There are plenty of places in New Zealand where, had you just been teleported in, you’d struggle to get your bearings. To watch the sun rise behind a grove of tall Hawke’s Bay gums, to the chortling of magpies, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d been dropped into rural New South Wales. Had you landed in Hagley Park, the chaffinches flitting from oak to oak might convince you you’d landed in an English common.
Here in peri-suburban Tauranga, I can hear the croak of a cock pheasant. Out in the garden, Californian quail fossick under the hydrangeas while blackbirds pluck worms from between the sweet peas. The bird feeder is a melee of house sparrows.
There’s nothing 100 per cent pure about this menagerie. New Zealand probably has more introduced species, from more sources, than any other country.
When Polynesian voyagers waded through the New Zealand surf some time around 1250, they became the first acclimatisers. From their great waka came the needs and seeds of colonisation: a living larder of kiore, kuri, kumara, gourd, taro, yam, paper mulberry and the Pacific cabbage tree.
The extinctions started shortly after. All that remains of Scarlett’s shearwater, the South Island snipe, the stout-legged wren, Hodgen’s rail, the New Zealand owlet-nightjar and the greater short-tailed bat are fossil bones, radiocarbon-dated to the arrival of the kiore. The rats also devastated tuatara, lizards, frogs and invertebrates, but worse—much worse—was to come.
Abel Tasman’s ships, the Heemskerck and the Zeehaen, almost certainly carried rats, but there’s no record of his survey boats making landfall on the mainland, though they did go ashore on the Three Kings Islands.
The Frenchman de Surville brought pigs on his 1769 New Zealand voyage, and gave a sow and a boar to Doubtless Bay Maori, but it’s generally thought they may have been killed and eaten before they bred.
It was James Cook who made the first concerted efforts at acclimatisation. His first voyage to New Zealand in 1769 revealed so little culinary relief from shipboard rations that he resolved, on his return, to stock the larder. On his second and third voyages, his men released a number of pigs around Queen Charlotte Sound, and two breeding pairs were given to the Hawke’s Bay chief Tuanui. South Island wild pigs, at least, are thought to be descendants from Cook’s liberations, and still go by the name of “Captain Cookers”.
Cook sprinkled other exotica in his wake: he released a pair of goats in 1773 (though they’re suspected to have fallen to Maori spears shortly afterwards), gave roosters and hens to Cape Kidnappers Maori, and left two hens and three cocks in Queen Charlotte Sound, where Furneaux’s men found brooding chickens the same year.
When European settlers arrived to start their lives anew, they quickly found that the Arcadian “Britain of the South” they’d been promised—bucolic, fertile, genteel—was in fact an alien, antagonistic place. Where New Zealand Company brochures depicted rural, rolling downs, Charles Terry found in 1842 “uncultivated wastes…swamps and marshes covered with rush and flax without any open spots for pasturage…”
Dreams lay broken across the wilds, ambition sank into the mud. Worst of all, there was very little to eat. Only the main settlements boasted butchers’ shops. Hinterland plants and creatures were mostly unfamiliar, and the colonists had little talent for living off them as Maori people had learnt to. Without their help and trade, many settlers wouldn’t have survived.
And they missed their homeland. The ordered borders, the peaceable parks. The dawn chorus offered little cheer: homesick migrants yearned for birdsong they knew and loved—the blackbird’s aria, the goldfinch’s lilting twitter.
Many saw a vacuum that Nature, apparently, found not at all abhorrent: crystal streams and lakes, filled with nothing more than eels and sardine-sized galaxiids. Vast forests with nary an ungulate. Settler Charles Hursthouse saw not an idiosyncratic Gondwanan relic, but a vast hunting estate awaiting stocking. New Zealand, he wrote, “should swarm with game… There is the finest cover and perpetual profusion of the finest foods for everything from jack-snipe to elephants.”
He found eager favour: apart from easing the food shortage, a truly egalitarian hunting and fishing resource underpinned the founding ideal of a classless colony. For many, the virtual caste system of British society, where wealth and privilege weren’t just unevenly distributed, but culturally denied to millions of citizens, had been a potent spur to leave. The Industrial Revolution had created an entire subclass of nouveau riche, and status had become a national obsession.
