Gannet Safaris Overland. The only operator providing overland 4WD access to the Plateau colony. School tours are a confirmed offering. Contact directly for school pricing and availability.
396 Clifton Road, Te Awanga, Hawke's Bay
+64 6 875 0888
gannetsafaris.co.nz/info/school-tours
15 August to 30 April. Tours depart daily at 9:00am and 1:30pm. The colony is not accessible to visitors between May and mid-August.
Up to 100 students and caregivers per visit across six vehicles. Buses seat 21. All RAM documentation is provided by Gannet Safaris Overland at time of booking.
Self-drive to Te Awanga base (approximately 30 minutes from Napier). Shuttle pick-up available from Napier and Hastings by arrangement. Confirm transport logistics with Gannet Safaris at time of booking.
Standard school tour approximately 3 hours. An optional beach extension from the DOC hut adds 1 to 1.5 hours (tide-dependent). Confirm which option suits your day when booking.
Gannet Safaris Overland offers custom school tours for all year levels. Tours can be focused on specific curriculum topics. The journey through Cape Kidnappers Station is part of the programme, not just travel time.
The 36-kilometre return journey traverses riverbeds, rolling pastures, native bush, and steep gullies across Cape Kidnappers Station, a 2,500-hectare working farm. Guide commentary covers the farming operation, geology, Māori history, and the gannets throughout. The journey is curriculum content, not transit.
A 200-hectare section of Cape Kidnappers Station is protected by a predator-proof fence running coast to coast. The sanctuary hosts kiwi, tuatara, and a range of native birds that have been reintroduced after predator eradication. Students may observe native species alongside the gannets, providing a live case study in conservation management.
Students spend time at the main colony watching gannets at close range. Guide commentary covers behaviour, breeding cycle, adaptations, and conservation status. A cliff-top stop en route provides panoramic views across Hawke Bay and access to the geological record in the cliff faces below.
After the colony, the group can park at the DOC hut and walk to the beach. The beach section adds 1 to 1.5 hours and is tide-dependent. Teachers should discuss this option with Gannet Safaris at time of booking and confirm tide conditions when planning the visit date.
School tours can be focused on: local history, Māori legends and the name Te Kauwae-a-Māui, geology, the wildlife sanctuary and predator control, or the gannet colony and native bird ecology. Nominate your priority topics when booking.
The colony is one of the most sensorially intense wildlife encounters available to a Hawke's Bay school. Prepare students for scale, sound, smell, and proximity before they arrive.
The tākapu: Australasian gannetTākapu have no external nostrils: openings are tucked inside the mouth to prevent water rushing in during impact. Air sacs in the face and chest cushion the force of hitting water at 100 kilometres per hour from 30 metres altitude. Students can observe the streamlined body form, pointed bill, and folded wing shape that make the dive possible.
The colony displays multiple behaviours simultaneously: courtship displays between paired adults, nest-building using seaweed, grass, mud, and droppings, incubating eggs, feeding of chicks by regurgitation, and mutual preening that reinforces pair bonds. The density means every observation position faces multiple behaviours at once.
Tākapu are long-lived (25 to 40 years) and slow to mature. Chicks fledge at around 16 weeks and weigh approximately 3 kilograms. They make a solo crossing of the Tasman Sea to Australia without having flown before. Up to 80% of chicks do not return. Those that do return after two to three years for tentative mating but do not nest in earnest until five years old. The colony holds birds at every stage of this cycle.
The headland's Māori name refers to the fish hook of Māui: the North Island as the great fish hauled up from the ocean by the demigod. The name was restored in legislation through the Heretaunga Tamatea Claims Settlement Act 2018. Students encounter a place with two names and two ways of understanding its significance: geological and ancestral.
The cliff faces below the Plateau are made up of sandstone, conglomerate, mudstone, river gravel, pumice, and silt, with glimpses of petrified wood and lignite visible in the rock layers. The cliff-top stop on the way to the colony provides a vantage point for reading these layers as a record of geological time.
