Native Animals
Waitakere has a unique environment, and over half of the
city is covered in park land. This means that we have some
special animal species present, some of which are rare and
threatened. Not only that, you do not have to travel far to
be amongst our native animals and their habitats.
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Dotterels on Te Henga
Beach, rare endangered birds.
Image source ARC |
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Dunstan Gecko |
Native animals in Waitakere
In Waitakere we have:
Creating habitat for native animals
You can help to bring native animals back into our
neighbourhoods by a number of different methods. Providing
food plants and habitat plants in your garden can also help
those animals that move from one area to the next and need
food and a stopping place, and also helps provide
replacement habitats for those that were lost during
subdivision.
Things that you can do are:
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- Create places for skinks and geckos to live and be
protected during the day from cats and dogs. These are
called
reptile refugia (Size 101K).
- Build weta houses
(Size 248K) out of railway sleepers or old
wooden power poles – great for the kids too.
- Plant plants which these animals like to live in or
feed in.
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Encourage birds into your back yard.
Threats to our native animals
Our native animals evolved without many predators and are
now threatened. Animals like cats and dogs can hunt our
birds and reptiles and we end up with no species surviving
except in undisturbed bush areas.
It is important to keep dogs on leads, and put bells on
cats as ways to stop them hunting as efficiently, and help
protect our native species.
Pest animals can also eat
food from our native plants that our native animals feed on,
affecting how many young they can have in a given year.
Controlling rats and mice is a good way to make sure the
fruit on our trees are reserved for our birds.
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