‘This is the dark times’: How saving nature saved two struggling tourist towns

When borders closed to tourists, West Coast locals picked up spades and weed-eaters – launching a nationwide employment scheme. Now they want it to become permanent. Words by Andrea Vance, pictures by Iain McGregor. Made with support from New Zealand On Air.

It takes a certain amount of skill to coax a reluctant kiwi from its burrow.

As the persistent West Coast rain pounds down in great, heavy drops, three people are on their knees on the forest floor.

Jim is snug in his earthy sanctuary. Olivia Van Dissel (Te Rūnanga o Makaawhio) reaches in, up to her shoulder. Rivulets of water run down her slick waterproofs. She can feel the bird’s warm, soft down, and sharp, hooked beak. But the rowi – or Ōkārito – kiwi twists out of her reach.

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Sarah Mockett takes over, using a crook around scaled, muscly legs to gently walk the kiwi out of the peaty tunnel. In a flurry of feathers and claws, the bird is out, blinking in the daylight. Mockett hands the bundle to Kylan Gasko, immediately the bird stops struggling and docilely nuzzles into his stomach. The trio is there to replace the batteries in the tiny kettle-bell-shaped transmitter fixed to his leg. But the bird is not Jim – this is a female.

Using a cellphone camera, Mockett discovers Jim pressed into another narrow tunnel. Pushed face-down in the marshy ground, she wrestles for a few minutes, but Jim is too difficult to reach. His companion is returned to their leafy, dry refuge.

Jim may have eluded them on this morning – but Mockett, Van Dissel and Gasko are all proficient members of Operation Nest Egg, a conservation programme that has been preserving dwindling numbers of the national icon since 1995.

However, only Mockett is a Department of Conservation employee. Van Dissel, a former tour guide, and Gasko, a kayak guide, learned their skills through the government-funded Jobs for Nature scheme.

Van Dissel, 24, returned to the Coast from Rotorua when Covid-19 closed the borders, ending her employment at an Adrenalin Forest adventure centre. At first, she took a job in a dairy factory in Hokitika. “It wasn’t me. I couldn’t stand being inside for hours and hours on end.”

Makaawhio put her in touch with Jobs for Nature, and she secured a contract placing artificial lizard retreats in the lush rainforests of South Westland. The small wooden boxes, which native geckos use for basking or protection, help monitor populations.

“Catching my first lizard was pretty spectacular,” she says. “I had done hours and hours of work putting these retreats out into the bush and had never seen a lizard. I knew why I was doing it, but there was a slight disconnect. Then as soon as I caught that first lizard in one of the retreats, it came full circle.”

With more experience came more responsibility, and Van Dissel began working with audio recorders, placed in the forest to detect bat activity. From there she moved onto kiwi work, trained in how to use the bright orange antennae that detect the birds by pinging off their transmitters fitted to their hocks.

A decade ago, the rowi was in trouble, with predators driving its numbers down to 250 birds. Operation Nest Egg, tracks the breeding kiwi to their burrow and takes the egg to be incubated, and then the chick is raised on a predator-free island until it reaches a weight that can fend off stoats. The population has more than doubled, and the 12,000-hectare Ōkārito Kiwi Sanctuary is running out of room, with the birds now ranging out with its boundaries.

For Van Dissel, who often thought about applying for work as a DOC ranger, the job is a dream come true. “Every Kiwi child grows up hearing about kiwi, but I didn’t know how special they were until I started working with them. I used to talk about them on my guiding trips, but I couldn’t really go into huge depths.”

She’d never seen a kiwi in the wild. “Getting taken to my first burrow, getting my first snuggles with a kiwi, was absolutely amazing. Every day is so different and unique. I really couldn’t ask for more.” She also cherishes her kaitiaki role. “My people have been here for a long time. Being connected with it in this way is just amazing.”

Gasko’s first kiwi encounter was with an egg. When it hatched, he named the chick Haeata, or dawn. The 37-year-old, spends kayaks with tourists around Lake Mapourika, or ‘flower of the dawn’ named for when the glassy waters are at their most picturesque.