Hunting had long been a conspicuous badge of that status. Game was the preserve of the gentry, locked away on closed estates and rivers patrolled by wardens, even as many rural folk went malnourished. Punitive game laws enshrined the rituals of the rich: grouse shooting, salmon fishing and deer hunting.
So the founding of a New Zealand hunting and fishing commons was seen by many as a proxy constitution for the colony, a “beau ideal of a new country”, as one correspondent put it, where the working class, delivered from the sooty slums of the industrial Midlands, were guaranteed right to roam in their own national estate.
Around 1840, private importations began, in the absence of any legislation. All were haphazard, many were ill researched and some were bizarre—records show instances of only one individual being brought in, seriously hampering its chances of procreation. One of the most zealous importers was Governor George Grey, whose menagerie included kangaroos and wallabies, sundry antelopes and deer, monkeys and zebras. His kookaburras actually established, as did the peacocks. His emus were the forebears of a domestic farming industry.
The chaos prompted calls for co-ordination and, over the 1860s, dedicated acclimatisation societies were formed, specifically charged with stocking the dominion for commerce, sport and sentiment. Auckland’s was generally considered to be the pioneer, established around 1861, and it triggered a nationwide nascence: Whanganui and Nelson formed in 1863,and Otago and Canterbury in 1864. Predictably, many of the day’s executive were active importers (we have North Canterbury vice-president Octavius Matthias to thank for gorse). They were also well connected, and shipping agents wrangled cheap, or free, deck space. It was less-than-optimum transport: a 75 per cent mortality rate was taken for granted.
Because many acclimatisation society members also happened to be Prime Ministers, crown ministers, MPs, mayors and councillors, enabling statutes had an easy passage: the Encouragement of Acclimatisation Societies in New Zealand Act of 1867 saw substantial wads of the public purse diverted, through provincial governments, to support importations.
Around 1850, the first deer arrived. Red deer were released into the Nelson forests and around Auckland and Otago. A decade later, newly formed societies in Auckland, Nelson, North Canterbury and Otago liberated fallow deer. Otago imported the Asian chital deer, which soon became a pest farmers shot it to local extinction in 10 years. (Another chital release on Kapiti Island failed.) Later, in 1880, they imported the sika.
The Government took a lead. On the urging of Thomas Donne, founding head of the Department of Tourism and Health, in 1901, it brought in a bestiary of North American exotica: Canada and snow geese, and canvasback, wood, pintail and widgeon ducks, as well as wapiti, moose (famously), mule and Virginian deer. The justification, of course, was sport shooting, but the rationale for raccoons, terrapins and owls remains hazy.
As the forests filled, importers then looked to the mountains. Julius von Haast tried to secure chamois on a visit to Austria in 1886, but it was, again, the energies of Thomas Donne that sealed the deal. In 1905, he sent a gift of tuatara to the Austrian court. Two years later, the courtiers heeded his heavy hints: a shipment of chamois arrived, courtesy of Emperor Franz Josef.
Donne then went on to secure the first thar, from the Duke of Bedford’s own herd, no less, and played a big part in some 30 deer releases around the country. For these efforts, Dick Seddon suggested Donne be immortalised in a statue, but not everyone was an admirer: Donne stood accused by one newspaper of “dumping all manner of animals from moose downwards into this favoured land”. For his part, Donne believed he was rectifying some ecological oversight: “Nature neglected New Zealand in providing game animals; man has remedied the omissions. Nature will do her part in supporting them; let man do his part in protecting them.”
Originally, many societies cultivated exotic plants in dedicated gardens (including wild rice, intended to replace the vast acreage of wetland plants already cleared, so as to provide habitat for ducks), and imported familiar fauna as a balm for colonial homesickness. In 1867, for instance, the Auckland societies imported starlings, yellow hammers, skylarks, chaffinches, blackbirds and thrushes from England, and Antipodean exotica such as Rockhampton sparrows, magpies, Java sparrows, doves, pigeons and gulls. In just two years, the societies liberated 27 exotic bird species. The nightingale, twight, linnet and robin never adapted to their new homeland.
