It has been a busy start to the year for our education team who report that students are really enthused about heading into the Park.

DOC education ranger Brooke Turner says Motueka High School has had a range of students studying in the Abel Tasman in term 1, including Design, Outdoor Education, Geography and Science classes.  Some of the students are returning to the Park for their 2^nd and 3^rd years as part of their adopt-a-section classes.

As part of our series on place names in the Park author Dave Hansford takes a look at Hadfield Clearing and the family whose name Is forever entwined with it.

On January 21st, 2004, a strand in a 146-year bond was broken when Bill Hadfield passed away. The last of five generations to farm the Awapoto Valley, Bill came to the 790-hectare Golden Bay property in 1950; Bill came to the 790-hectare Golden Bay property in 1950; settled into the homestead where his grandfather William brought his bride Adele in 1878.

The objectives of Project Janszoon’s planting projects on the foreshore in Abel Tasman National Park are to reduce the fire risk to the national park and to help build resilience in native foreshore ecosystems.   Some area of foreshore can be stable for long periods of time, but it is a dynamic ecosystem and will always be subject to damage in extreme weather events.

Kākā are one of the noisiest and sociable birds in the forest and Project Janszoon is working on different ways to increase the numbers of these charasmatic native parrots in the Abel Tasman.

With a beech mast predicted for 2019 we are looking at taking kākā eggs from the wild, hatching them in captivity, and then releasing them into the park.

Birds and snails in the upland areas of the park are going to enjoy two consecutive years of low rat numbers, thanks to last year’s aerial predator control.

Monitoring results show that, in August this year (nearly a year after the October aerial predator control operation), rats above 600m altitude were still tracking at less than 10%. Experts say this is a measure below which native bird species will be largely relieved of predation pressure.

It was only a few years ago experts were predicting kiwi would become extinct on mainland New Zealand and now they are considering returning them to the Abel Tasman.

The eroded hills behind Anchorage and on Motuareronui Adele island are not what nature intended.  What we should be seeing is a low forest of kanuka, along with hard and black beech. Instead, fire events over the last 200 years (sometimes planned, sometimes not) have left exposed ridgetops ripe for colonisation by introduced weeds like hakea. Restoration supervisor Helen Lindsay updates us on the beech planting project aiming to bring beech back to the hillsides.