Sheryl Collins
Kiwi conservation volunteer says tough, hard and exhausting work delivers the best 'high' ever
So here's a question for you. What do kiwi have in common with crayfish?
No? Here's a clue: the answer can often be found deep in the forests of inland Hawke's Bay, tramping through ferny undergrowth, face-down in leaf-litter and loamy soil, or on a ridgeline somewhere, listening intently for the electronic 'ping' of a transmitter locator signal.
Still no? Well, the answer is Sheryl Collins, our extraordinarily dedicated volunteer kiwi wrangler who used to spend days on end at sea, cooped up on a fishing boat somewhere between Wellington and the Three Kings Islands north of Cape Reinga, monitoring the crayfish catch and collecting data for research purposes.
These days she's pulled back from a lot of the long-duration boat work, preferring to leave that to her daughter, but from time to time will still do short stints in the Māhia and Gisborne areas.
This is so she can focus on "chasing birds around the bush" on our Maungataniwha property, something she finds infinitely preferable to riding the featureless, monotonous swells of the Pacific - the only woman on a boat full of fishermen.
In fact, it's not just preferable - it's work that Sheryl (Ngāti Porou) finds stimulating and rewarding in a way that she finds hard to describe. Which is just as well really because, as an unpaid volunteer, she is literally doing it for love.
Sheryl is a vital member of the Forest Lifeforce Restoration Trust’s small but exceedingly dedicated kiwi conservation team. This group oversees the Maungataniwha Kiwi Project, one of the most prolific and successful kiwi conservation initiatives in the country.
She and her partner Simon Anderson, a kiwi trapping, mapping and data collection specialist, work closely with Tamsin Ward-Smith and Nadine Maue of Wild Solutions, the Trust’s chairman Simon Hall and kiwi expert Dr John McLennan, along with a raft of other volunteers. Together they drive the ‘Circle of Life’ that is kiwi conservation; retrieving kiwi eggs from the forests that the Trust stewards, speeding them to specialist facilities for incubation and hatching, delivering the hatchlings to protected ‘crèches’ for rearing until they are old enough to defend themselves in the wild from a host of predators, and then finally relocating the large juvenile birds back into the forests from which their eggs were recovered originally.
Sheryl's association with the Trust, and our kiwi conservation work, started back in 2008 when she, Simon and their two daughters started spending a few weeks each summer at Hole Hut on our property in the Maungataniwha Native Forest. One day in 2012, during one of these visits, our forest manager Pete Shaw called in and asked the family if they be interested in taking part in an egg-lift that night.
At dusk Sheryl and her daughter Michaela joined the egg-lift team on quad bikes.
"It was a 45-minute ride along a track into the forest, through drizzle with bambis (deer) jumping out in front of the quads and staring into the lights.
"After a bit of training on how to monitor the transmitter attached to the adult male bird who was sitting on the eggs in the nest, we settled into watch and wait mode - taking turns at checking the signal.
"Just after 3am we got a signal indicating that he'd left the nest and was on the move, foraging for food. With fingers, toes and everything else that we could cross, crossed, we walked to the nest site. There, the experts dropped down and opened the nest - revealing two large, gorgeous and well-developed eggs."
These were extracted gingerly and the team then started the slow, careful trip back to camp with the eggs cushioned inside small chilly bins.
"The excitement was huge and we arrived back at camp feeling on top of the world," Sheryl wrote later, on the tenth anniversary of that trip. "That was the start of it for me. I was hooked from that moment. Now I live for the next trip into Maungataniwha to work with kiwi. It's tough, hard and exhausting work but the feeling of getting the job done is the best 'high' ever."
Since that night in 2012 Sheryl has been involved with pretty much every aspect of the Maungataniwha Kiwi Project's mahi; from working with specialist dog teams to find and 'tag' new adult male birds, through to sitting out in the forest overnight to listen for kiwi calls as part of the annual population survey, tracking birds fitted with transmitters, taking part in egg-lifts, and introducing kiwi chicks back into the forests from where their eggs came.
She also helps her partner Simon with his work to develop a revolutionary new system that will help map individual birds in any given area, gather data and assess population numbers more accurately than ever before. Much of the development of this technology is taking place at Maungataniwha, aided by its healthy collection of 'transmittered' kiwi.
Sheryl's dedication to the survival of our national icon is illustrated well by her marathon drive in March 2020, the day before NZ went into full COVID lockdown for the first time.
She travelled from her home in Ōpōtiki to the National Kiwi Hatchery in Rotorua to pick up two small juvenile birds destined for protective crèching at Save the Kiwi's facility in Napier. On reaching the coast and depositing her two feathered passengers, she picked up two larger juveniles before retracing her journey back up State Highway 5, bound for the Trust's property at Pohokura where the two larger birds were due to be released back into the wild.
Sheryl spent 11 hours on the road that day, travelling over 700kms. Just to make sure the birds got to their forever homes before we went into full lockdown.
She's also been known to come straight off a crayfish boat in Māhia to do an egg-lift at Maungataniwha that same night.
FLRT Chairman Simon Hall is blown away by this level of dedication and says it's typical of the kiwi conservation community.
“People don't realise how much kiwi conservation work is done by good people like Sheryl," he said. "So much of it is about friends, neighbours and our volunteers banding together to protect our national icon. Frequently in the dark and the cold and the pouring rain. They do it for love – literally.”
As for Sheryl? Well, her view is simple. "Even when it's dark, cold and pissing down with rain there's absolutely nowhere else I'd rather be."