But the real zeal was reserved for game birds. Partridge, snipe, woodcock, a variety of grouse, green and golden plovers, prairie hens, ptarmigan, Australian curlew and more than a dozen species of pigeons and doves were shortlisted for introduction. Some were actually released; none established.
Another target, the black grouse, was released near Tongariro National Park by Hawke’s Bay Acclimatisation Society president James Lowry in 1926. Expressly forbidden to release the birds inside the park, he simply crossed the road and let them go on the boundary. The 15 birds perished, but heather seeds already sprinkled about to provide them with habitat flourished: heather now infests around 50,000 hectares of the central North Island.
Pheasants, however, along with Californian quails, chukar partridges from the Himalayas and mallard ducks are now a part of the rural biota.
This rush of releases began to unnerve the mindful. Throughout the country, regional societies convened to a chorus of calls for any importations to be “organised and carefully considered”. Organised they certainly were, but consideration was mostly devoted to ensuring the survival of imports, rather than any ecological consequences. Some societies seriously considered importing Arctic fox, muskrat and beaver to kick-start a fur industry. A cageload of foxes escaped into Marlborough. They didn’t take hold: neither did the kangaroos that the Southland society let go on Bluff Hill.
It soon became apparent that not all exotic species were going to represent an asset. In 1872, newspaper correspondent “Anglo-New Zealander” wrote that “the native species…are unable to compete with the foreign immigrants in the struggle for existence, and they are rapidly giving way”. Their displacement, though, was easily dismissed by an abiding justification of the day: that creatures had been put on this Earth for the utility of humankind.
Furthermore, Charles Darwin’s seminal Origin of Species had been in print for a decade, and acclimatisers readily bastardised his principle of “survival of the fittest”. If native birds were capitulating to imports, it simply reinforced their redundancy: “they will not be allowed to stand in the way of the Englishman’s traditional love of sport,” concluded Anglo-New Zealander.
Acclimatisation nonetheless had its critics: none so eminent as the prestigious journal Nature, which, from the other side of the world, lambasted the colonists’ “silly mania for acclimatisation” and “the reckless way animals of extremely doubtful advantage have been transported to the Antipodes”, and predicted that “unaccompanied by any of those checks which keep natural fauna balanced, the importations will inevitably become the greatest of nuisances”.
While the endeavour still had overwhelming support here, a few dissenting voices managed to make themselves heard through the fervour. In 1897, Alexander Bathgate wrote that “the zeal of the early acclimatisers was greater than their knowledge… Due care and consideration would have prevented the introduction of several undesirable immigrants, which now, like the poor, are always with us.” But to highlight the erratic rationale of the day, Bathgate then went into bat for the hedgehog: “a most useful animal”. Likewise, an ardent defender of the indigenous, Richard Henry, condemned the importations even as he suggested the release of goats on Resolution and Kapiti islands.
Science, then, rarely approached the debate. Maori voiced some of the more pragmatic objections: the pacifist Te Whiti pointed out that, while pheasants might make good sport for Pakeha, to Maori they were a gluttonous havoc on crops. The late Bob McDowall, in his history of the acclimatisation societies, Gamekeepers for the Nation, called for objectivity: “They were allowed to do what they did with the approval of the communities in which they were operating.” The country as a whole, he argued, “must accept much responsibility for bad decisions, and for damage…which is now regretted”.
Besides, most of the more reckless imports possums, rats, pigs, goats, cats, rabbits and red deer—were already at large in the back country before the societies were established, and various Governments were responsible for the bulk of mustelid releases.
But if they didn’t make the original imports, the societies did go on to spread many of them still further and wider. Some helped to spread deer, possums and rabbits, while others at least imported mustelids, even if they didn’t liberate them themselves. Other releases were entirely their own work: practically from day one, they were importing possums from Tasmania and Victoria (in 1931, the Bay of Islands society applied for consent to liberate them throughout Northland—the application was declined) and they let hedgehogs and hares go, along with wallabies.
