In January 2016, a Christchurch resident named Duane Major and his brother-in-law Adam Gardner launched a Givealittle page asking New Zealanders to help buy a beach inside Abel Tasman National Park. Awaroa, a golden 800-metre stretch on the park's northern coast, was privately owned and up for tender to buyers who wanted to build waterfront homes on it. More than 33,500 people pledged over NZ$2 million, the government added NZ$350,000, and by July 2016 the land had been handed to the Department of Conservation for good. It became known as "the people's beach."
That story is well told by now. What happened next, in the decade since, is less known — and it just reached its own milestone. In February 2026, a philanthropic trust called Project Janszoon marked the end of fourteen years spent trying to bring back the wildlife that had all but vanished from the forest behind Awaroa and the rest of the park.
Project Janszoon was set up in 2012 by philanthropists Neal and Annette Plowman — who later founded the NZ$200-million NEXT Foundation — describing itself as New Zealand's first privately funded landscape-scale restoration project of its kind. Over fourteen years it put more than NZ$20 million into clearing wilding conifers, controlling weeds and browsing animals, and reintroducing native birds absent from the park for generations, working alongside the Department of Conservation, local iwi and community volunteers. The ambition set out from the start was to finish the job in time for 2042 — the park's centenary and the 400th anniversary of Abel Tasman's arrival — and this phase of the work has now wrapped up eight years ahead of that horizon.
The clearest evidence sits at Hadfield Clearing, an old farm site beside the Awapoto River just inland from Awaroa, gifted to the Department of Conservation by the Hadfield family in 2006. Since 2017, Project Janszoon and DOC have released 358 pāteke — brown teal, one of the world's rarest duck species, with only 2,000 to 2,500 left in the wild — at Hadfield Clearing, the Awaroa Inlet, Tōtaranui and around Awaroa Lodge itself. The first large release, 21 birds on 16 May 2019, was followed by proof the ducks were breeding: six wild ducklings turned up on a monitoring camera that December. Abel Tasman is now considered one of the country's critical sites for the species' survival.
Elsewhere in the park, kākāriki (yellow-crowned parakeets) went out from an aviary at Wainui Hut starting in 2014; kākā followed in 2015 and again in 2019, 38 birds released in total; and whio (blue ducks), bred at the Isaac Conservation and Wildlife Trust's Peacock Springs facility, were released into the Wainui, Falls and Awaroa rivers from 2018 on. On Motuareronui/Adele Island — one of three islands in the park kept predator-free with traps and tracking tunnels, alongside Fisherman/Motuareroiti and Tonga Islands — tīeke, forest birds known in English as saddlebacks and reduced to roughly 650 birds nationally, were released in September 2014, ferried over from Motuara Island in the Marlborough Sounds.
None of this restoration work ever belonged to the state. Project Janszoon ran as a fixed-term, privately funded trust, and its founders always intended to hand the results over rather than manage the park indefinitely. Under an arrangement it calls the Tomorrow Accord, the trust transferred its programmes to the Department of Conservation around mid-2026, with day-to-day continuation now resting on DOC, iwi partners and the community-led Abel Tasman Birdsong Trust. "DOC is committed to honouring the legacy Project Janszoon has created," Director-General Penny Nelson said at the February handover event. "We'll be working with iwi, community groups, landowners and other supporters to sustain and build on these gains for future generations."
None of this guarantees what any one visitor will see. Pāteke are shy and mostly active at dusk, easy to miss even where they're established. But the underlying claim is a modest, verifiable one rather than a marketing line: the birdlife around Anchorage Beach and Awaroa Beach today is measurably different from what it was in 2012, because of a specific, funded, fourteen-year programme that has now formally finished its founding phase. Anchorage, the park's busiest bay and a scheduled water-taxi stop, and Awaroa, reached on foot across a tidal estuary further north, sit roughly a day's walk apart on the Coast Track — and the birdsong along that stretch, however faint it might sound to an untrained ear, has a documented, funded reason for being louder than it would otherwise be.
No. Pāteke are shy and mostly active at dusk, so they're easy to miss even in areas where they've been reintroduced, such as Hadfield Clearing and the Awaroa Inlet. What's confirmed is that the species has been sustainedly reintroduced there since 2017, with documented breeding.
There's no easy road access to Awaroa: most visitors arrive on foot via the Abel Tasman Coast Track or by water taxi. Anchorage is a scheduled water-taxi stop and the busiest point in the park, roughly a day's walk from Awaroa.
It's the name given to the arrangement under which Project Janszoon, a privately funded trust set up in 2012, transferred its fourteen years of ecological restoration work to New Zealand's Department of Conservation, with continuation resting on DOC, iwi partners and the Abel Tasman Birdsong Trust from around mid-2026.
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