They had the courage to start. They dared to dream. I'm AMP Scholarship judge Justine Troy. I'm in awe of people who persevere and push through when every door slams shut on them. Conservationist Scott Sambell is so passionate. And with an AMP Scholarship, and his best mate Milly, he's tackling the seemingly impossible ` creating a safe haven for our native species. I'm at Glenfern Sanctuary near Port Fitzroy, on the beautiful Great Barrier Island. PLEASANT GUITAR MUSIC Great Barrier's about 100 K's off of Auckland. It's about 285km2, and it's full of a bunch of very unusual people and animals. I've travelled to a lot of places; I've been around the world a few times, but when I got here 10 years ago, I stopped and I haven't been able to leave. So this is my place, and this is my people and these are my birds and my lizards and my trees. GENTLE MUSIC So this is an example of what happens when you just let a paddock go back to its natural state. So this area here was farmed only 50 years ago, on the right-hand side, and 65 years ago on the left-hand side up here. And then you've just got this, like, a juvenile manuka forest here. And then you'll see, um, where man has been in. (CHUCKLES) And purposely this wouldn't normally happen, but, um, just put a nice little rimu in there about 12 years ago. Thank you very much. Um, but everything else pretty much has happened naturally. I mean, this is what happens when you just stop farming. Nature just takes over again, basically. Conservation, to me, is redressing the balance that has been altered by humans over the years. Milly. Milly. Calm down. That's enough, OK? Stop. Milly, sit down. What I've got here in my hands is one of the rarest, um, NZ animals that there could possibly be. This is a chevron skink. This is the largest native lizard. They grow up to a foot long. I remember the first time I actually saw one in the wild, and I just couldn't believe it, because, you know, for all intents and purposes, these are pretty much extinct. Like, they're the stuff of fairy tales. When you think about the fact that, you know, there might not even be 500 of these guys in the entire world, and I've got one in my hands right now, that's how incredibly rare they are. And this is... This is where, just down here in this valley, inside Glenfern Sanctuary, is, you know, where the majority of them live. So it's a pretty bloody special place. There we go. That one, uh, definitely has to go in the database. Things like that are vitally important that we know where and when and how that we found that little guy... or girl. So... skink ` type. And, um.... Oh, I don't know if it's a boy or girl. We'll leave that blank, I guess. I had a very ad-hoc involvement with conservation, in that I would go out and randomly plant a tree or two and do some recycling and think of saving the planet. Until I met my wife, who is a real, bona fide scientist, you know? It's a magical valley. Another hundred years' time, this will be awesome. The skills that I've got and the skills that she's got, we ended up being a pretty cool team, and we've done some pretty cool projects over the years as well. We've got a thousand trees to go in this year. So` CHILD: Milly, Milly, stop. We keep putting 'em in here and fill up this, or we continue the corridor. Scott gets an idea and he's like, 'I'm doing that,' and nothing will stop him. He will just` He's just driven to doing that. And everything is focused on that, whatever that is at the moment that he just pours, you know, 200-odd per cent into it. From here we're gonna have a seamless... (WHOOSH) Yes. That's right. ...wetland going all the way up. It's not wetland. I mean, it's` It's riparian. Riparian corridor. Yes. Yeah. A place for ducks to live. Yes. Yeah. OK. GENTLE, DELIBERATE MUSIC 10 years ago, when we got fresh off the boat... Cos I'd lined up this job over here and thought, 'This is awesome.' And I googled Great Barrier Island and thought, 'Wow. What an amazing place. This is some kind of utopia,' and went back to Emma and told her and showed her a few photos. You know, if we had sat down and gone, 'Oh,' you know, 'what's our ideal job, reality and all the rest of it?' Then being sanctuary managers on an island is pretty up there. At the time, I was pregnant with Pippa, and we were going to a different country and having a baby on an island and starting a whole new life, which was definitely not planned at all. So when we had Pippa, we planted out hundreds and hundreds of kauri. It's a