 o find the native bushbirds, you must travel some way in from the coast. One place to start is the Kaweka Forest Park to the west of Hawke's Bay, which can be reached by travelling along the Napier-Puketitiri Road north-west of Napier. 
This area was greatly modified by the fires that devastated Hawke's Bay and heavy native bush survives only in the sheltered valleys, the remainder of the park being made up of about equal parts of scrub and tussock in the north-east and beech-podocarp forest in the north. Native birds that can still be found in the Kawekas include whio, kiwi and kakariki; an almost complete range of feral mammals is found there too - pigs, deer, rabbits, possums, hares, goats and even wild sheep.
Many of the other birds that are of interest in Hawke's Bay are either exotics or self-introduced species called adventives. There are wild turkeys inland from Tutira Station together with feral peafowl at Waimarama. Although black swans have been in the bay for some time a white species, called the mute swan, was until relatively recently not present. Liberations have been made on Horseshoe Lake to try and establish the species in this area. |
One of our most attractive recent immigrants, the black-fronted dotterel was first seen near Napier in 1954. It breeds in the Esk and Rangitikei riverbeds and from here it has spread throughout the lower part of the North Island and into Nelson and Marlborough where it has colonised other shingle riverbeds.
The best of Hawke's Bay's wildlife attractions is the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers. Cook traded with the local Maoris for fish near the cape in late 1769. While here he mentioned the gannets or 'Solander geese’. They provided his Christmas dinner, yet he made no note of their nesting here. About 100 years later when the naturalist Henry Hill visited the cape he found a colony of about 50 birds, which he estimated had been using the site for some 20 years. By about 1914, when the colony was made a reserve, nearly 2300 birds were nesting and today there are probably around 20,000 gannets. This was the world's first mainland gannet colony, and for a long time the only one known, because gannets usually nest on small, rocky, offshore islands. Recently, others have been established at Muriwai, north of Auckland, and at Farewell Spit, in Nelson.
While here take some time to study the domestic arrangements of the gannets if you can. Each nest consists of a few twigs and bits of seaweed, scrapped together just out of range of the rapier-sharp beak of the next bird. Any minor miscalculation by a landing bird means running a gauntlet of the stabbing beaks of outraged neighbours to get home. One wonders why they bother nesting in colonies when they get on so poorly with each other.
The accessibility of the colony has made it a prime study area for ornithologists. To get to Cape Kidnappers from Hastings drive to Clifton, which is 21 kilometres from the city, and from here there is a seven kilometre walk along the beach, but check the tides first. There are also four-wheel drive excursions along the cliff-tops. |
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