Jobs for Nature meant Dale and Bronwyn Burrows, of Franz Josef Wilderness Tours, could afford to take him on, just over a year ago. A Canadian, he arrived in New Zealand three years ago. He is proud to share the knowledge he’s gained with visitors on his tours. “I’m super lucky. It’s a dream to hold kiwis on my days off. I have these two amazing jobs.”

The Burrows had been steadily growing their business over the last decade – Dale working as a glacier guide, while Bronwyn ran the kayak tours.

Seven years ago they bought a boat and began offering lake tours, catering to up to 100 people each day in the summer season. But severe storms, which closed the main routes into the area, and then the pandemic decimated their income. “Everything just ground to a halt,” Dale says.

In winter 2020, they put the business into hibernation and used the time to streamline and rebrand, reopening in the summer with two staff, including Gasko. A good five-hour drive from either Christchurch or Queenstown, Glacier Country is too far for the weekend-trip market, and fell quiet outside of school holidays. Then the Delta strain arrived and bookings dried up. “The second lockdown last winter felt like the end of the world,” he says. “We were back to square one.”

With 95 per cent of their customers gone, and two young children, Hudson, four, and Taylor, two, as well as two employees to support, the Burrows sought help. “We’ve tried to stay fairly positive and tried to make the most of all the bad situations,” Dale says. “Jobs for Nature hugely helped with that. It’s a big part of our survival.”

When they don’t have customers the team head into the forest that fringes the lake, attaching acoustic recorders to trees to detect the booming call of the endangered Australasian bittern. They’ve waded through rivers looking for blue ducks/whio.

Now they are working to establish how far the rowi have ranged. Already, their work has led to the discovery of long-tailed bats/pekapeka near Franz Josef for the first time in decades. “Our staff were really fizzing,” Dale says.

The staff are also trained in analysing the data, and also sift through photos taken by trap cameras looking for, and recording, both predators and native species. “That’s office based work, so our staff can man our desk at the same time, and be able to catch customers who come in.”

The scheme has kept the business afloat, and allowed the Burrows to retain experienced staff. “Now the borders have reopened, we’ve got two trained guides who have stuck with us.” But Dale says it has brought so much more than a financial safety net to the area.

“You used to occasionally go to the pub, and you’d have the glacier guides at one table, the pilots at another table and someone else on another table. Now, all of these groups that are working together on different projects during the day are starting to mesh together. It is bringing the community closer.”

The Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, in the Westland Tai Poutini National Park, are among the most accessible in the world, making them a drawcard for over a fifth of New Zealand’s tourists, pre-Covid. Up to 800,000 visitors a year spilled into the valleys to wonder at the rivers of ice, and close to 90 per cent were foreigners.

Once there, they discovered the region offered so much more than the glaciers – an untamed natural wilderness with rainforests, dramatic beaches, mirror lakes, historic buildings and a river delta teeming with wildlife.

Tourists were hosted at either of the two associated glacier villages, situated 23 km apart on State Highway 6. Now they are ghost towns, with shuttered motels, empty car parks and deserted restaurants. Locals began to fear their township would echo the fate of other settlements haunting the West Coast, casualties of the gold and coal rushes.

More than half of the 1000-plus jobs in the area were lost once the borders closed. Nearly 300 people, including 19 children, and almost 40 fire, search and rescue, and ambulance volunteers, left the area. At least 16 businesses closed forever.

During the first lockdown, Fox Glacier Guiding chief executive Rob Jewell spent long hours in his office trying to work out how to save the business. With a staff of 65, they were hosting over 30,000 people a year, for heli-hiking, ice climbing, overnight experiences, and even horse-trekking and e-bike hire. Almost all of their customers (97 per cent) were international.

“We could have up to 200 people flying into the glacier on a day. It was a very busy operation.” Almost overnight, their market fell away. “It hit us hard in February [2020] with the Chinese closed out first at the border, right around Chinese New Year.”

He made the tough decision to downsize – although many overseas staff had already left to return home. But the remaining 15 still needed to work.

