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.

Native animals in Waitakere

In Waitakere we have:

• 71 native bird species
• 5 native reptiles
• 1 native bat
• 1 native frog
• 11 freshwater fish
• 1 native marine mammal
• 2 freshwater crustacean
• 100 species of land snail
• Over 800 insect species

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.
• 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.