News

New Falcon Charity Formed

Our important news is that thanks to the very kind support of His Excellency Mohammed Al Bowardi, the Emirates Falconers Club has undertaken the financial sponsorship for the project for the next three years. This, together with match funding and services from International Wildlife Consultants in UK, means that the project is secure until 2011. It is disappointing that overseas falconers have had to step in to support the falcon conservation work, but we hope that some New Zealand organisations will come on board soon. To this end, a new charity has become established:‘The Marlborough Falcon Conservation Trust’. Set up largely through the energy of Sara Kross, Kathy Hughes and several local supporters, the Trust is being launched at the Marlborough Wine Festival on 14th February 2009 at Brancott. The Trust will take on the work of finding and co-ordinating sponsors and publicising the project, something we have struggled to do because we have been too busy with the falcons.

It has been a busy season for the project in Marlborough. As well as Colin Wynn (General Manager), and Nick and Barbro Fox from International Wildlife Consultants, we were joined by Jamie Cooper, Lena Olley, James Crowe, Paul Lintott, Jos Fryer, Katey from the Department of Conservation and Teresa Fisher as Field Assistants. In addition Sara Kross has started work on her PhD study based at the University of Canterbury. Sara will be looking at the way the falcons use the vineyards and their effect on pest birds.

Meanwhile Dr Val Saxton from the University of Lincoln has continued her study of pest bird damage. Amongst other things, Val found that for a radius of 300 metres around falcon feed sites (an area of 28 ha) bird damage on un-netted grapes was reduced to zero, and for a radius of 300-600 metres, only 5%, a potentially protected area of 113 ha. Her study will continue this grape season.

The vineyard falcons came through the winter well. None were lost to electrocutions, but one was killed by a cat, and another was killed on the road. One or two have lost contact because their transmitter batteries have run out. During the early season, when funding was uncertain, Colin had limited time in the field and one of the vineyard pairs successfully fledged a chick before he could tag it. Their chick from the year before is still in the area and we managed to replace her backpack tag. Another pair laid eggs and were losing them either to predators or by breaking them themselves. We removed their last two eggs and incubated them artificially. These resulted in two healthy chicks which we reared and fledged. The pair re-cycled but had more problems with their second clutch of eggs, so we gave them a foster-chick to rear, raised their nest barrel up from predators and ‘it all ended happily ever after’. The third pair, Maggi, caused us a lot of running around. For a start she has two husbands and regularly switches from one to the other! Then she lays her eggs in exposed places and breaks them. Any eggs that we rescued had thin shells and lost weight too drastically to survive incubation. But finally she laid on the bank just a hundred metres or so from where she had originally fledged herself, we got her to accept a nest barrel and they successfully reared a male chick.

Meanwhile we continued with the field surveys. Sara had nest cameras on two nests, one of which fledged two chicks. The other nest had three chicks and was doing well when a cat came and ate them, on film. Another nest had one chick with a thorn in its eye and was blind. We replaced this chick with one of our own to ensure that the nest was successful, and sent the chick up to Wingspan for their captive breeding project. Maybe sometime ‘Winky’ will father some chicks which can re-join the project for release. Thank you Noel and Debbie at Wingspan.

We translocated ten young falcon chicks from wild nests and all have been successfully released and are flying well. This time we have concentrated on the south side of the Wairau Plain, as far from power lines as possible. The release sites are at 2-4 km intervals and we hope that even if some of the birds die during the winter, there will be enough staying on site to pair up and become established breeders. We are also experimenting with new designs of nest barrels, to try to encourage them to nest off the ground.

We have had considerable publicity this year in various magazines and papers. Currently we are filming for an episode of Country Calendar, due for viewing over the winter.