Jewell had developed a relationship with Wayne Costello, DOC’s South Westland Operations Manager, during the clean-up of Fox River in 2019. The community had united to clear thousands of kilograms of rubbish washed out when an old landfill on the banks of the river became exposed during flooding. “I got on the phone to Wayne and said: hey, what jobs have you got that my guides could do?”

Costello, based in Franz Josef, was able to repurpose money allocated for forestry work. “I could just see the writing on the wall in terms of how things were going to end for a lot of businesses, friends and staff and our community,” he says.

“We had a Civil Defence welfare group, we were going and checking on people. And you could just see how concerned people were, and the stress.” Jewell and Costello drew up contracts to allow the guides to work on repairing the network of DOC tracks in the area. “As soon as we came out of lockdown, we were straight into it and haven’t looked back,” Jewell says.

It was an idea forged out of the determination and resilience of a population which is isolated, and vulnerable to natural disasters. The pandemic had a catastrophic impact on their livelihoods, but they are reticent about the slog and acutely aware of a lack of sympathy for businesses reliant on travel.

Word of the enterprise reached the Beehive, and planted a seed. In the May 2020 Budget, Jobs for Nature was launched – a $1.2bn plan to restore communities and the environment through nature-based work. It promised 11,000 jobs. As of December 2021, $1.014 billion had been approved for projects, with $276.7 million paid out, and 7197 people employed. Nearly 400 of those jobs were on the West Coast.

In year one, it saw nearly one million plants in the ground, over 300,000 hectares of land under pest control, and more than 500 hectares of freshwater under restoration. It has faced criticism from National who point out that in some cases, the employment scheme is costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per job.

At least half of all the businesses in Fox and Franz Josef now participate in the scheme. “I’m really proud of the team, and I’m really proud of my community in the way we’ve worked together. We have been able to keep our community together, which is pretty special for me,” Costello says.

Costello is too diplomatic to confirm it, but locals say the work has dramatically improved relations in a region where residents are traditionally suspicious of the conservation agency. “We’ve built it together,” Costello says. “Now it’s like we’re part of the same family. And people are really engaged in what we do.”

The Copland Track is one of the country’s original tramps, a blazed line through unforgiving bush, taking tourists across the Southern Alps linking the West Coast with the Hermitage, a popular lodge at Mt Cook. Construction began in 1901, after New Zealand became the first country in the world to form a government department to develop tourism.

Marius Bron, head guide at Fox Glacier Guiding, is tickled by the history and that he is now part of a government scheme to repair the track. “Glacier guiding is one of the original tourism activities of New Zealand. I like that connection.”

With fellow guides Carter Lin, and Nepalese Passang Phurba Sherpa, they are carefully re-routing the trail away from the Copland River, after it was washed away by floods.

The scheme is a life-line for Passang, who arrived here almost a quarter of a century ago. With a wife and two sons at the local primary school, he was worried. Jobs for Nature means he can pay the bills, he says. Building rock steps reminds him of working at home in Lukla, gateway to the Everest trekking region.

Lin, 36, dreaded having to return to Taiwan. He worked as a butcher in Christchurch before falling in love with the West Coast on holiday with his sister. He was so chatty, the company offered him a guiding job.

“People are always so excited to land on the glacier, he says. “It’s very happy. They maybe have only one experience in their lifetime, and it’s our job to show them around.” After six months with no tourists, he was filled with anxiety about his future. “I was quite worried. This is the dark times.”

He finds the physical work draining, but enjoys puzzling out a route without destroying the forest. “This is the only job for us, so we don’t have a choice,” he says. “I have two options: working here unhappy, or working here happy. I choose happy.”

On the riverbed, Ingrid Wood, a former shop assistant, and Angela Wright, once a horse trek guide, are hauling rocks to be placed on the new track. Both lost their jobs to Covid. Wood has lived in Fox for three decades, and worked 17 years in the general store.

“The shop didn’t have enough hours,” she says. “It was really quiet.” She’s repaired tracks and cleared scrub and gorse across the region. “Lifting rock and that, once you start doing it and building those muscles up, it’s not too bad. Some days you might feel a little bit tired at the end of the day.”