Term 4 (November onwards) and Term 1 (February to March) are the prime school visit windows. November and December offer the most visible breeding activity: eggs hatching, small chicks being fed, and continuous adult movement. March and April offer older, more visible chicks approaching fledge weight.
The colony is an outdoor environment subject to weather, wind, and variable conditions. Preparation before the visit and structured observation tasks on arrival get the most from the experience at any year level.
The colony's most instructionally rich period is November to February, overlapping with the end of Term 4 and all of Term 1. If your Science or Environmental Education programme has flexibility, plan the visit during this window rather than forcing it into Term 2 or 3 when the colony is closed.
The colony is loud, densely packed, and distinctly aromatic. Students with sensory sensitivities or anxiety around large numbers of birds should be briefed before arrival. The Gannet Safaris guides are experienced with school groups and can assist with positioning students who need more space.
A single open question to carry into the colony produces more focused observation than a worksheet. "What can you see happening that could not happen without a partner?" or "What problem does the gannet's body solve?" work well across most year levels. Brief, generative, and not answerable before the visit.
Students can submit tākapu observations from the Plateau. With the species, location, and date recorded, observations become part of the global biodiversity record. Use the iNaturalist Real World Protocol to build this into the visit as a deliberate citizen science act. See the iNaturalist protocol in this library for the preparation and three-tool comparison framework.
The 90-minute return journey through Cape Kidnappers Station is not downtime. The guide commentary covers farming, geology, conservation, and Māori history. Assign students to listen for one specific thing: a fact about the wildlife sanctuary, a detail about the cliff geology, or a phrase from the Māori name explanation. Brief, focused, and shareable on the bus back.
The Plateau colony is on an exposed headland. Wind is frequent and temperatures at the colony can differ significantly from Napier. Hats, sunscreen, and a wind layer are essential regardless of what conditions look like at school in the morning.
These prompts build on what students observed at the colony. The most productive anchor is always something specific: a behaviour witnessed, a physical feature noticed up close, a moment from the guide's commentary, or an iNaturalist observation submitted from the Plateau. Students who bring a real experience to the AI exchange get a different quality of response than students asking a general question about gannets.
Tell a gen AI chatbot one thing you saw at the gannet colony that surprised you. Ask it why that thing happens. Does its explanation match what the guide told you? What is the same? What is different?
Ask a gen AI chatbot: "How does a gannet dive into the ocean at 100 kilometres per hour without getting hurt?" Listen to the explanation. Can you find the body parts it describes in your own photographs from the visit?
Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What happens to a gannet chick after it leaves the nest for the first time?" Then tell it: "We saw chicks at Cape Kidnappers that will soon make this journey." What do you think the hardest part would be?
The place we visited has two names: Cape Kidnappers and Te Kauwae-a-Māui. Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain what each name means and where it comes from. Which name do you think fits the place better, and why?
Choose one physical adaptation of the tākapu you observed at the colony: no external nostrils, air sacs in the face, streamlined body, or binocular vision. Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain how this feature evolved and what problem it solves. Then evaluate: does the explanation fit what you actually observed of the gannet's behaviour at the colony?
The wildlife sanctuary on Cape Kidnappers Station uses a predator-proof fence to protect native species. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What predators most threaten ground-nesting birds in New Zealand, and how do predator-proof fences work as a conservation tool?" Compare the explanation with what you saw and heard at the sanctuary on the way to the colony.
Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What does a large gannet colony contribute to the local marine and coastal ecosystem?" Think about nutrient cycling, food chains, and habitat effects. Then consider: what would change at Cape Kidnappers if the colony was not there?
The headland's official name was changed to Cape Kidnappers / Te Kauwae-a-Māui by legislation in 2018 as part of a Treaty settlement. Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain what Treaty settlements are and why restoring place names is often part of them. Check the AI's explanation against what you know from the visit and from Social Studies.
The colony holds approximately 6,500 breeding pairs with a high chick mortality rate (up to 80% of chicks do not return from Australia). Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain the population dynamics: how can a colony this size be stable with such high juvenile mortality? Then evaluate whether the AI's explanation is consistent with the life history data you know from the visit.
