Baring Head

Like last year, I worked out at Baring Head during the final week of the girls' school. Its the edge of land, owned by the regional government, on the east side of Wellington Harbor with high hills and sweeping views back to the south coast of Wellington.

And of course there were sheep. When I arrived on the second day they were herding them down the steep hill, horns honking, dogs barking and a stream of sheep baaaing their way down the mountain.

The white line in the distance are the sheep coming down the road, dogs barking them along. 

We had to wait to start work until the sheep went through.

Now the lower paddock is filled with unshorn sheep.

The study we are working on out at Baring Head is looking at lizard numbers and diversity in areas retired from grazing, and with different levels of pest control. The retirement of grazing areas has made numbers of the northern grass skink and Raukawa gecko (the most common skink and gecko in the Wellington area) increase dramatically, but with the rare lizards we haven't seen any change. Something else is impeding their survival...or maybe we just won't see any change for years to come. The rare northern spotted skink is long lived, slow to reach sexual maturity and has few young. 

It's amazing to me that only 100 years ago, before the introduction of mammalian predators, these large skinks (northern spotted skink adults are the size of your hand!) would have comprised 80% of the lizards you'd find. Now they are nearly extinct on the mainland--so rare they are reduced to two very small isolated populations. 

A northern spotted skink subadult. 

It was 7 days of 10+ miles a day of hard hiking, up and down these 'hills', but the views were stunning.