Increasingly frequent encounters between humans and sea lions in the Catlins and Clutha coast has conservationists calling for vehicle bans on beaches
The world’s rarest species of sea lion is clawing its way back into prominence on Southland beaches - but road traffic on the seashore could send them back into the ocean, and obscurity.
It’s an existential threat provided by motorists who have been using the beaches with minimal regulation for generations for recreation. And now with the advent of tar-sealed roads around the Catlins, growing tourism operation.
Despite this, a proposal for blanket bans or reduced speed limits on Clutha District Council beaches was rejected last year with a large number of submissions wanting to preserve unmitigated vehicular access.
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Instead, the council rolled out a bylaw that came into effect at the beginning of this year requiring people to drive on the beaches in a way that doesn’t threaten the safety of people, plants and animals; as well as keep out of the dunes.
It was a disappointing result for sea lion advocate Sian Mair, the founder of pinniped preservation campaign Sea Society, who spent 28 months of unpaid full-time work collecting data on the situation and canvassing the public.
“It’s not what we asked for,” she said. “I respect that people felt differently, but to me it was a no-brainer.”
In the sea lion’s den
Mair said she first encountered the sea lions in 2020, when she moved to Invercargill to study environmental management.
But after getting to know the megafauna of the south coast, she switched to zoology.
Then on one day in May of 2020, she witnessed a truck continually approaching a bull on the sands of Catlins beach Cannibal Bay.
“I think they were trying to incite a reaction for a photo,” she said.
After seeing the aggravating impact the truck had on the animal, Mair was politicised.
She began writing to council, conservation groups and local iwi and learning about the knife-edge mainland sea lion colonies rest upon.
She started a petition to stop vehicle access to two beaches in the area, and then formed the group Sea Society with an eye to proposing broader rule changes to council.
At first, she said the response seemed overwhelmingly positive.
“When I first started the campaign it was a very positive response. Lots of people were saying to me I’ve lived in the Clutha region for years and they’ve noticed the traffic increasing, they’ve noticed sea lion numbers are increasing and its been concerning.”
It seemed like she had tapped into this undercurrent of people wanting change, but not knowing how to achieve it. Maybe she could harness that political will and get those changes through the halls of power.
But once the draft for the bylaw was released in May of last year, the opposing voices spoke up, with a volume that surprised Mair.
“I think it was when the draft was released that those who were against it realised that it was actually potentially going ahead,” she said. “It was something that wasn’t just a rumour.”
She said the opposition was formed primarily of locals, and followed three main lines of reasoning.
There were those who saw the ban as a violation of their democratic right, those who said they had driven on the beaches forever and didn’t want to stop now, and those who were concerned over the time and money needed to police it.
Mair remains diplomatic, empathising with people who have done things a certain way for generations.
She related a discussion she had at council with a local tourism operator, who runs a tour taking tourists up local beaches on ATVs.
Tourism operators benefit from the presence of the animals, and could even conceivably play a role in raising awareness about their ecological plight.
The operator’s argument was concern over who was going to police strict bylaws out on this isolated stretch of coast.
But Mair said ultimately there was a logical breakdown in tourism operators not wanting to take action to save the animals.
“It’s a tricky situation for sure,” she said. “But their reasoning in my perspective isn’t logical. What happens when the sea lion goes?”
It’s happened before.
The prodigal sea lion returns
Once found all the way from Fiordland to the Coromandel, according to the fossil record, around two-thirds of the 12,000 New Zealand sea lions left in the world live in the subantarctic Auckland Islands.
A vibrant pelt trade in the early colonial era saw them disappear from the mainland in the early 19th Century.
The South Island was sea lion-free for more than a century - until 1993, when a sea lion named ‘Mum’ emerged from the surf at an Otago Peninsula beach.
Since then, small populations have formed on Stewart Island, Otago Peninsula and the Catlins coastline.
But while it represents a tremendous win for the ecology of the area, and the potential for a small remnant population to recolonise old breeding grounds and grow in population, it’s also meant sea lion and human have started to become reacquainted.
In 2020, a matriarch of the Clutha breeding group named Matariki and her one-month-old pup were struck and killed by a vehicle as they crossed Kaka Point Road near Balclutha.
At the time, DoC Murihiku operations manager John McCarroll said she was much loved by the local community and that the deaths were a tragic loss for the New Zealand sea lion population.
“Matariki was gifted her name by local whānau,” he said. “She was a taonga of the sea lion population at Kaka Point. Over the years she had developed a habit of giving birth to pups in unique places such as under a crib or in a farmer’s shed.”
The slow return to breeding colonies on the mainland means more and more, the animals are crossing roads to find places to breed.
Two years ago, Dunedin City Council closed a busy coastal road for a month in order to keep a sea lion safe which was crossing back and forth after giving birth on a golf course.
“We’ve closed John Wilson Ocean Drive to vehicles for the next month to allow some special residents to use the road safely,” the council wrote on Facebook.
“That’s New Zealand,” said a commenter. Another: “Love our little country in this way!”
But the same courtesies to our flippered cousins isn’t extended further down the coast in the Clutha and Catlins area, where Mair said protections like that don’t exist.
And the sealing of roads in the area over the handful of years has introduced more tourists and seen traffic speed up.
At the same time, more sea lions seen on the mainland doesn’t mean the endangered species itself is out of the woods, with pup production at the main breeding spot in the Auckland Islands down by 50 percent in the past 12 years.
DoC predicts a 98 percent probability of extinction in the Auckland Islands within five generations - around 50 years' time.
The biggest threats to the animals at the moment are diseases that could break out in colonies and human fishing activity in their feeding grounds - during the last decade, more than 700 sea lions are thought to have been killed in the Subantarctic squid trawl fishery.
But a truck barreling along the beaches of Te Waipounamu certainly doesn’t help.
Looking at the feedback reports on the issue to the Clutha District Council, it seems some people in the area would rather there were fewer sea lions to worry about.
Some feedback received to a consultation back in May of 2019 had locals wanting greater control of sea lions on beaches, asking the council to chase them away.
In the same report, locals also asked the council to fence off sea lion-used areas to keep humans away from them and educate tourists on not getting too close.
For now, the sea lion shares the beaches of the southeastern South Island with the human population.
It seems that it’s not always a comfortable arrangement for either party.
However, according to Mair and Sea Society, it’s not an arrangement that will go on for much longer without some swift and strong changes to how Kiwis use our coastlines.
