Banded dotterels - precious Hutt beaches residents

Louise from Woburn

At the moment there are banded dotterels to be seen on our beaches. They are quite hard to spot so you have to get your eye in - check along the strip behind the Settlers Museum. It is important not to disturb the nesting sites around Eastbourne and Wainuiomata - these are roped off, and definitely please keep your dog on a lead in the middle section of Petone Beach (as all the signage where the dotterels like to hang out says!). Not going inside the roped off areas at nesting sites is really important - the chicks and eggs are so well camouflaged that it would be easy to step on a nest before you realised it was there. Unfortunately these little guys haven't had a lot of luck with their nesting with successive generations being wiped out by predators (usually domestic cats, but sometimes hedgehogs and rats in the Hutt), they are now listed as Nationally vulnerable and their numbers are declining. I'd hate to see them go extinct, which could happen in my lifetime if we don't take better care around their nesting sites. You might notice that some of the birds that turn up on Petone Beach have little tags on them - this is so researchers can track their movements and know which birds are successfully breeding. It's how we know that some of these little guys like to go spend the New Zealand winter in places like New Caledonia. The nest photo is taken when I was helping the Mainland Island Restoration Operation (MIRO) with their monitoring programme, but the rest were taken on Petone Beach just yesterday - they don't nest there fortunately, they just come around to Petone to feed.