Carly Hill passes Ngatai Rauputu a wētā in the new facility. Behind them are containers housing the hatching insects.
Māhoenui’s very own wētā are thriving in Ōtorohanga – and last weekend a centre just for them was officially opened. Sigrid Christiansen was there.
Ngatai and Marina Rauputu didn’t choose wētā life – wētā life chose them.
The insects living in gorse on the Rauputu family farm at Māhoenui, near Piopio, were identified as significant nearly seven decades ago, when Ngatai was a schoolboy.
“I’d known about them ever since I was a child. It was no different to any other thing, a snail or a frog.”
Then in 1962, a cousin took a wētā to school in a box. The headmaster pursued it, and had it identified.
“Prior to that, it had just been a thing we saw,” he said.
“It was identified in the sense that it was unidentified – it was a wētā but it didn’t have a name. It was distinct, it was unique,” Marina added.
Outside agencies started coming to the farm, saying the species was significant, unique and at risk of extinction.
The insect had not been found anywhere else, it turned out – to acknowledge where it was found, it was named the Māhoenui giant wētā.
The Rauputu family’s response was to ask: “what can we do to preserve this?”.
After Marina became part of the family she became familiar with the farm’s most distinctive residents, who lived in a patch of gorse at the back of the farm.
The wētā’s survival was a matter of luck: “all these great things happen by mistake,” as Ngatai put it.
His parents had never let goat hunters in. The patch of land where the wētā lived, right of the back of the farm, had been written off until they could develop it, and the goats kept the gorse under control. The goats trimmed the gorse bushes, as far as they could reach. That created a cage effect – keeping the wētā safe.
“It actually was a big help for the wētā. Because the predators, the cats, the stoats and so forth, don’t come up the base of the gorse because it’s short and prickly.
Ngatai and Marina were at the opening of the new facility at the Ōtorohanga Kiwi House on Saturday to see the progress of 22 weta taken from their farm and given a new ‘home” in Ōtorohanga.
They feel more hopeful than ever about the future of the wētā.
Marina described the insects as a national treasure, which would have been “on the way out, if nothing were done”.
He welcomed outside agencies getting involved, saying they had brought great potential to the survival the rare and endangered insects.
“Before, it was just a pie-in-the sky idea. Now we have Government agencies, DoC, interested people, capable people. People who have spent a long period of time studying things – they can bring it all together and make it happen.
“This is what my parents wanted too.”
