Castlecliff Conservation Area
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Castlecliff Conservation Area Nau Mai! Haere mai! Welcome to the newest part of the country PRE VISIT Brainstorm the ideas that students already have about the site. Group their ideas under headings such as biodiversity (the variety of life), earth science, recreation, human impacts, etc. according to the objectives for your trip. Design an outdoor safety code. Appoint class members to help apply it on the day. Visiting outdoor areas usually requires special gear. Have students list the clothing and other gear they think they will need on the trip. Locate the site on a map. Work out its distance from the school and how long it will take to get there. Talk about how people would have travelled there in the past. Find out who the local iwi in your rohe are. Where are their marae? Who are the kaumätua? What stories can they can tell you about the place you are going to visit? Find out what the students know about DOC. Is there a DOC office in their area? What sorts of things does a DOC ranger do? Check out the DOC web site, www.doc.govt.nz Use maps and other resources to gather information about the geology and geography of the area. Examine key ideas related to the history of the site - eg its location and strategic importance; evidence of past occupation and uses. Which groups of people have lived in or used the area in the past, and for what purposes? Explore New Zealands responsibilities under global conventions such as the Rio Convention on Biodiversity. Use the DOC web site to find out about the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy. How do the goals and actions in the strategy relate to the site you are visiting? Examine the meanings of the words exotic, endemic and native. Consider which exotic plant and animal species could get into the reserve unaided. How could they get there? What would their impact be? Find out if there is anything that you can do to help look after the environment when you are on your visit. POST VISIT Produce a coast care pamphlet to tell other people about things that they can do to keep this as one of the best parts of the whole bay on which we live. Messages to include are: stick to the paths, keep vehicles out of the dunes, keep rubbish out and control dogs. Super Sites for Education in Wanganui 1 Make a large wall chart of a cross section of the beach from low tide level up to the cliff with teams working on the shells, plants, insects and spiders, birds and fossils. Find out about the use of coastal plants and animals for food, weaving and as rongoa or traditional medicines. Ask your local kaumätua or check books in the library. Choose a picture of a bird like the black-backed gull (karoro) and identify its special features e.g. powerful hooked bill, loud calls, keen eyesight, webbed feet and, long wing feathers for soaring. Add labels for these adaptations (features) and say how each helps the bird survive. Make a wanted poster for an introduced mammal pest such as a rat or cat. Describe the damage that the pest is doing and suggest an ecological reward for its elimination. Draw plants and animals that make a food chain and/or cut them out. Arrange them into a food chain or, for more advanced students, build up a food web. Find out about three weeds that are established here. Why are they weeds? How did they get brought into New Zealand? Produce cards describing the aims of interest groups involved with the reserve - e.g. local beach society, iwi, neighbouring houses, surf-fishing enthusiasts, Forest & Bird Protection Society and off road vehicle users. Distribute the cards and conduct a debate on what should go in the management plan for the reserve. Try modelling some of the coastal processes using a shallow aquarium, sand and a flat board to make waves. Can you create a long shore current by making the waves strike the shore at an angle? What sand patterns are created? Rippin ragwort - Once you have learnt to identify the pink ragwort (contact DoC Wanganui if you want to make this an aspect of your trip) you can encourage students to pull it out. N.B. Please make sure that only responsible students are invited to do this as there are some rare plants around. Fortunately none of them look anything like the pink ragwort. Spread the message - We would love students who have learnt to value this great piece of New Zealand to spread the word to others who think of it only as piles of sand with a few weeds on. Discuss, as a class, things that could wreck this area (e.g. off-road vehicles, loose dogs, new weeds). Now design an information board to tell visitors whats special about the reserve and what they can do to protect it. As an alternative you could make an informative guide to the reserve. TEACHER NOTES, CASTLECLIFF CONSERVATION AREA The following notes are aimed at providing the teacher with some background information. Refer to the activities appended for more ideas for students. This reserve is a surprisingly rich natural area on the doorstep of a city. It is included in this series because of the dynamic physical environment, range of plant and animal biodiversity and famous fossil beds. 2 Super Sites for Education in Wanganui In a small area, students can find nationally threatened plant and animal species. They can see powerful physical forces in action and find a fossil. Being so handy it should be possible to return in different seasons to see some of the annual patterns of life. Tread gently On your trip to the reserve you are likely to cause some damage just by walking over the dunes and disturbing the plants and their roots. The tough plants that grow here have a tenuous hold on the sand and when they lose their grip, the wind that roars in off the Tasman causes blowouts that spread until the sand-binding plants get a chance to weave their magic again. Staying off the plants as much as possible protects your environment. Keep to tracks wherever you can find them. Otherwise try to step between the plants and disturb the sand as little as possible. Makin tracks - One way students can help is to bring back some branches of driftwood to lay where the main track runs. This encourages people to stick to one track instead of going all over the place and therefore damaging the plants Access There is a good parking space with a beach sign on Longbeach Drive. A path leads off this to a set of wooden steps down to the dunes. From the steps you can see the layout of this reserve. Looking northwest a line of cliffs sweeps around toward Kai iwi. Taranaki is way off in the distance. In front of the cliffs are newly formed sand dunes. Pause for a moment to look at the sea conditions. (Activity 1: Can you read the sea) From here there is a choice of direction and it is sometimes hard to tell what is a real track. Sticking to the main paths particularly near the access points is an important rule to prevent damage to the plants, which are holding the sand dunes together. Many people head straight down to the beach and walk a distance along it before heading back into the dunes. If you choose this option please be careful when recrossing the foredune as it is the most fragile. An alternative is to take the path that leads down into the hollow behind the fore dune. This tends to be a bit overgrown. Watch out for boxthorn. Earth science This region is a good place to see evidence that sea levels rise and fall. Independent of that, the land can also be lifted and dropped. Sea level change seems to have been particularly common in the most recent Quaternary geological era. It is driven mainly by global climate changes. In the ice ages, more water was locked up in ice sheets and glaciers so sea levels dropped. During the last big ice age it got so low that there was dry land between Wanganui and Nelson. Warmer periods like now bring the sea back up, swelled by melting ice and heat expansion. Low areas are flooded and high land is cut back creating cliffs. Meanwhile, rivers are always carrying sediment (mud and sand) out to sea. Sand being heavier drops first, mud goes further out where, like the sand, it buries shells and other marine creatures. Super Sites for Education in Wanganui 3 On a planet that is still active, what goes down eventually comes back up. Certainly the Wanganui region is full of the evidence with widespread deposits of shell fossils. The rise of the land has been driven by the collision of the Australian and Pacific plates under the North Island. Looking inland we see a series of old terrace plains that were lifted, one after the other, out of the ocean only to then start eroding back into it. Nature is full of cycles! Geologists love the fossils along this coast. They are easily accessible in the cliffs and, the layers are gently tilted so that from Castlecliff, which has the youngest layers, back to the west there is a neat sequence of fossils. It has become the national standard and even if a fossil is found in Hawkes Bay it will be called Castlecliffian if it is 200,000 years old or Kaiiwian or Nukumaruan if it is somewhat older.