Nelson DOC scientist honoured

Studying albatross population at the Auckland Islands, recovering declining bird numbers, and piloting large-scale predator control programmes are the career highlights for Dr Graeme Elliott.

The Nelson-based principal science adviser for the Department of Conservation (DOC), was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year 2024 Honours for services to wildlife conservation.

Born and raised in Christchurch, Graeme flocked to Nelson in about 1980 and studied fernbirds in Golden Bay for an honour’s degree, banded rails in Nelson swamps for his master’s degree, and mohua (yellowhead) in Fiordland, for his doctorate, which he completed in about 1990.

After contract work with DOC, he landed his first official role with the department in 1995, becoming a scientist for the National KākāpōManagement and Recovery Group.

“When I started doing that the numbers were very low, and by the time I stopped doing that and moved on things were looking up, so that was pretty good, and it was great fun working with a bunch of people who were so focused on something,” he says.

Graeme has also been a member of the whio (blue duck), orange-fronted kākāriki and mohua (yellowhead) recovery groups, principally as a science advisor since 2003.

“In the time I’ve been working on mohua, their numbers have plummeted, but we know by now it’s to do with rats and stoats, and we’re struggling to fix it, but we know what we have to do, which is really good pest control, and that’s very expensive at a large scale,” he says.

“But they’re not going to go extinct, we’ve moved them, they were mainly on the mainland before but now we’ve got them on a bunch of islands with no predators.”

Graeme, along with his partner, Dr Kath Walker, who was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to wildlife conservation in the New Year 2023 Honours, had also annually monitored the health of albatross populations in the subantarctic since 1991.

The pair had carried out much of the work in their own time.

“We had a trip down to the Auckland Islands in 1989 to look for this little rail, which is not found anywhere else, and having worked on the banded rails in Nelson, we sorted out the rail quite quickly… and we were wondering what else to do so we started counting the albatross,” he says.

“At the time, the albatrosses had just been found and even killed in large numbers by the tuna fisheries, and the numbers were plummeting.

“We come down each summer and we’ve got intensive study areas on the [Auckland and Antipodes Islands], and we go round and find all the birds each year to see who’s still alive and who’s died so you get a measure of the population trends, and we find all their nests to see how productive they are.”

Graeme is also regarded as a cornerstone of DOC’s large-scale predator control programmes, with his research informing the approach applied in South Island forests and adapted for North Island forests, leading to an increase in forest bird and bat numbers.

The 67-year-old says he’ll continue his conservation work “until I drop”.