Whistleblower Ian (not his real name) believes it was neglect for Cape Sanctuary, Hawkes Bay not to search for missing little spotted kiwi in 2017 despite knowing of mortality signals.
However, it isn’t a word used to describe the private wildlife sanctuary’s failures in the independent report commissioned by the Department of Conservation (DoC), written by former Chief Censor David Shanks.
In 2018, Steve Sawyer, the Cape’s ecological adviser, didn’t flinch at the characterisation of “neglect to monitor chicks through a drought period”.
In a response to Ian’s whistleblowing letter to Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage in 2018, Sawyer said in an email to the Department of Conservation’s Hawkes Bay manager Connie Norgate: “This is correct. During this time a change of management occurred at Cape Sanctuary and a 50 percent loss of kiwi chicks was recorded due largely to an inexperienced kiwi operator being placed onsite, out of her depth and without sufficient kiwi and personnel management experience.”
After the “disastrous result”, new managers made immediate changes to wildlife management processes, and lifted the level and effectiveness of predator control, leading to “excellent results”.
The Shanks report did carry Ian’s concerns about kiwi tours at the Cape, for fee-paying guests at the luxury lodge at Cape Kidnappers.
Comments to the investigator by the recently appointed Cape manager Beau Fahnle mirrored Ian’s concerns. Fahnle said tours were temporarily suspended because they “took too much time and lots of staff resources to do them”, and he needed to “ensure the kiwis’ survivability”.
The Shanks report said: “The Sanctuary does not accept that kiwi chicks were subject to unnecessary health checks to allow the continuance of kiwi tours over this period, and maintains that the chicks were only subject to health checks (and associated kiwi tours) when scheduled to be subject to a necessary health check.”
As noted in the first part of our story, Newsroom asked Cape Sanctuary for comment several times, the first time in September, but did not receive a response before publication deadline.
Millions of dollars invested
Though Cape Sanctuary has been criticised, there’s no doubt the founders – the Robertson, Lowe and Hansen families – have invested millions of dollars in the name of conservation.
Nicola Toki, chief executive of conservation group Forest & Bird, says private sanctuaries can benefit native wildlife, and connect the public to nature.
Shanks wrote in his report: “Private organisations operating wildlife reserves and sanctuaries under appropriate authorities granted by DoC form a significant part of Aotearoa’s wildlife management system.”
At 2500 hectares, Cape Sanctuary is more than 10 times larger than Wellington’s Zealandia, and is ringed by a 10.5km-long fence. The sanctuary also contains a 13ha DoC reserve, and the Cape Kidnappers golf course. (The majority of the families’ land is a working farm.)
Private animal sanctuaries take native species as chicks and allow them to grow and thrive, safe from predators, until they’re big enough to fend for themselves in the wild.
The kiwi tours are also of financial benefit – although the Cape has said previously the charges didn’t recoup the full cost of its conservation efforts. In 2017, single guests were charged $375, and couples $575, to “have the opportunity to hold the kiwi”.
This is something Sir Paul McCartney did, captured in a video that went viral in December 2017 – after the terrible 2016-17 season – despite the fact only registered kiwi handlers were meant to handle the birds. (Plus, the Cape didn’t have a permit for “advocacy tours” at the time.)
Toki, whose organisation was a party involved in the Shanks report, says wildlife sanctuaries, whether public or private, “need to follow the law and must focus on their conservation priorities and obligations first and foremost”.
Public agencies also need to apply the law and fulfil their duties, she says.
“Consulting and working collaboratively does not mean being swayed by interest groups at the expense of statutory duties or holding the line on compliance.”
Kevin Hackwell, formerly Forest & Bird’s chief conservation officer, who also became an informant against the Cape about the kiwi deaths, says there needs to be a complete culture change within the department.
“Relationships are important, we need to encourage them, that’s great, but when there’s a conflict, it’s our statutory responsibility for the welfare of these species that must dominate, must prevail.”
Whistleblower Ian’s years-long quest for accountability hasn’t gone well.