Yet societies were themselves critics of some introductions, especially those, like stoats, which threatened the fortunes of game animals. In 1888, the Wellington society denounced what it viewed as “experiments in the way of introducing vermin of all kinds for these Islands, hitherto free from noxious animal life… These tamperings with the balance of nature in a new country are exceedingly dangerous, and may lead to…disastrous results in years to come.”
After the initial obsession with exotica, the societies settled into what became their core business—sport fish and game birds—and eventually became known instead as Fish & Game Councils.
Out of purpose-built fish hatcheries poured the anglers’ quarry. The abiding premise was “more is better”. Nobody knew whether the ecosystems could sustain self-perpetuating populations of fish so, to be safe, they simply kept tipping them in.
Between 1869 and 1923, the Otago society liberated 23 million trout fry and fingerlings: three million of them into the Pomahaka River, a reach noted by Bob McDowall as “one of the most naturally productive brown trout rivers in the Otago district”.
In 1965, Laurie Pope started work at the North Canterbury Fish & Game hatchery at Greenpark, on the banks of the Halswell River. “It was seven days a week, and it wasn’t big pay. I didn’t know much about fish, but I soon learned.” The first thing he learned was to find another source of water: the catchment board would arbitrarily tip Paraquat down the Halswell to combat weeds. “So we sank a bore, rather than rely on the river, which was getting polluted.”
Even after release, the fish were lovingly nurtured. Pope routinely rescued thousands of trout, left stranded in evaporating summer pools on the Selwyn River. The fish were loaded into trailer-borne tanks and released into “safer waters, or brought back to the hatchery for a while”.
But his real expertise lay in game birds. He helped to raise thousands of grey partridge chicks from Danish stock first detained at Massey University under quarantine. “The best year we had, we released 2500 birds,” he recalls. But the grey partridge remains one of the acclimatisation movement’s greatest, most expensive failures.
Pope’s birds went forth, but they didn’t multiply. “We put them on the shooting list for one week. A chap came in with five unbanded birds, so we knew they had to be breeding, but they didn’t stick,” says Pope. “There was something wrong…we were dealing with birds that had originally come from game farms. Like any bird, if they’re kept in captivity too long, they’re not much damn use when you let them go.”
If breeding potential was theoretical, trophic webs were still the stuff of fiction. As far as most societies were concerned, if there was a remote possibility that it ate trout, or stalked pheasants, it was animalia non grata. Hunters turned their guns on the “predators” they considered threatened their sport. A price was already on the harrier’s head by 1866. Some societies set up predator extermination funds. In 1867, Auckland paid out some £33 for the feet of 659 harriers. By 1942, another 250,000 of them had been killed in Auckland province alone.
But it was shags that took the full brunt of this protectionist policy. Anglers talked themselves up into something verging on hatred: “… without doubt the dirtiest, lousiest, and most stinking creature we have in this country,” vilified one writer to the Otago Daily Times. In 1875, the North Canterbury society even sought police assistance, politely declined, to eradicate shags. In 1927, Auckland shooters killed 1500 birds on a single lake.
No threat, real or imagined, was brooked. At national meetings, remits were sought (though declined) for the persecution of black-billed gulls, herons, bitterns, weka and moreporks. In 1876, William Colenso implored the Hawke’s Bay society to stop paying bounties on kingfishers’ beaks.
Eels too, were maligned. Some campaigners talked, naïvely, of total extermination. At one Auckland dam, eels heading for the sea to spawn were electrocuted as they passed. A society bulletin reported that “over 2000 eels, weighing about two tons”, were dispatched in just one night.
It was zealotry verging on genocide. Arguments on the strength of ecology were rejected out of hand, though Alfred Hefford, Chief Inspector of Fisheries, fared better by dressing it up with logic: “…big trout feed on small eels, just as big eels feed on small trout.”