little tiny baby coming back to life just there. Sort of like carbon credits, I guess ` like, the impact of a human and trying to negate those impacts. So she grew up here in the sanctuary, and pretty bloody amazing place for a kid to grow up. She doesn't know that it's not normal to be surrounded by endangered species. Thinks I'm Mum. (GIGGLES) Jump in there, P. (LAUGHS) You know, she gets to kayak to school. Gonna be a good day. Yeah, I guess for the first five years, didn't know what a video game was. (LAUGHS) So she's kind of this little experiment, you know, out here in this very isolated place. She's a pretty unique kid. I think there might be some rats down here. I better clear this track, eh. This is crazy. You've gonna jump left. Oh, wait. See if it's off first. BRANCH SNAPS WHACK! WHACK! Oh. It wasn't! (LAUGHS) Could've got your fingers then. See if there's any peanut butter in there. Bait's untouched. No. Nothing. Yup. All right. You wanna set that one? Eurgh. Eurgh. What? Is that gross? You do eat that. CLICK-CLACK! Didn't you have that on your toast this morning? No. No. That's a different peanut butter, isn't it? Yes. Nice. This is serious stuff. (LAUGHS) We don't have fun in the bush (!) (SIGHS) Does Milly look like she's laughing? No! No. She's working. She's seriously working. She's just always like that. So, Milly is a pure-bred Jack Russell fox terrier, and she was basically raised, from 8 weeks old, when I got her, to tell me where kiore are. So, yeah, she is a rodent-detection dog. And she does a bloody good job of it. And she loves her job. Good girl! (WHIMPERS) Good girl. You're not allowed to throw sticks for her, because if she's out with Dad, um, and a stick flies past and she's on to a rat, she might go straight for the stick instead of the rat. Good girl. Oh, good girl! Yeah, 90% of what we do in this industry, unfortunately, is just catching predators. So I first had the idea that you could know if a trap was sprung... Years ago, I though, 'There has to be the technology to do this.' And there's these little chips you can buy off the shelf that you can put together and do that and programme it. It calls in ever couple of hours and says, 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm still alive.' And then the second that bar goes down, potentially there's a little rat in there, it calls in to say, 'I'm not fine any more.' So the whole point of it you can know from your desk, in the sanctuary, from` in Auckland, from New York ` provided the Internet works ` that a trap has gone off. So this is the situation this morning. Woke up to an alert. So I got an email and checked the map, and the map says, 'Yeah, number 15 ` trap is closed for some reason.' And then, uh, Matt Wade got involved, who's a bit of a software genius, and he said, 'Right, let's just take this to the next level now.' And him and Gian put this together, made their own circuit boards, and these things can tell you when the trap is open or closed. It can tell you a hell of a lot of other things as well. We started here with these prototypes that we made in my shed just down here. And now, thanks to the scholarship, we have these. These are out in the field right now, and these are telling me if a rat has broken into Glenfern Sanctuary. UPBEAT ROLLING MUSIC 25 years ago, Tony Bouzaid came out here with memories of grand old Fitzroy House, took his family up to Fitzroy House and walked in the back door and just was so heartbroken that it had changed so much in the last 25 years, that he decided to buy the place. I guess he didn't need any more money, so he decided to just pour all that energy into conservation. So that's why he bought this place, basically. He restored Fitzroy House, and then he set about restoring 240ha of land, trying to put it back to, I guess, how it was before we came and turned it into cow paddocks and had massive amount of vision ` like, crazy ideas of what he wanted to do. We were only here for a week and we were having dinner at his house and I was going, like, 'Oh, game. We love crazy ideas. We're into this, eh.' And then, um,... about a month later, he had an aneurysm, passed away. So... we had this sanctuary all of a sudden. HOPEFUL MUSIC Straight up the ramp, and just wait for us up there. Thank you! Safe travels. Thank you. (SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY) Thanks very much. Thank you! PLEASANT MUSIC You are here on this little spot just here, this 240ha, being the Kotuku Peninsula, and you haven't