“We’re back on the road and already putting our new vehicle to work transporting plants!"
Moehau Environment Group (MEG) are thrilled to receive funding support from The Jenkins Foundation for an appropriate vehicle for the rough northern Coromandel roads and conditions. MEG have a field team that needs to get around the region to clear tracks for stoat trapping lines in a network covering 16 000 ha from Coromandel town to Sandy Bay for kiwi protection. Over 120 dozen eggs are delivered around the region for trappers to bait traps each month.
The vehicle transports field team members to the Port Charles MEGa Pest Attack, a 450ha unfenced sanctuary where the team undertake intensive rat control, checking over 2500 rat traps per month to help the plants and wildlife thrive.
A few days after purchasing the new vehicle it was needed to collect 300 plants to help revegetate coastal forest with a planting day for schoolchildren. Alongside planting days, the MEG team regularly participate in controlling environmental weeds like kahili ginger, pampas and wilding pines.
“We hope The Jenkins Foundation trustees know how much we appreciate their support for conservation in northern Coromandel. We are protecting habitat and keeping predators at low enough numbers for our native wildlife to recover. We have a growing population of wild kiwi and kākā throughout our trapping region, we are protecting breeding pairs of matuku-hūrepo/Australasian bittern in our local wetlands, helping pōhutukawa recover from possum browsing, and to achieve a difference at landscape scale we really need a reliable vehicle to get our team to all the far-flung places that need our help. Thank you, it is so heartening to have your support.” Dr Steph Parkyn, Ecologist, Moehau Environment Group