Ironically, some societies found themselves declaring war on creatures they had themselves not long before released. House sparrows, for instance, were widely released as an insect control measure, despite the fact that they are overwhelmingly seed eaters. But by 1875, “sparrow clubs” were formed to try to exterminate them after protests from grain farmers—in just two months, one club paid out bounties for 21,000 shot birds and destroyed eggs.
Little owls soon became an orchard pest in Central Otago, while farmers complained that hares and Canada geese were eating them out of business. One of Laurie Pope’s jobs was to try to keep mallard ducks off Canterbury crops: “The farmers used to call us when the mallards flew in. They’d feed at night, so we’d be out there at all hours. They used to love the peas, for some reason. We’d go out there with big propane gas-powered bird scarers. The poor old farmers; it was their livelihood, but they weren’t allowed to shoot them, at least not out of season.”
Crop damage was a seasonal setback to farmers, but deep inside the forests, a national calamity was unfolding. It was but a few decades before trampers and hunters began to appreciate the consequences of deer liberations. Already, some of the more palatable species of native vegetation had all but vanished from the forest mosaic, leaving behind a monoculture of distasteful pepper tree and crown fern. Worse, the carpet of seedlings that underlies any healthy forest had vanished. The forest giants had no successors.
The fabric of a giant sponge had been torn apart: the rains now rushed unfettered off the steep lands, tearing away the soil. Erosion and flooding became the preoccupation of the Department of Internal Affairs, which called a “Deer Menace” conference in 1930. After lifting protection, it dispatched teams of cullers into the hinterland to try to stem the havoc deer were wreaking. By the 1950s, 125 cullers were shooting 50,000 deer a year.
Trout have enjoyed much better public relations, despite research that lists them as a likely suspect in the extinction of one native freshwater fish, the grayling, and shows they’ve seriously impacted on the fortunes of many others. A study on the Taieri River showed that several native galaxiids now survive only in headwaters above large waterfalls that brown trout cannot pass. Freshwater ecologists suspect trout may profoundly alter the face of stream communities, depleting the grazing invertebrates that other creatures rely on.
In his 2011 valedictory address, outgoing Federated Farmers dairy chairman Lachlan McKenzie prompted an outcry from anglers when he referred to trout as “freshwater stoats”. He pointed out that, while stoats are “hunted as a terrible pest, the other is protected in the RMA [Resource Management Act], and even has a hatchery on Department of Conservation land”.
McKenzie tried to blame trout, rather than dairy cows, for the algal pollution of New Zealand waterways and, while there’s research that shows trout can alter nutrient cycling, the assertion brought widespread derision as a claim too far.
It all brings a sigh from Bryce Johnson. Fish & Game’s long-serving director is weary of indictments against introduced species from “people who won’t, or can’t, acknowledge that they were imports here themselves. The acclimatisation has been done, for better or worse. And the ecology of New Zealand is what it is. Trout are here now—they’re established, and I would argue that they’ve largely struck a balance between themselves and indigenous fish—eels, lampreys and crayfish and all the other elements of the ecosystem.”
Besides, Johnson has bigger things to worry about, and, he argues, the “pro-indigenous” ought to be worried about them too. “Nowadays, all those animals are facing the same threats. Mayflies, for instance, are up against nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and sedimentation too. So when we apply for a water conservation order and get a stretch of river protected because it happens to be an outstanding trout fishery, that also protects the mayflies, and the eels, and the lampreys and crayfish.
“They ought to be supporting us in our endeavours to protect trout habitat,” he insists. “They have a higher ecological requirement than native fish, so any measures to protect trout will protect everything.”
Nationally, that habitat is in decline. The quality of New Zealand rivers and lake waters continues to worsen; the noxious slime, didymo, has now reached more than 125 South Island waterways. Trustpower is trying to get a water conservation order on the upper Rakaia River— secured by Fish & Game in the 1980s—effectively overturned, so that it can draw water for a hydro project and an irrigation scheme for 40,000 hectares of Canterbury farmland. Meanwhile, Otago Fish & Game has been locked in a 10-year battle with energy firm Pioneer, which wants to put a dam on the Nevis River.