Not only did the Department of Conservation fail to immediately investigate Ian’s concerns, it disclosed his private details to others, failed to treat him as a protected discloser, misled Sage, its minister, with advice containing false information, and made public statements suggesting the whistleblower’s concerns were unfounded and without evidence.
DoC’s new director-general, Penny Nelson, sent an apology letter to Ian after Shanks’ report was published. The department didn’t retract its public statements, however. Rather it provided a website link to Nelson’s apology.
‘These relationships contributed over $100 million additional resource to conservation along with thousands of volunteer hours of work‘
Former Department of Conservation director-general Lou Sanson
In response to Ian’s whistleblowing email, to Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage, DoC provided misleading advice to her in April 2018. Then, in October, in response to an RNZ story, ‘Kiwi birds died from neglect at Cape Sanctuary in Hawke’s Bay – report’, DoC released an inaccurate press statement.
In August this year, before Sage retired from Parliament, Newsroom asked her if there had been accountability for this misleading behaviour from the department. After all, some of the people who provided bad advice, or publicised inaccurate information, may still be in their jobs.
“There is accountability now with such a thorough review,” Sage said.
“What we’ve got in this report is recommendations for change. Mistakes are made in any system, and, yes, it would have been desirable if it had been more fully investigated earlier, but we now have the report and a number of recommendations.
“And the key task for senior management is ensuring that all of those recommendations are thoroughly implemented.”
Newsroom asked DoC director-general Nelson whether this situation could happen today, and what did the department intend to do about what appears to be a problematic culture within its operations arm?
“Shortly after I became director-general, I commissioned this report because I was really concerned about what people were telling me,” Nelson said.
“Work is already underway, and is being driven as part of our concerted, ongoing programme of work to lift DoC’s performance.
“All recommendations from the report will be monitored through an audit programme by DoC’s senior leadership team and chief assurance officer to ensure this situation will not happen again.”
In a press statement in August, the Department of Conservation said Shanks found the department’s systems to be inadequate, and his report recommended significant improvements to the issuing, documentation, monitoring, and reporting of permissions under the Wildlife Act, as well as improving complaints management.
DoC accepted all of Shanks’ recommendations, pledging to implement them over the next two years.
Another key player in the Shanks report is former DoC boss Lou Sanson, who was criticised for not declaring being hosted at the Mission Estate Winery concert in 2017 – headlined by the Dixie Chicks – by Cape Sanctuary co-founder Andy Lowe. (The report said he shouldn’t have accepted the hospitality, given it was foreseeable the Cape would need to, at some stage, obtain or renew wildlife permissions.)
When the concert was held, more than a dozen brown kiwi chicks had already been found dead at the Cape, and there were question marks over the fate of little spots.
The Shanks report says: “The issue of missing kiwi or kiwi deaths does not appear to have been discussed [by Sanson and Lowe].”
Newsroom asked Sanson if he thought that was good enough, considering the deaths were already known, that a complainant had already informed DoC, and that it took the sanctuary until December that year to formally disclose the brown kiwi deaths?
Sanson said his understanding was DoC’s Napier office was informed of the deaths but the information wasn’t relayed to senior staff. “At that time there was a significant drought and we were experiencing Kiwi deaths across the North Island eastern regions.”
Shanks’ report says, and Sanson confirms, he only became aware of the deaths, and the expiry of the Cape’s brown kiwi permit, the following year, as the department responded to Ian’s complaint to Minister Sage.
The report said DoC staff were “well aware” Lowe could and would escalate issues, from time to time, with Sanson.
The former director-general says: “Many staff realised I kept contact with significant conservation community leaders right across New Zealand.
“Andy Lowe was no different, and my support of relationships and partnerships to achieve conservation is widely known and reported.”
(He notes he hasn’t met Lowe since leaving DoC more than two years ago.)
Sanson says the department, under his leadership, was heavily focused on working with others to achieve conservation.
“I did not favour Mr Lowe over the hundreds of others of community leaders, iwi leaders, NGOs, commercial partners or philanthropists working so hard to bring back our precious birds.
“All conservation leaders could access me at any time and expect my full attention to their problem if it was significant. I would task the follow-up work through my leadership team in their monthly operating reviews.