There is also ‘inside’ work to be done – digitising insect archives and studying kea footage. “A lot of us would have had to leave,” she says. “Fox wouldn’t have survived. It would basically be farming left. It’s definitely been a lifesaver.”

Tony Howard, 56, saw two of his three children leave Fox as work in tourism dried up. “They loved the place and stayed here as long as they could.” Howard has been flying since he was 15, commercially for 27.

He takes visitors on the spectacular Grand Traverse, a scenic flight that explores 200km of breathtaking landscapes and 12 glaciers around Aoraki/Mount Cook. On a good day in summer, he could do four or five flights. “You hear little yelps of delight. I’ve had a lady cry because it was beautiful. Getting off the plane I get hugs. It’s everything, from meeting people to the flying. I want to be up there all the time.”

Air Safaris, the company he works for, closed Fox operations for two months after the Waiho River inundated the air strip in 2019. When Covid hit, passenger numbers dropped by 95 per cent. Staff took a wage cut and most left.

“It got harder as it dragged on,” he says. “I’ve watched the town slowly shrink.” Howard fills time between flights monitoring footage from bait cams placed at Cass and Doubtful Sound. It’s the perfect distraction from worrying about the future. “It’s good to feel useful.”

Before Covid, Robbie Stewart also spent his days in the skies, throwing himself from a plane and free falling 20,000 ft strapped to a tourist. “I’ve done 4000 jumps over 27 years and I get a buzz every single time. I’ve got the best job in the world.”

Now it is business that has plummeted, from up to 60 customers a day to 10 in a week at the local Inflite base. Stewart is now mostly grounded, feeling the shape and substance of the land under his feet as he repairs a network of hiking trails around the Franz Josef Glacier with wife Angelique.

“It’s real good fun. I work outdoors. It’s a really satisfying job.” The work his team have done is to such a high standard that seasoned trampers now complain the four-hour zig-zag climb to the top of Alex Knob is “too boring” now it is free of hazards.

As manager of Skydive Fox and Franz Josef, Stewart says it was a challenge to keep the base open. “The temptation is to immediately close, mothball and just wait for the borders to open again from a financial point of view.”

Instead, they went to a skeleton crew, in order to retain their highly-trained staff, used to operating in the rugged landscape and local weather conditions.

“The people that we employ are of a different caliber. They are really good skydivers and pilots. If we lose them, starting again from scratch, having to retrain everybody, is quite difficult.”

The company also recognised its responsibilities to the community: by staying open it would attract people to hotels and restaurants. “Do we want to just shut our doors and say: we’re done for now? And only when we make money and only when it’s enough money, will we be willing to operate again?”

Stewart says he’s proud of the commitment. “It’s important that we are here for the long run. This is a temporary situation that we find ourselves in.”

New Zealand’s borders will start to open to tourists gradually from April. The towns’ residents are ready to welcome visitors – but they are also wondering about the future of the scheme.

Gerard and Bernie Oudemans are hoping to reopen their boutique bed and breakfast Holly Homestead in October, after nearly 18 months closed.

The scheme has meant “survival and sanity” for the couple, who have lost 20kg between them clearing pest weeds, and they want it to stay.

Gerard says it would help retain trained staff in the area throughout the winter. “And we can give DOC a hand. The Government has been underfunding DOC for decades. If they want people to come and see the natural beauty of our country then they are going to have to stick their hand in their pocket for pest and weed control. You can’t maintain a National Park, with tracks and huts, if you don’t have the money to do it.”

Chris Alexander owns Lake Matheson Café, at the entrance to the lake’s walkway. Jobs for Nature saw his staff takeover maintenance of the toilets, tracks and car park from DOC.

He’s gone from 45 employees to six, each working 20 hours a week on the scheme, and the business wouldn’t have survived without it. “It’s been a real saviour.” Alexander would like to see it evolve as the industry contemplates ‘regenerative tourism’.

“It could become a permanent thing if the funding was there. Or it could be on a voluntary basis,” he says.

“Our travelling workforce love being involved in things like this. It really helps them justify their travel, if they are contributing to the environment and putting more back into the environment they are visiting than they are taking out.”