Busy summer and Kaipara expansion

Thanks to all our landowners and volunteer Ambassadors for helping us through what has turned out to be one of our busiest summers ever. The perfectly dry weather was a huge help, enabling us to work uninterrupted until the rain finally arrived to stop us in May. We ran a number of volunteer workshops to help landowners with large properties and lots of trees, who couldn’t manage the work on their own. Some of these were in spectacular locations, like this one at Weiti Bay in Okura (above).

Kauri Rescue was awarded a grant by Lotteries which enabled us to start the work of expanding our impact into the Kaipara area, covering both Auckland and Northland Regions in this area. We have focused on iwi engagement before moving into these new rohe (tribal areas) and have been working closely with Te Uri o Hau and Ngati Whatua o Kaipara (Nga Maunga Whakahii o Kaipara Ngahere) to train their kaitiaki teams to undertake our work assessing the health of kauri and treating them with phosphite if necessary. This has been hugely rewarding work, with the iwi groups being funded by Auckland Council, and we are now undertaking landowner recruitment in the Kaipara areas with the hope of being able to support landowners to treat kauri in these new areas next summer.

If you are concerned about the health of your kauri please sign up on our website for a free health check and to learn how we can support you to improve your kauri health.

Photo: Sam Kemp – Kaitiaki training wānanga on Pukekararo with Te Uri o Hau and Department of Conservation

Watercare funding

Watercare Services Ltd has committed to an annual funding grant for the next 10 years to support our work in the Waitākere Ranges.

We are very grateful for this additional support, which extends the financial support we receive from Auckland Council to cover the Auckland Region, so we are able to help even more landowners.

Book your reassessment and re-treatment for next summer

We have had a very successful roll out of our Re-treatment Strategy for landowners who treated their trees more than 4 years ago. A total of 22 landowners reassessed the health of their trees this summer and many of them found trees that needed to be re-treated.

If you treated your trees a few years ago and would like to see if they now need to be re-treated please let Mels know so we can book you in for a kit next summer.

Landowners will need to reassess the health of their trees, using our simplified methodology, to establish if some of them have recurring symptoms and need to be re-treated. This is a quick process taking only a minute or two per tree and once we have seen the results we are issuing treatment kits so those trees needing a boost of phosphite can be re-treated.

Special volunteers

We celebrated Volunteers Week by saying thank you to two very hardworking volunteers.

Guenter Niersbach is Kauri Rescue’s most loyal and regular volunteer. He also volunteers for ARK in the Park and the Cancer Society along with his wife Karin. We delivered a hamper full of lovely and useful goodies collected by the Pest Free Waitakere Ranges Alliance. Huge thanks to them and to all the donors of goods: Mitre10 Mega, The Trusts, Ecostore, Tui Balms, Niwashi, Ecomatters Environment Trust and Waitākere Ranges Local Board.

We love our volunteer Ambassadors – thank you for your work. 

If you’d like to volunteer for Kauri Rescue please sign up here.

Photo: Mels Barton