North Canterbury's Bush Janitor and his vision for Island Hills Station

Today North Canterbury's terrain tells the story of rugged pioneers who etched their mark on the landscape through fire, livestock and pasture. However, a farming family with 100 years of history in the area have been turning back the hands of time and now, with the help of a man dubbed the Bush Janitor, they hope to return the great spotted kiwi to its ancestral home. Timothy Brown reports.

When arriving at Island Hills Station, it looks like any other Hurunui sheep and beef operation.

But in the hills lies 600 hectares of regenerated native bush under a QEII covenant - one of the largest in Canterbury.

Dan Shand, the fourth generation to farm the station, says conservation runs in the family.

"Early on even my grandfather recognised the value of it, so he didn't just keep burning," Shand says.

"Then my father and my mum made a QEII covenant in the 90s, which was really early on for QEII covenants... So we've always been going down that path."

In the early 2000s Shand and his wife Mandy returned to the property and built a walking track to bring in additional income.

"It's always been a difficult property to farm, whether it was the snow, the extremes and it's pretty hard country. So it's definitely always been a tough place," Shand says.

"We still wonder why they picked this place. The three brothers sold some land in Christchurch and bought Port Ligar, the Blue Duck in Kaikōura, and this place, and they're three of the hardest places. But maybe the most beautiful."

The native bush has created a habitat for pīwakawaka, tūī, kārearea, kākāriki, kākā, kea and more.

But in 2015 the Shands were keen to spend more time with their kids and decided to close the walking track.

"We hadn't seen our children grow, you know, we were missing out on a lot of stuff," Shand says.

"We were trying to run a farm, a honey business and a walking track. So we just needed a break and to be able to see the kids."

That is where the Bush Janitor, Shaun Monk, enters the story.

Monk grew up on the West Coast near Haast and spent his childhood in the bush and mountains.

But growing up meant university, a corporate job, a marriage and "that whole thing of life and a big mortgage".

In 2019 Monk was searching for purpose.

"One day I thought 'nah, that's actually not what I want to do' and I pretty much tossed the whole thing away and ran away from a career, a job, that I'd done for 26 years and I just basically jumped ship and ran off into the bush and Island Hills Station is where I ended up," Monk says.

"It was really nice of the Shand family to take me on as their resident hermit and I ran into the bush here and kind of lived in the huts."

After six months of running around the bush, Monk realised he needed something to do and a way to earn an income and proposed resurrecting the walking track and operating a tourism venture from the station.

"The whole corporate world, I guess I probably wasn't cut out for it in the end and they probably weren't cut out for me either," he says.

"So it was quite cool to just end up going back to basics and back into the bush was really nice. It kind of does throw away a university degree and career, but you move on to other things - you reinvent yourself.

"It's given me a life in the bush again. I started my life in the bush and now I'm back in the bush."

That is where the Bush Janitor moniker comes from.

Running around cleaning up after visitors to the station and its walking track and huts.

"One of my mates that was a hunting guide, he said to me 'what are you, some kind of janitor out there in the bush' and I ended up just taking on the name and I quite like having a name like Bush Janitor because it keeps it real, keeps you grounded. You know what you really are - just a dunny cleaner at the end of the day in the bush.

"I mean, you could call yourself a CEO or a general manager or whatever you want to call yourself when you're self-employed. Why not just be the janitor?"

Since moving to Island Hills, Monk has started a concerted trapping effort with visitors to the station able to sponsor traps to contribute to the cause.

"We started in 2019 with a very meagre trapping programme. We've managed to get up to around 270 traps now," he says.

The station also now hosts the Skedaddle trail race, which has provided further money to purchase traps and monitoring equipment with the hope of reintroducing kiwi.

"That's getting us to a level where we can start getting really serious about it," Monk says.

"Great spotted kiwi used to live in this area maybe 80 years ago... and we would love them to come back.

"Predators and deforestation have been what's removed a lot of kiwi habitat all through Canterbury. There's very few kiwi populations in Canterbury nowadays and getting more kiwi back into the Canterbury region would be an awesome achievement.

"To do that, we really needed to create some more funding streams to control predators and to get some monitoring underway to give evidence that we were getting the predators and pests under control, and that we had a flourishing bird population here. All of those things provide a nice foundation for a kiwi release."

They are now working with the Save the Kiwi Foundation.

"They are keen to work with us towards that goal of releasing great spotted kiwi and, of course, we need someone that's going to raise the kiwis from eggs and raise the chicks to release here and that's where Save the Kiwi Foundation comes in," he says.

"So we're working closely with them towards our end goal and to do that we need to do more tracking, more predator work and more monitoring."

Two trail cameras that are activated by movement have recently been installed to capture pests moving through the bush, and two self-resetting traps are now making a dent in the possum population, as well as the deadlier pests lurking in the bush.

"Two of the key predators are feral cats and stoats. Those two are the most savage on kiwi. So we need to get them down to levels where through our monitoring we can show that they are at very low levels.

"They don't have to be fully gone because that's almost impossible at this stage. But we will get them to very low levels and that's the point we'll be able to release kiwi," Monk says.

He says he wants to see kiwi reintroduced in the next decade.

"I just imagine having kiwi here in the bush and people that come to enjoy this area could hear a kiwi call - that would just be magical," Monk says.

"That's kind of the thing, really, is you just want to have a place where people can come and experience kiwi - there's not many places to do that in the wild in New Zealand, and so having more of those places would be great, and especially in a place like Canterbury which has traditionally become more and more farmland and open land.

"And now it's becoming more of a habitat for birds again and it would be great to see kiwi as part of that.

"And when you're trying to go for a goal such as kiwi, you're also fixing all the other problems at the same time. So you're allowing a habitat for all the other birds to come back."

Shand also supports the aim.

"They were here once upon a time, and so... if we can look after the bush, get the pests down and get it to a point... we can prove to them that we're worthy of having them here then how amazing would that be?"

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.