Our rivers and lakes might sparkle sufficiently for tourists’ photographs, but beneath the surface, something is very wrong. In 1949, a census on the Selwyn River estimated a spawning run of 65,367 brown trout. In 2007, Fish & Game staff trapped just 265. That year, the trap had to be relocated, downstream of Coe’s Ford, because the Selwyn had so little water left in it. Field officers say the river fell to a one-two-three punch: extraction, wetland drainage and climate change.
“All of a sudden, there’s this realisation that we’re running out,” says Johnson. “They say peak oil happened a couple of years ago: now we’re headed for peak water.”
His predecessors fought tirelessly for pristine, egalitarian fishing reaches, and you get a sense that, now, Johnson feels the commission of every one and bears the weight of their collective ire. None of this was in the job description when he started at Fish & Game in 1980. “There wasn’t the level of discussion that there is now about the impacts of agricultural intensification. The dairy industry has taken off in the last 15 years, really—the last 10 in particular—and that’s when we entered a whole new era of concern.”
Johnson came to the organisation with a degree in biological sciences and post-graduate qualifications in agricultural science and wildlife management. He was the first science graduate to be appointed to a senior post, and it signalled a monumental shift for Fish & Game. “In those days, we were still breeding up pheasants for release, and releasing fish.” (They still do, in some of the Rotorua lakes.) “The big emphasis was on giving game species every opportunity to establish and thrive…so the staffing focus was very much on rangers, because people were concerned about poaching.
“But then, people began to realise that there was a bigger problem, which was habitat destruction. The emphasis was to step back from ranging and to start putting more resources into combating that. They started hiring biological science graduates. The focus then became ecology, habitat, and everything that was needed to protect it—that was the era they moved on to. Now, we’re starting to employ graduates with resource management backgrounds. So we’ve gone from huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ good old boys to biologists and RMA experts.”
Fish & Game finds itself in a paradoxical position nowadays: a voice of protest, linking arms with the environmental groups it used to lock horns with (and still does, occasionally). Only this morning, Johnson tells me, he sat round the table with Forest and Bird, WWF-NZ, the Greens and Jan Wright, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Along with other non-governmental organisations, watchdog and community groups, they now represent what he calls the “Thin Green Line”.
“That’s why we get on so well with the mainstream conservation groups in New Zealand: there’s very little left that divides us. We now have a common enemy. Whether we look at a duck down the barrel of a shotgun or through a pair of binoculars, we’re both focused on the bastard who wants to drain the swamp.”
In 2009, the National-led Government slashed $54 million off the Department of Conservation’s budget over four years. That same year, the Ministry for the Environment took a $20.6 million cut. At the behest of the Cabinet, the ministry’s Govt 3 programme to promote sustainable practice among government agencies was axed. Twenty staff were laid off.
In September 2011, DOC announced 96 job cuts. Many of those losses were science staff, some of whom had been engaged in providing expert evidence and advice at resource consent hearings. Last December, 107 New Zealand scientists sent a letter of protest to Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson, saying the cuts would seriously erode DOC’s capacity, as many species and ecosystems teetered “on the edge of oblivion”.
As the Government steps back from environmental protection—even as it promotes more exploitation of natural resources—the burden of monitoring and mitigating that exploitation falls increasingly upon the Thin Green Line. The costs of environmental management have largely been externalised. “We’re all having to circle the wagons,” says Johnson. “The current administration is a bloody disaster.”
“What’s the future of our clean green brand if it relies on volunteers for its credibility?” Fish & Game’s Nelson-Marlborough manager, Neil Deans, asked the Marlborough Express in 2010. The Environment Court had just found in favour of a Trustpower bid to take water from the Wairau River. Deans pointed out that, while the decision was wide open to High Court appeal, the costs would be too great for the more than 900 appellants to bear.
Trustpower was awarded the right to take water from the middle reaches of the Wairau, divert it into some 50 km of races, through a hydro-electric plant, and back into the lower river. “The river will effectively be de-watered anyway,” says Johnson. “It’ll cut the river in half.”