seen it yet, cos you came by boat, um, but there's a predator-proof fence, which is 2m high, that goes around the outside. So the whole point of having this is that we've got a pretty sensitive ecological area here in this peninsula. And so we're just trying to keep out certain pests like feral cats and rats and pigs and such forth. LIGHT-HEARTED, UPLIFTING MUSIC The fence is here to stop the flow of predators into the Kotuku Peninsula. ENGINE RUMBLES So the fence was always Tony's dream. I mean, we both shared this dream of a predator-free Great Barrier Island, but Tony was getting on, and I think he got the point where it wasn't gonna happen in his lifetime. Like, he wasn't gonna see a predator-free Great Barrier in his lifetime but he could have a predator-free Kotuku Peninsula. The beauty with the fence is that it will make eradication possible as opposed to control. I mean, what we've been doing for the last six years is we're trying to control the rat population. Rats and cats. Um, and to a degree, we've been successful, but not successful enough. That was his accomplishment, you know? This fence is his legacy, and Kotuku Peninsula ` what it is now ` is his legacy. We're basically stopping cats and pigs and rats from getting on to the Kotuku Peninsula. And they can't` They can't get through this, all right? It's just not possible. But they can go round the outside, and they can swim. Rats can swim, you know. So it's not the fence that's the issue but things getting in. It's everywhere else except the fence. The thing is that we've got such an incredibly precious ecosystem happening in there now that it's not like out here. It's not like it's just a free for all, you know? In there, the animals... They don't know that the cats are out. They're not` They don't know to protect themselves. There's some` Like the Cook's petrels, for example. They don't know what a cat is. POIGNANT MUSIC So, this is what we call angel wings. So this is a Cook's petrel. And this is kind of heartbreaking, because these are the guys that didn't` didn't exist here 10 years ago, and we created the habitat for them to be able to return. They reintroduced themselves. We've got about 20 burrows, um, but we've got five less now. Feral cats are the apex predator on Great Barrier Island. And that's why we don't have Cook's petrels breeding outside the sanctuary. You know, the ones that got a taste for a species are gonna keep going for that species, and Cook's petrels are completely defenceless. This guy's burrow, we found just up here, and they pop their head out and they just have a little bit of a sniff around, do a bit of gardening and then go back in again. And the cat was waiting outside the burrow. The cat took out five before we got it. When the fence was proposed, the goal of it was to prevent pests from entering the sanctuary after an eradication ` to create a safe haven for native species. I think now the fence is an interim. So my goal, I guess, is actually to get rid of the fence ` because we won't need it any more, because there won't be any pests on Great Barrier Island to get into the Kotuku Peninsula. Everyone's, sort of, perception of conservation is changing. I think people see it as more important now. People don't think I'm crazy any more when I say that we can eradicate the entire island, so maybe another 10 years and we'd be a fair bit closer. OK, so now we're heading into what we call the duck pond, which is so much more than just a duck pond; this is the` the pateke factory. So, once again, very rare, threatened species. Um, but in here we've got a super mum. Gretchen here is not yet 5 years old, and she's had over 50 babies, and the most important thing is those babies survived, um, which is very very unusual for pateke. So, these guys here are 6 days old now, and they've already doubled in their size. So, this stuff here was specially formulated... to do exactly what we're doing right now. So, the wee ducklings need to get on weight fast, because they're sitting ducks, (LAUGHS) literally! Gretchen knows where we feed her. She teaches them, 'This is where they feed.' Um, and then after, we start backing off the food. Yeah, if not, they're gonna get dependent on us. * UPBEAT POUNDING MUSIC RELAXED MID-TEMPO MUSIC D'you wanna pour that in? OK. You can start. Tell me when it's 1 cup. Up to here? It's wet! Any eggs? One egg. One egg! Yay! We need one egg. When Tony died, you know, apart from, you know, the initial, 'Oh my God, Tony's dead,' um, the next thought was, 'What happens now,' because this was his baby, and he funded it. 