Mon, 28 Sep 2009 3:22 pm – Posted by Mandy | 5 Comments
Guest Blogger: Co-campaign Manager for the Karearea, Alan Macdougall
No animal should to be anthropomorphised - but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Karearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.
It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Karearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children.
Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles’ Harrier?
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Mon, 28 Sep 2009 9:10 am – Posted by Mandy | 8 Comments
Guest Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Grey Warbler & Broadaster, Graeme Hill
The only reason that the Grey Warbler is not bird of the year, every year, is that this soldier of our conscience is not often seen… yet it is common.
How can this be?
Grey Warbler
It is tiny and it gets mistaken for dust, or a bumblebee, but hear its song!
Grey Warbler Song
The Grey Warbler song is imprinted on all of our memories, and is more of a national anthem than, well….. our national anthem.
For years the humble Grey Warbler has been ignored, marginalized and even persecuted. One year it was depicted in a Forest and Bird illustration for Bird Of The Year coming LAST! We must all say… never again, never again.
Grey Warbler FACTS.
- New Zealand’s most successful endemic bird post-human invasion.
- New Zealand’s smallest bird (equal with the Rifleman)
- New Zealand’s most often heard endemic song
- Our hardest working bird. They rear cookoos as well as their own brood.
- It appears in more poetry than any other New Zealand bird.
- It is New Zealand’s best bird.
- No two Warbler songs are the same.
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