He still resents the fact that, after appealing against an interim resource consent approval in July 2007, DOC then withdrew its opposition in September 2009, after it announced it had struck a deal with Trustpower, which granted $3 million for a management plan to protect endangered black-fronted terns on the river.
Fish & Game had planned to split the cost of expert witnesses with DOC. At the time, Deans said the decision meant it would now have to cover DOC’s share of evidence at a “late stage in the proceedings”. It was the most expensive case the organisation has ever taken: $850,000 out of a total annual budget of just $9 million. Practically all of that comes from annual licence fees paid by hunters and anglers, but sales, in some regions at least, are in decline.
Noel Birchall has worked for the Bay of Islands Fish & Game Council for 45 years, 14 of them as chairman. “When I started, we would have been selling about 9000 licences a year,” he says. “Nowadays, we probably sell 2500.” What’s more, operating costs continue to rise. Duck hunters have been a huge force for wetland restoration and protection but, says Birchall, they see their budgets increasingly consumed by compliance. “Up here in Northland, our work is more geared towards game-bird habitat, creating wetlands and that sort of thing, but we’re finding that the resource consent process is more expensive than building the damn wetland. We’d like to do more of it, but the consent costs and engineering requirements make it very difficult.”
As the land is squeezed harder for more productivity, he says, habitat vanishes. “Probably the biggest impact on waterfowl has been the advent of the hydraulic digger. With every drain that goes in, another little wetland disappears. But that little wetland could have raised three clutches of ducks a season.”
If one entity epitomises Fish & Game’s improbable new role, it’s a nondescript little fish called Galaxias gollumoides—Gollum for short. In the late 1990s, Pioneer Generation Ltd bought up two Crown leases in the Nevis Valley, Central Otago. Its interest really lay in the Nevis River, a tributary of the Kawarau. Under the tenure review process, it secured freehold title to the valley floor, with a view to building a 45 MW power scheme on the river, with two dams below the Nevis Crossing forming an eight-kilometre lake.
The Nevis’ wild values were already acknowledged in a water conservation order, granted in the early 1990s, says Johnson, “but the conditions didn’t prohibit damming. So Pioneer saw that gap.” A 2006 bid by Otago Fish & Game to have the river recognised as an outstanding trout fishery, and therefore inappropriate for damming, failed. But what did eventually convince a special tribunal was Gollum. The 18 cm native fish, listed as “nationally vulnerable”, lives only in the Nevis, although it has relatives elsewhere in Otago, Southland and on Stewart Island.
The tribunal was unconvinced that Pioneer’s offer to build fish barriers around power turbines would sufficiently protect Gollum, and recommended in 2010 that dams be banned on the Nevis.
The irony isn’t lost on Johnson. “From our point of view, to be honest, Gollum is only important because trout eat it. It’s perverse.” Neither is the irony lost on Pioneer Generation, which has lodged a claim in the High Court arguing that Fish & Game doesn’t have a remit to advocate for native species.
Which raises the question, says Johnson, that if Gollum isn’t Fish & Game’s responsibility, whose is it? “Where’s DOC in all of this? They’re doing tenure review deals upriver instead.”
Section 6 of the Conservation Act, he says, places responsibility “to preserve indigenous fisheries” squarely on DOC, “and to protect recreational freshwater fish and their habitat. They have a more explicit function than we do to protect rivers. We get there on the grounds that we’re there to maintain and enhance trout and salmon—that’s what our function says and to represent anglers nationally.”
But Johnson’s used to finding himself in unfamiliar, hostile territory. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, the number of dairy cows in New Zealand nearly doubled, to around 5.9 million, as more and more farmers chased record milk payouts. The first 2000-cow herds began to appear, and fertiliser use soared. Irrigation water became a highly politicised commodity.
Lowland rivers and streams became Fish & Game’s Western Front. Photos of defecating dairy cows hock-deep in waterways already green with over-nourished algae were long-range shells that landed among an outraged public. Somewhere in a Fish & Game press release appeared an off-the-cuff alliteration—“dirty dairying”. Those two words became such a powerful, pervasive denunciation that they won Fish & Game a Public Relations Institute award.
