On Saturday 10th of August, Mountains to Sea Wellington’s Wai Connection team hosted the Pinehaven community for a day of exploration in partnership with our friends from Pest Free Pinehaven and Junior Landcare (Bupa x NZ Landcare Trust). Nestled to the side of the busy Pinehaven Road in Upper Hutt, the community joined us for a day of learning, exploring, and connecting with their local awa. Kerrie, from Pest Free Pinehaven is a community legend working and supporting loads of awesome taiao focused kaupapa!
In recent months, Pest Free Pinehaven has collected eDNA (environmental DNA) samples from the Pinehaven Stream and sent them off to Wilderlab to find out what friends are living in the stream. Check out this amazing illustration Kerrie put together of all the awesome native fish and macroinvertebrate species that showed up on the eDNA results!
The excitement from the eDNA results led Kerrie and our Wai Connection team to think this stream would be a great place to do some spotlighting! With torches in hand and gumboots on the team set out with the awesome Pinehaven community and got to searching the awa for our native fishy friends! In our fish survey we spotted giant kōkopu, toitoi (common bully), tuna (eels) and lots of kōura/kēwai (freshwater crayfish)!
With the community buzzing from these fresh new finds it was only fitting to head out to the stream on a sunny Saturday and invite the local community and their whānau to join us! We welcomed the community to come down to the awa as we checked and emptied fish traps, revealing nearly 2 dozen tiny toitoi which the tamariki helped carefully transfer into our fish buckets so we could take a better look! The macroinvertebrate table had everyone buzzing! Everyone had a lot of fun and focus when sifting through the water samples for macroinvertebrates, everyone loves checking out the bugs!
Māia from Taranaki Whānui had everyone excited and eager to learn how to prepare the harakeke/muka and then having them create harakeke taura, a rope which is a great tool for many things including improving climbing habitat for fish to move upstream!
Pest Free Upper Hutt were there to educate the community on the importance of trapping and sharing the awesome news of the kiwi callings that have been recorded in Upper Hutt. All that hard work from the pest free trapping community is working - Kiwi are returning home!
With such awesome work being done by the Pest Free community here, Kerrie has set her sights on how the community can come together to improve and protect the biodiversity that lives within the Pinehaven Stream. If we can have kiwi returning and flourishing in our more urban environments it only makes sense to look at the wider ecosystem and work on providing better habitat and conditions for our native fish to return to and call home once again.
Such a special day connecting this awesome and budding community with the Pinehaven Stream, the aim of this community day was to provide an opportunity for the community to engage with their awa and those that live within and all around it! The day also provided space for new discovery and learning around pest trapping, harakeke handling and all things freshwater.
Thanks again to our friends at Pest Free Pinehaven, Enviroschools, Taranaki Whānui, Junior Landcare (NZLT x Bupa) and all of our community members that came down. No doubt we’ll be seeing these familiar faces again as we see them start regular monitoring and put their new found skills to the test! If you're keen to join us, make sure to keep an eye out on our events page and keep up with our social media pages @Mountainstoseawellington to stay in the loop for any local community days and monitoring trainings that may be near you!
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