'Who owns this place now?' Probably a good quarter of a cup. Yeah. Emma and I basically took over the running of` of everything here. But we knew that wasn't sustainable. You ready? Go. So we're always looking for grants in order to keep the place going. All of this? Yeah. We're gonna need all of them. I started talking to people in our Auckland Council about, you know, 'What if we turn this into like a regional-park type thing?' At least get it into public ownership, right? That's the whole thing ` if it's in public ownership, then it's secure, right? And it's owned by the people of NZ. We've been working on this for a few years, and it's been a lot of ups and downs. You know, if we could just procure a couple of million dollars from nowhere and make it what we see as the vision, then, sure. But we` We can't do that. And some days you think you've nailed it and you've got the money pledged and enough money to buy the place, then other days you get thrown a spanner, and suddenly you think, 'Oh God, we're a million miles away from this now.' Because without the foundation of, 'This is who owns it,' it's really hard to draw money in to make things happen. It's just the same situation as before. It's like, 'How long do we go on waiting to just keep things ticking over?' Mm. Well, end of this year! That's it. Line drawn in sand. Instil the fear. Shall we eat muffins? OK. STEADY MID-TEMPO MUSIC So we've been fighting to keep this place... going as a sanctuary for the last four years. VOICE BREAKS: It takes its toll, eh? WATER TRICKLES So, Glenfern is basically our whole lives. You know, we live here; we work here; it's everything. We know all the birds intimately, you know? I've raised so many birds from` from eggs, and now their grandchildren are living here. So it's just so much a part of us. And, you know, if we were to lose all that, where do you go from there, you know? What would we have if we didn't have this place? POIGNANT MUSIC So, all the negotiations have been done. The proposal is that Auckland Council will be the purchasing body. They will buy the land off of the Bouzaid family, um, and it all comes down to a vote from the Parks Committee, which is this afternoon. Yeah, it's when our fate gets decided. WIND BLOWS SOFTLY HEAVY KNOCK ON DOOR I was just checking to what's happening with the phone call or anything` Nothing yet. > Nah? No. > I'm gonna text Izzy now. Oh. I'll hang around or...? Sure, if you want to. PHONE RINGS PHONE BEEPS Hello. Hey, Scott. Izzy calling. Hello, Izzy. How you going? I'm standing up. LAUGHS: Standing up? What happened today? You know, I've got a little smile. Oh! OK! (CHUCKLES) And I can't` I'm not allowed to say much. OK. But it's favourable and now has to go back to the other funders. I know what that means. OK. OK, cool. Sweet as. Talk to you soon. Thanks, Izzy. LAUGHS: OK, bye! Bye. They have to approach other funders, which means that one of the funders said yes. So that means that` But they wouldn't approach other funders unless the first funder said yes. The first funder's Auckland Council. They've said yes. Otherwise they wouldn't have to approach other funders. Yes, there we go. So the sanctuary's probably safe. Probably! (CHUCKLES) At least for` ...a bit. Yeah. GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC This is the furthest we've ever been in the journey, you know, to getting this done. Yeah. This could be... Yeah, this could be closure. You know? And I will have a conversation with Tony, as I do. So, this is Sunset Rock, and this is the last resting place of Tony Bouzaid. Um, and this is Tony's hat. Tony's put his hat down and he's` he's gone, you know? But he's left his hat here. Sometimes I curse you, Tony, for starting me on all this. But I guess we can both relax now. The place is safe now. And we did it. We did it, didn't we, Mill? We did it, Tony. Thanks, buddy. It's not just looking after this place; it's the potential it has for showing what's possible in other places. We're really taking advantage of the potential for using technology in conservation to make a very real difference to control those pests and to create a safe haven for the native species that we've been trying so hard to protect for so long. I love this place. I do love the island, and I love... the sanctuary. It's a part of me. The sanctuary's a part of me. Captions by Glenna Casalme. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016