Newspaper Article – Swamped by good feelings

Swamped by good feelings

HOLMES AT POUKAWA
Paul Holmes

One of the best things going on in Hawke’s Bay is the Peka Peka wetland redevelopment along State Highway 2, between Paki and Poukawa.

I’ve watched it evolve with pleasure over the last several years driving in and out from town.

The swamp sits right beside the main road and covers about 90 hectares. For decades, you couldn’t see much of the wetland because of the infestation of willow.

Willow had taken over. It ran rampant for decades, clogging and over-powering so much of the native swamp vegetation, affecting the flowing of the water, generally fouling the place up.

One day we began to notice the willow dying off. They’d sprayed the willow. It must have been an incredibly selective spray because it killed the willow and left everything else. Slowly, we began to see what we’d been missing.

Since then with $600,000 from all over the place and with the effort of dedicated volunteers, thousands of native swamp species have been planted. Land has been cleared for a visitors’ centre. There will be hundreds of metres of walkways through the wetland which they plan to have finished by next March.

There is an emphasis on remembering and honouring the importance the wetland had to Maori and the large Maori population the wetland once supported.

We under-rated our wetlands for most of last century. Swamps were places that were being drained or were going to be. Now we appreciate their beauty, their abundant bird and water life and wonderful variety of their vegetation. Nevertheless, with the dairy boom, 80 per cent of New Zealand’s remaining wetlands have disappeared in the past three decades,

Peter Dunkerley, formerly of the legendary Dunkerley’s Pharmacy in Hastings and chairman of the Friends of Peka Peka, very much involved in the raising of funds for the project, took me recently into the accessible parts of the swamp. He was marvelling at the birdlife there already and probably increasing in numbers, He reeled off the names of birds I’d never heard of: the bittern, the dabchick, Australian coots, ducks like the shoveler, the teal, the mallard, finches, hawks and moreporks and swans. I’ve never had the patience for bird-watching but Peter had the binoculars out with glee.

I took the chance to ask him how his Lotto outlet sold such a staggering number of Division Ones over the years, all in all nearly 30. He said that he got lucky in the first moments of Lotto with a couple of division one wins in three months, It got some local and then national publicity. Pretty soon Dunkerley’s became the only place to buy your tickets. People know about it in Auckland, I remember. Peter says that with the huge increase in his Lotto traffic, further division one successes simply became a mathematical probability, the more tickets you sold, the greater the chances of the big prizes. Fascinating.

So well done to everyone involved in Peka Peka. It’s going to be a great Hawke’s Bay attraction and a great study resource for our local kids as well. Not much is going on at the moment because it is the breeding season.

We have our own little wetland at Mana Lodge. It’s a pond along our driveway, man-made, hard clay bottom, fed by a pipe off a spring that flows down from the hills behind us, the water flowing out from the pond down to the Poukawa Stream. We’ve done a lot of work dressing the water’s edge. We’ve planted native grasses, tall and bushy, green and brown. We have masses of bright yellow and deep purple irises. I’ve got a huge copper fish mounted on the far side which I found at the Ellerslie Flower Show some years back. In clumps on the surface, we have four pink and red water lilies that are flourishing. The pond is surrounded by high old trees, I swear it’s starting to look like Monet’s garden.

It is inhabited at the moment by a pair of paradise ducks with 13 ducklings. We find them endlessly fascinating. One of the ducklings is much smaller than his siblings and seems to be having trouble converting his baby feathers to adult feathers. He stays close to his mother. I wonder if she worries about him. Deborah certainly does and makes sure he gets plenty of maize.

Also enjoying the maize are the three flightless Peking ducks we put there to help control the duck weed. God knows we’ve tried everything else and it seems to be working. The Peking ducks were supposed to be females. One day, Nigel saw one of them engaged in a vigorous act on top of another. Next thing they’re all mating, laying and nesting. Now we have more duck eggs than we know what to do with.

At least these Peking ducks have stayed. The last lot Nigel got were from a bloke who knew a bloke who knew a bloke. One day, walking up the driveway, Nigel saw what he couldn’t believe. He got out his cellphone and called the bloke. “Are you sure those ducks you got me are flightless?”

“Yeah, mate. They won’t move far.”

“Then why,” asked Nigel, “am I looking at the three of them a hundred feet up and heading south?”

Yes. And never to be seen again.

Paul Holmes is an award-winning columnist and leading broadcaster.