“The irony,” recalls Johnson, “was that we actually used the term maybe twice. Then all you media guys picked it up and ran with it. It went global. Now, it has a life of its own.” Google the catchphrase, and you get 240,000 hits. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
He admits to a “great satisfaction out of this David and Goliath thing, where Fonterra, with all its money and all its size, is getting smacked around the ears by a glorified fishing club.”
By 2003, the campaign had gained so much traction that Fonterra, along with the Ministry for the Environment and regional councils, responded with a voluntary code for farmers, the Clean Streams Accord. The intention is to get all dairy-farm effluent discharges complying with resource consents and regional plans. One condition is that stock be fenced out of any stream wider than a stride and deeper than a Redband gumboot. The dairy industry claimed last year that 84 per cent of farmers had duly complied, but the figures were shown in a subsequent Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry study to be just so much self-reporting: in fact, found MAF, only 42 per cent had fenced their waterways to the satisfaction of the terms of the accord. Apparently, the discrepancy came down to whether you believe a single strand of hot tape on a reel constitutes a fence.
There is growing impatience with all of this among councils—some of whom have signalled their intention to start regulating soon, if voluntary requirements keep failing—and among New Zealanders at large, who now find themselves warned against swimming in just under half the country’s lowland waterways. In them, Fish & Game has spotted a new constituency: the same one that backed the acclimatisers of yore.
Johnson says that behind the power of the dirty dairying campaign lies the notion of championship. “That campaign set us up as a champion of the public interest. We set out to protect rivers from cows, not just for the benefit of anglers and hunters but for the New Zealand public, some of whom happen to be anglers. Wherever we put up an angler’s access sign, mum, dad and the kids can get to a river to swim and picnic as well. Kayakers can put their boats in: all those things can happen. Once we adopted that line, we started getting editorial support, and once you get that, you’re well on your way to winning your argument.”
Late last year, Fonterra responded. After June 2013, it says, it won’t accept milk from accord farms with unfenced streams.
Though it’s a public entity, Fish & Game gets no taxpayer money: it’s funded solely by sales of licences for fishing and game-bird hunting. And while it punches well above its bantam weight, it doesn’t win every bout. Last year, Kate Wilkinson, after lobbying by Federated Farmers, stripped Canada geese of their protected game-bird status and relegated them to common pests.
Johnson’s response was characteristically pugnacious, condemning the minister’s decision as “bizarre”. And bold, considering that various Governments over the decades have looked closely at disestablishing, or at least reining in, this vexatious harrier. Last year, prior to the November general election, Fish & Game scrutinised the outdoor recreation and public access policies of the political parties, then presented them to hunters and anglers so they could “make the best informed decision at the ballot box”.
While Johnson was careful to add a caveat about Fish & Game’s political neutrality, it was a gambit that would have cost the CEO of any government department his or her job. Fish & Game’s unique status gives him a little more political leeway, and he knows exactly how close to the wind he can sail. “We’re here by the grace of Parliament, not Government,” he says, “and that’s interesting, because the odd minister—even in the present Government—likes to take a swing at us when we get in the way of irrigation schemes and things like that.”
That historical statutory remit—to represent the interests of anglers and hunters—has given Fish & Game both the rationale and the requisite for its remarkable metamorphosis from gamekeeper to environmental watchdog.
“And we take the view,” says Johnson, “that anglers don’t want polluted streams, so keep your bloody cows out of the river. And they don’t want bloody great plumbing edifices put across valleys.”
It’s all about limits, he says—or at least it should be. “You can intensify your farming operation up to a point, but that’s it. We strike a balance, and we set the limits: we allow for the fact that there will be some pollution, but we don’t let it go too far.
“Once you’ve set those limits, theoretically that’s it. But every 10 years, they reset that balance; it gets shuffled out a bit further. That’s exactly what’s happening on the Rakaia. It’s that old argument for infinite growth on a finite resource base.
“It’s all come a hell of a long way from tipping fish into a stream.”