The World is watching

A DELEGATION from the Ōtorohanga Kiwi House & Native Bird Park was gobsmacked to discover just how highly the Ōtorohanga project was rated globally.

The delegates were invited to present the kiwi house redevelopment project as a keynote address at the Living Futures Institute of Australia.

General manager Jo Russell, deputy trust chair Kim Ingham and development manager Julian Phillips attended.

“We got invited to go over there as keynote speakers and present where this project sits in the world. We knew it was big, but we didn’t know it was actually going to be groundbreaking,” Kim said on their return.

As part of the redevelopment project, they adopted the institute’s living building challenge, currently the highest form of international sustainable accreditation.

“This is how we got seconded to go over there to Melbourne, because no one’s ever done that programme based on a zoo before, so we will be world leading,” Kim said.

“It’s really interesting, the living building challenge is predominantly about people, but we are considering both people and animals. And it’s been a bit of a challenge for everyone. And it certainly raised a lot of eyebrows and brought a lot of emotion from people at the symposium.

“We had grown people crying to us afterwards. ‘We can’t believe that’s what you are doing, and you are doing it from a really small little town in New Zealand’.

“We were actually very humbled. We knew it was big, but we didn’t know it was actually going to be that big.

“We were so locally focused we hadn’t really considered the international impact of what the Ōtorohanga kiwi house was trying to do,” Julian said.

WAZA, the World Association of Zoos and Aquaria, put figures out that zoo visitation hits 700 million people every year.

“So, if we can make a difference and influence and inspire other zoos to do similar programmes, we are reaching a lot of people,” Kim said.

“We are hoping to create the benchmark for all future zoo, wildlife park, aquarium design because the focus is obviously for visitors, but predominantly wildlife and how that fits within the WAZA and the UN,” Julian said.

When they started the living building challenge and were exploring whether they were going to take it on, they found they were already working on 17 of the 20 imperatives.

It was made for them, Julian said. Particularly around their approach to building materials – and wildlife.

Most of the silicones in widespread use in New Zealand building and construction as sealants, adhesives and gap fillers, are full of anti-fungicides, anti mould, UV protectants.

“The amount of volitile organic gases that come off that we are breathing as humans, but at the same time we are also using in our wildlife habitats,” Julian said.

“We have now moved completely to inert silicone stuff that insects and the animals won’t try and eat or chew, and that’s just one very minor example of the swing in the built environment that we are working towards.

“Fantastically we are predominantly hunting down New Zealand companies and working with them specifically.”
Some of the people they were working with came from provincial New Zealand, he said.

“And we are potentially getting their products across the line to be the first in the world under this accreditation system we are working on.

“Every single thing you see in here – the wood, the paint – we can trace where they have come from.

“The stainless steel we can trace right back to the moment it was taken out of the earth to the moment it was processed.

“So, we are creating local economy sourcing, supporting the local economy as much as we can but also understanding the ingredients. It’s amazing what ingredients are in products that we use every day.”

During the project they will create a massive website. QR codes on an external timber door frame will link back to the kiwi house website, outlining what the product is, how it was fixed, what glues were applied, and the sealant used to complete it – with a contact link if someone wanted to use the product.

New Zealand was quite advanced when it came to sustainable products, Julian said.

“But we just need to take that extra step to be world leading, and a lot of these companies we are working with, their minds are blown with where we are heading,” he said.

An interesting quote they heard in Melbourne from one of the people in their session was: “The kiwi house is Ōtorohanga and Ōtorohanga is the kiwi house”.

That resonated with them.

“We are just head down bum up, we don’t really promote ourselves that well,” Julian said.

Jo and Kim have also recently spoken at a Tourism Waikato symposium.

“Tourism NZ is watching us closely in terms of regenerative tourism, which is the
new catch phrase,” Kim said.

Before her involvement with the kiwi house, Kim was working on the development of the new regional medical facility, which was built through the generosity of people in the community.

This facility was now debt-free and paying $100,000 to community groups every year, she said.

She said once the kiwi house project was debt-free, they conservatively estimated they would have a million dollars profit and that would be put into ex-situ conservation around this area.

Julian said the international visitors at the Melbourne symposium, representatives from the United Nations and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature were blown away with what the kiwi house was trying to achieve.

“Not just with the built environment, not just visitor experience and what we are doing with wildlife, but also how we are bringing in and entrenching tikanga and Maōri values in everything that we do.

“We have a partnership with our local marae and Tom Roa. It’s phenomenal what we are bringing, we are bringing it all back.”

When completed the kiwi house and bird gardens will be essentially of grid, Julian said.

“We will still be grid connected for emergency purposes because we have critical wildlife, but we will be off grid and we can support our community at the drop of a hat in any civil defence type situation – because we are higher than the ‘58 flood. It only came halfway up the main street, so we have a good opportunity here if we meet something in the future.

“And our new animal enrichment centre we are building down the bottom, we can convert one of those kitchens to human food at the drop of a hat if we need to.”

The springs discovered in the earlier stages are to provide water for the wetland habitat, which is in the design stage.

“We found some more (springs) but we are capturing them so we can use the water, doing hydrology tests to ensure they don’t overdraw the supply,” Julian said.

“This whole catchment seems to be a heap of springs that we didn’t know existed.

“We are being responsible with that water, making sure we are dealing with it appropriately and making sure we are not taking too much out of the water table.
“Regenerative, sustainable but you also have to be responsible.”

The project will support 10 new guiding jobs, and the kiwi house has a relationship with the college to give opportunities to local rangitahi.

“Ultimately for young people to get the first foot on the ladder in the conservation realm, it’s very difficult for them to do that,” Kim said.

“It’s really important work that we are doing. It’s got huge breadth and depth and the world is watching, which is really daunting but exciting.”