Creating a New Gannet Colony

[zooboy28]

How to create a new gannet colony:

Story and photos here: Fake colony helps gannets move | Stuff.co.nz

Fake gannets are helping Motuora Island to become a fashionable Hauraki Gulf gannet suburb.

Last year saw two eggs laid, though the first chick hatched in the artificial colony later died.

This year there are high hopes youngsters will be fledging with a big increase in numbers of birds nesting.

"In the last couple of days the number of incubating birds jumped from 6 to 12. We are regularly seeing up to 30 gannets on the ground. Last year we were seeing around 20 birds," island ranger Sian Potier says.

The birds usually lay just one egg each year.

Volunteers with the Motuora Restoration Society who administer the 80-hectare island with the Department of Conservation set up the colony in 2010 using 16 fibreglass decoys from the United States.

A solar powered audio system playing gannet colony sounds during the day and fluttering shearwater sounds at night was also used.

Volunteers made the fake colony as realistic as possible, with seaweed nests and white paint splatters like real gannet droppings. The birds like to breed in the colony where they were born, so getting them to up anchor and move to Motuora is seen as something of a coup for the volunteers.

A similar fake gannet colony was established at Young Nick's Head near Gisborne in 2008. It became a breeding site once the first chicks were hatched there.

The Hauraki Gulf is an international seabird hotspot with colony's of nesting birds important for island ecology. Droppings from the birds help add nutrients to island soils. The pest free island is also an important nursery for North Island brown kiwi. Chicks are released on the island from eggs collected from wild birds around Whangarei and incubated at Auckland Zoo.

Hundreds of gannets are also back at the Muriwai Beach colony for the new breeding season.

 

[gentle lemur]

This is evidence that gannets don't have much sense of smell, otherwise they would have had to synthesise the distinctive smell of a gannet colony to add to the decoy sights and sounds.
For those who have never visited a gannet colony, try to approach slowly upwind and remember that after a few hours you hardly notice the smell any more

Alan

 

[IanRRobinson]

I don't know if Maori or Aboriginal sources help with Australasian Gannet colonies, but the Northern Gannet clings to its colonies with phenomenal levels of perseverance. That on St Kilda is a good millennium old, and James Fisher reckoned that on Bass Rock, where the colony is known to date back to 1521, the species had been nesting since the late seventh century.

 

[zooboy28]

I don't think Maori helped gannet colonies at all in the past, although they likely are involved now. Most gannets nest on offshore islands around New Zealand (Three Kings, White Island, Gannet Island), so would have had minimal impact from Maori. Mainland colonies were presumably destroyed by Maori, as the only two (large) North Island colonies on/very close to the mainland (Muriwai, Cape Kidnappers) were only colonised in 1900 and 1880 respectively. The only major South Island colony (Farewell Spit) was established in 1983.

 

[IanRRobinson]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. What I was trying to get at is how long ago known gannetries date from for Morus serrator.

 

[zooboy28]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. What I was trying to get at is how long ago known gannetries date from for Morus serrator.

Oh right, I get that now! Well I don't really know the answer to that, except to say that the mainland NZ colonies are all fairly young.