Two hundred kilometres south of Stewart Island, a small cluster of granite islands rises out of the Southern Ocean and quietly hosts more breeding seabirds than the entire United Kingdom and Ireland combined. The Snares Islands, known in te reo Māori as Tini Heke, are the smallest of New Zealand’s five subantarctic island groups and almost certainly the most biologically intense. They are also among the most strictly protected pieces of land in the world. Almost no one is allowed to set foot on them.
The figures are difficult to take in until you sit with them for a moment.
Where they are
The Snares group sits at roughly 48 degrees south, about 200 kilometres south of Stewart Island and 100 kilometres west of the Auckland Islands. There are two main islands, North East Island and Broughton Island, plus a scatter of rock stacks and islets, and the total land area is about 3.5 square kilometres. That is smaller than the Auckland CBD.
The islands were sighted by George Vancouver and the explorer Lieutenant William Broughton on the Chatham in November 1791, three months after Captain Cook’s last voyage had passed through the area. Vancouver named them the Snares because the unmarked rocks were a hazard to shipping, a hazard which over the following century claimed several whaling and sealing vessels. Sealers worked the islands hard between 1810 and the 1820s. The southern fur seal population was almost eliminated and only began to recover after the trade collapsed in the 1830s.
The islands have been a nature reserve since 1961 and form part of the New Zealand Sub-Antarctic Islands UNESCO World Heritage site, alongside the Auckland, Campbell, Antipodes and Bounty groups.
The numbers
The dominant inhabitant is the sooty shearwater, known to Māori as titi and as the muttonbird to the rest of the country. The Snares are the world’s premier breeding site for the species. A 1982 burrow survey by zoologists John Warham and Graham Wilson counted 3.29 million burrows on the islands and estimated, assuming a 75 percent occupancy rate, about 2.75 million breeding pairs. That single figure means there are likely more breeding seabirds on these small islands than nest in the entire British Isles.
The shearwaters are joined by 39 other seabird species. Ten of the world’s 22 albatross species have been recorded breeding or visiting. Buller’s albatross, the Snares Cape pigeon, the southern Buller’s mollymawk and at least three species of prion have established colonies. There are also two penguin species, the endemic Snares crested penguin, which breeds nowhere else, and the more widely distributed erect-crested penguin.
Beneath the seabirds, an endemic understorey runs through the rest of the ecosystem. The Snares snipe is found only here. So is the Snares tomtit. There are endemic weevils, an endemic flightless cricket, an endemic earwig and at least three endemic plants. Of the 22 vascular plant species recorded on the islands, 20 are indigenous. The only introduced plants are common chickweed and an annual grass, both confined to old hut sites and considered manageable.
And above all of this sits the most important number of all. Zero rats. Zero stoats. Zero cats. Zero mice. The Snares Islands have never had a mammalian predator introduced.
Why they are still pristine
That zero is unusual on a planetary scale. New Zealand’s mainland was deforested across about a thousand years by Māori burning and European clearance, and its native bird fauna was reshaped by the arrival of kiore, then ship rats, then stoats and possums. Across the country’s offshore island estate, predator-free status is something that has had to be earned, painstakingly, through eradication programmes that have run for decades. On the Snares, the work was never necessary. The islands are far enough from any landmass, exposed enough to weather and difficult enough to land on that no rat ever made it ashore. Sealers in the 1820s did not leave a permanent population behind. The post-sealing era left two huts, both now removed.
The result is one of the few completely unmodified land ecosystems left on Earth. Around 80 percent of North East Island is covered by a forest of the tree daisy Olearia lyallii, growing to roughly five metres. The shearwaters burrow through the soft soil beneath the canopy at densities so high that walking through the forest, where it is permitted at all, is done on boardwalks because every step risks collapsing a nest.
Access
Visiting the Snares requires a permit from the Department of Conservation and one is almost never issued. The general rule is that the only people allowed ashore are scientific researchers, DOC staff and the occasional documentary crew, and even then with strict biosecurity protocols. Boots are inspected. Bags are sealed. Velcro is brushed. Everything that lands has to be quarantined first because a single seed or a single fertilised insect egg could change the place forever.
Cruise ships do occasionally sail past on Heritage Expeditions and similar trips into the subantarctic, but they are not allowed to put passengers ashore. The closest most people get to the Snares is a Zodiac cruise around the perimeter, looking up at granite cliffs and into rookeries from the water. DOC’s own page on the Snares is sparing with practical information for exactly this reason. There is no visitor pathway. There is no visitor centre. There is no commercial reason for one to exist.
The wider decline
One unsettling thing about the Snares is that being pristine is not enough to insulate the place from change. Sooty shearwater numbers across the islands have fallen by roughly 37 percent over the 27 years since the original Warham and Wilson survey, an annual decline of about 1.7 percent. The causes are not on the islands themselves. The shearwaters spend most of their year at sea, ranging on a 15,000 kilometre figure-of-eight migration into the North Pacific, and the decline is attributed mostly to ocean conditions, food availability and incidental bycatch in fisheries on the other side of the world.
That is the sober reading. The country can protect a single piece of land as comprehensively as it has protected the Snares Islands, and still the birds that depend on it can decline because of what happens 10,000 kilometres away. The Snares, by themselves, cannot save the sooty shearwater. They can only refuse to be part of the problem.
It is a precise, unromantic kind of conservation outcome. The Snares Islands are not pristine because they were rescued. They are pristine because, by a combination of geography and good fortune, nothing has yet been broken. The country’s job for the next century is to keep it that way.
If you want to see where the Snares sit in the wider conservation picture, Newswire’s Conservation Areas Explorer maps every DOC-managed reserve in New Zealand, including the subantarctic groups. The NZ Bird Map includes records of Snares crested penguins and Snares tomtits among other endemic species.
Should the Snares Islands remain closed to almost all visitors, or is there a case for limited, tightly biosecured tourism? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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