Lake Rotakare Ranger for a day!!

On Wednesday the 13th of April a group of kids from my school including me went to the Lake Rotakare Reserve. Lake Rotakare is based in the south part of Taranaki and it is a beautiful lake. It also is a reserve which holds many endangered species of birds that are native to New Zealand. They have a big fence around the perimeter of the reserve to stop all the predators that may kill the birds such as possums, rats , stoats cats and many more. The birds are precious to the reserve because once they are extinct there are no more of that species ever again so they are trying to do anything they can to protect them. The reserve hold many birds such as Kiwis, Tuis, Fan Tails, Robins just to name a few and they have also recently introduced the Saddle Back that were extinct from Taranaki for over 100 years! One of the Teachers from our school, Mrs Derbyshire is currently doing a science programme in the reserve and asked if some of the kids from my school wanted to come and help her for the day and get their hands dirty. I was one of the lucky ones that got chosen and I was very excited to see what we were going to do.



For our first activity we were planting tracking tunnels. Tracking tunnels are little tunnels around the reserve in certain areas with little ink cards. The reason for the ink cards is to put food in the middle of them so when any animal or insect wants to eat the food they walk into the tunnel and they leave their foot prints so we know what is in the reserve. We split up into four groups and we went through a different part of the reserve each and put the ink cards in the tracking tunnels. We would write the name of the tracking tunnel, the date it was placed and then put the food in the middle of it and put it in the tunnel. My group were lucky enough to see the Saddle Back bird. It was amazing to see it and you could tell how it got its name because it had a red look like saddle shape on its back. There is a photo of the Saddle Back on the side of the post.  It was a lot of fun to do because we could cross streams, climb vines and slide down slopes just to get to them. It was a lot of fun and we hope the tracking tunnels we did show any evidence of animals being in them.



After we had lunch we went onto our next activity. Looking for the Peripatus. The Peripatus is a very rare species and there is not much known about them. There is about 30 unnamed species of the Peripatus and Mrs. Derbyshire has found only 2 in the reserve so the chances finding one was very slim. We split up into 2 groups and we each had a 4x4 area of bush with rotten logs and lots of foliage because that is the place they like to hide in. First we descrided the area around us and it was quite cold and humid so we put that down on a piece of paper. We lightly ripped away the old logs delicately to make sure we don't hurt any insects inside them. We looked for about an hour and had found lots of cool insects but no Peripatus. Our spirits began to dampen. Suddenly Brendan Fowler (Riley's Dad) ripped open a big log and we saw it. We had found one. I have a photo of it above. They looked very strange. They looked like a black slug with velvety skin and lots of little legs. Luckily I yelled out for him to stop because he thought it was only a black slug and was just going to chuck it away. We were so happy that we found one. They took it away to analysis it to see if we had found a new species. Overall it was a great day and I had so much fun and I hope I can do it again!

 My Sister Jorja putting the ink card into the tracking tunnel

A curious Robin checking out what we were up to during Peripatus hunting

All of the kids that took part. I'm 6th from the left!