“These relationships contributed over $100 million additional resource to conservation along with thousands of volunteer hours of work.”
The work at the Cape continues, Sanson says, considering its wild population of eastern North Island brown kiwi are being shifted to other locations to support remnant populations.
“This is at no cost to the New Zealand taxpayer.”
Sanson’s statements might be construed as an answer to this question we asked him: did DoC, under his leadership, favour relationships over what was best for kiwi?
Forest & Bird chief executive Nicola Toki says there is a fundamental disconnect at the department – between its statutory functions and responsibilities, and a perceived prioritisation of relationships. In the years-long Cape saga, she believes the latter was put ahead of legislative requirements.
There’s also a lack of accountability at DoC when proper processes aren’t followed, or on occasions of unacceptable behaviour, such as undeclared interests, Toki says.
“Forest & Bird have attempted to work constructively with DoC on this issue since we flagged the kiwi deaths to leadership at DoC in 2017, and formally registered our concerns with the previous director-general in a letter sent in October 2018.
“It has been frustrating and deeply concerning that despite a number of investigations that have previously been carried out, the issue has not been brought to the public’s attention until now.”
Toki says New Zealanders must be able to trust the public service generally, and, when it comes to the protection of taonga species, DoC in particular.
Government agencies must be resourced appropriately so they can undertake essential monitoring and compliance, she says.
(Jess Scrimgeour, a kiwi expert for DoC, emailed the department’s former Hawkes Bay manager Norgate in December 2018: “Compliance is something DoC is not well-resourced for. It tends to be done reactively, after things go wrong.” In the same email, Scrimgeour wrote: “Regular audits is not something the department regularly does with community groups, except when things go bad.”)
If laws are outdated they should be updated, Toki says, rather than departments operating in a grey area, or outside responsibilities.
“Given the concerning findings in this situation, the spotlight must now shift to the wider environmental system and ensuring that it delivers on what New Zealander lawmakers require it to.”
That statement may take on greater relevance in the newly formed government, and for National’s Tama Potaka, the new Conservation Minister, considering the coalition’s promise to cut public spending, and greater strain on public revenue to deliver tax cuts now New Zealand First has scuppered a plan to allow foreign buyers back into the housing market.
When Ian, the Cape whistleblower, thinks back to the horrific summer of 2016-17, it’s the Cape’s treatment of little spots that sticks in his craw.
“The very first mortality signal should have been a signal this is an emergency; get in there and find out what’s going on.
“And they could have prevented things. That’s probably, to me, worse than the kiwi deaths.”
Questions Newsroom asked of Cape Sanctuary in September, and again last week
Is the sanctuary sorry for the kiwi deaths in 2016/17?
When kiwi managers at the Cape were told there were mortality signals for little spotted kiwi, why did they not act immediately? Why did it take two months?
On the issue of informing DoC of kiwi deaths, any experienced kiwi manager would know, wouldn’t they, DoC had to be informed in a timely fashion – whether it was required under a permit, the act, or Operation Nest Egg? Why were the deaths (and not all of them) only disclosed in December 2017?
Were the kiwi deaths covered up? If not, why did Steve Sawyer tell several people involved in searching for little spotted kiwi not to say anything about the deaths?
Informant 4 tells me because the focus at the Cape was on some birds for the Lodge tours, other birds were neglected – “they didn’t get monitored and therefore died”. How does the sanctuary respond?
Informant 4 says he provided evidence to David Shanks “health checks” were done to order for Lodge tours, and some kiwis were “checked” twice in a single day, or on consecutive days. At least one other informant told DoC kiwi chicks were being checked more frequently than necessary to satisfy Lodge guests’ demands. How does the sanctuary respond?
Is the public expected to believe the tours had no effect on kiwi deaths? From the documentation it seems kiwi that were regularly part of the tours remained alive, while some that couldn’t be found, and weren’t being checked despite wearing transmitters, were left to die and decompose.
Is the Cape still a kiwi creche? Are Lodge tours still occurring? Are kiwi still being handled by guests? Does the Cape’s current operation follow scientific best practice for kiwi? How many kiwis are still being tracked by transmitters?
