished by their habits - skylarks sing in flight while pipits sing from a perch and the pihoihoi has a distinctive way of flicking its tail up and down, as if impatient.

Weka success. The weka family on A line (the Mt Arthur track) seem to have had a good season. Early in October Pam Coleman of Ngatimoti saw a pair of weka with six(!) chicks and a few weeks later FoF's Chris Potter saw the same pair with four half-grown offspring. Four or six, it's still a good effort, and continues the weka's welcome comeback in the Flora. A few short years ago, the odd sighting of just one bird was a talking point. Obviously fewer stoats means ground-nesters such as weka and pihoihoi have a fighting chance in the Flora.

Rat catch cracks 1K.

Here are our total predator kills for September.
Stoats; 4 (322 in total since Feb 2002)
Rats; 30 (total 1019)
Mice; 9 (total 679)
Possums; 4 (total 221 since June 2004)
with no addition to the tally for other pests such as weasels (6), ferrets and cats (1 each).

More from FoF next month when we have more on the rock wren and the lifeblood of the beech forest - honeydew.

Ivan Rogers FoF Committee