We feel extremely lucky that our son (still a toddler) gets to grow up in this beautiful area and that the Abel Tasman National Park is his extended backyard. During Conservation Week (September 2019) it was time to clean up that backyard, by joining the Abel Tasman Beach Clean.
Stew Robertson from Tasman Bay Guardians went through a lot of effort to organise an Abel Tasman National Park Beach Clean-up. It was great to see everyone come together for such a good cause: Multiple operators kindly provided the transport of 65 volunteers to all the different beaches of the Abel Tasman National Park.
Amongst these 65 volunteers there were many children and young people, including our toddler. Looking after Mother Nature is one of the life lessons we feel passionate about passing on to him and we believe we can’t expose him to great initiatives like these early enough.
All together we collected 195kg of rubbish. The timing was excellent. With Spring about to start the Abel Tasman National Park would soon see lots of visitors again. Not seeing any rubbish would encourage people to take out their own, instead of adding it to an existing pile.
Although it is good that this rubbish is no longer in the Abel Tasman National Park, we can’t help wonder what it was doing there in the first place? We would like to think that we can all do our bit to keep the Abel Tasman pristine and that we can avoid any wildlife being exposed to our plastic, our glass bottles, and our tins. May we suggest the following:
- Those cute little Wekas are very cheeky. They love pinching your food and taking it to one of their hiding spots. Please be forewarned and make sure they cannot get to your food nor your rubbish.
- Have a look around you after you get up from your picnic break, have you dropped any waste or wrappers by accident?
- When you see rubbish lying around, please pick it up and carry it out, don’t give anyone the idea that it is okay to start a little pile of rubbish in the National Park.
Another part of the beach clean-up was the removal of carved graffiti into the granite rock of Mosquito Bay (Namu Namu). With the graffiti gone, we hope that people will no longer get the idea that it must be okay to do such a hideous thing, and that they will no longer be tempted to add their names to the rock.
We were lucky to have Kyle from Bare Kiwi present to record the day’s events. Please have a look here to see the video he made. Or read the newspaper article here.
Thank you to Stew for organising this event. Thank you to Abel Tasman Eco Tours, DoC, Abel Tasman Kayaks and Wilsons for transporting all the volunteers in and out of the National Park. And thank you to the many volunteers that were willing to spend their day off cleaning up the Abel Tasman National Park.
See what more we do to try to help the environment here.