If you submitted iNaturalist observations from the Plateau, find them online and examine where else in NZ tākapu have been recorded. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What would a change in the distribution or breeding success of Australasian gannets at Cape Kidnappers indicate about the health of the surrounding marine environment?" Evaluate the response against what you know about the colony's food sources and the state of Hawke Bay fisheries.
Cape Kidnappers Station operates simultaneously as a working farm, a luxury tourist destination, and a wildlife sanctuary. Ask a gen AI chatbot to identify the potential conflicts and complementarities between these three land uses, and to describe how predator-proof fencing changes the ecological calculus. Evaluate the AI's analysis against what you observed of the landscape on the overland journey.
The cliffs below the Plateau contain sandstone, conglomerate, mudstone, pumice, and petrified wood. Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain what each of these materials records about the geological history of the Cape Kidnappers headland and the forces that formed it. Then assess: how much of this geological record can a student read from the cliff-top viewpoint, and what would require specialist field equipment or laboratory analysis to establish?
| Level | Years 0–6 | Years 7–10 | Years 11–13 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Student names the bird they saw (tākapu / Australasian gannet), can describe one thing it was doing at the colony, and knows where the colony is located. Understands they visited the largest mainland gannet colony in the world. | Student names the species, identifies at least two behaviours observed at the colony, and connects those behaviours to a life cycle stage: courtship, nesting, incubation, chick-rearing, or pre-fledge. | Student records specific field observations from the colony, names the behaviours observed and their ecological function, and situates the visit in the context of tākapu population ecology and the broader marine ecosystem. |
| 2 | Student explains one physical adaptation of the gannet and connects it to the bird's behaviour: "Gannets have no external nostrils because..." or "Their wings fold up so they can..." The explanation comes from the visit, not a textbook. | Student constructs an account of gannet adaptation that connects physical features to behavioural outcomes: how the body enables the dive, how the dive enables feeding, and how feeding success affects breeding. Each link is supported by something observed at the colony. | Student produces an evidence-based analysis of tākapu adaptation, connecting morphology to ecology: how physical features enable specific behaviours, how those behaviours support survival and reproduction, and how the colony's health reflects broader marine environmental conditions. |
| 3 | Student compares what a gen AI chatbot said about gannets with what they saw and heard at the colony. Identifies at least one thing the AI got right and one thing the visit showed that the AI did not describe. Can say why being at the colony adds something the AI cannot provide. | Student documents a comparison between the gen AI account of gannet biology or colony ecology and their direct field observations. Identifies where the AI is accurate, where it lacks specificity, and where the experience of being among 20,000 birds provides knowledge the language model cannot generate. | Student analyses the limits of AI-generated ecological explanation relative to field observation: what a language model can accurately synthesise from training data, what requires direct observation or specialist measurement to establish, and what the experience of physical presence with a living system uniquely provides. |
| 4 | Student explains what being at the colony added that a video, a photograph, or a gen AI chatbot could not: the sound, the smell, the scale, the proximity to living birds engaged in real behaviour. Can name one specific sensory or emotional detail from the visit. | Student articulates why direct encounter with a functioning ecosystem matters for biological and environmental understanding: what independent, place-specific, real-time observation provides that secondary sources cannot replicate, and why that matters for a claim about the colony's ecology or health. | Student reflects on the epistemological significance of field encounter with a living system: what forms of knowledge are available only through physical presence, what those forms of knowledge can and cannot claim, and what obligations accurate and respectful representation of a living place creates for the observer. |
| 5 | Student generates one question from the visit that they want to keep investigating: something they saw that they do not yet understand. Can say where they would look for an answer that is not a gen AI chatbot. | Student formulates a monitoring or inquiry question anchored in the visit: what would need to change at the colony to indicate that the health of the surrounding marine environment had changed, how would they measure it, and what would a meaningful result look like? | Student designs a field-based research project connected to the colony: specifies the ecological or conservation question, the data to collect (including citizen science observations via iNaturalist), the method of analysis, and a hypothesis about what change over time would indicate. Connects to relevant NCEA achievement standards in Biology or Environmental Science where applicable. |