Bloggers: Communications Officer, Dave Brooks & Conservation Advocates, Quentin Duthie, Debs Martin & Mark Bellingham
If you’ve got a hankering for a little natural history, or you’re wanting to pick up green-read this summer look no further. In this blog, our staff give you their top picks.
Quentin Duthie, Consevation Advocate
During the summer, I usually head into the wilderness to climb high ridges and follow deep rivers. For me, nothing beats the beauty of snow-capped peaks above lush forest and tawny tussock, except perhaps the wink of a cheeky kea eyeing my lunch.
I’ll also have a bit more time on my hands for holiday reading: among them the latest NZ Alpine Club Journal, magazines and novels. However, I also want to read some cerebral material this summer, and my topic of choice is the economics of conservation. I anticipate this will be a major topic of debate and policy development in 2011, including at forthcoming conferences of Forest & Bird and the Federated Mountain Clubs (see p18-20 of their Nov Bulletin [PDF 5Mb]).
Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick
As the mercury rises, the almighty insect kingdom is truly awakened - cicadas beat out their rambunctuous song, butterflies burst onto the scene and honey bees swarm in search of a new residence.
New Zealand has eight types of introduced bees that were brought here for their honey-making abilities or to aid in pollination. The large majority of our bees though are native (27 species).
Compared with our introduced honey bees – gregarious, social-gifted and flamboyantly dressed - our native bees can appear somewhat drab.
The majority of our bees are fitted out in a funereal colours – yes, mainly blacks and dark greys – rather than the hairy, lurid, stripy outfits of their Italian cousins.
And these primitive bees nest alone in small tree holes or tunnels in the ground – not an elaborate labyrinth of nesting cells that are abuzz with industrious workers, gigantic, egg-laying queens and sperm-carrying drones.
Most of our bees go about their lives in a solitary manner - they’ll find a mate around some flowers - and then create a cell to accomodate their baby. They’ll provision it with pollen and nectar, and then lay their eggs.
So if you’re out an about this summer, look out for these wee bee holes (pictured).
Blogger: Bug-enthusiast and Tauranga branch member, Eila Lawton.
You know that summer’s here when the sound of a thousand miniature drums fills the airwaves – cicadas.
Crown Copyright: Department of ConservationTe Papa Atawhai (1974), Photographer: Dick Veitch
This courtship call is done by the male – who transforms from a pale dirt-dwelling larvae into a handsome, green-suited bug in his twilight weeks.
In his final interation, he is turned into a finely-tuned sonic machine with a large air-sac that he uses to woo potential partners.
This additional design feature means its reproductive and digestive organs are much smaller than that of its female counterpart.
Using this resonance chamber, the male will serenade its partners with a set of special muscles that vibrate these drums at up to 300 cycles per second.
And after a couple of weeks of wild courtship, mating, drumming and more drumming they’ll turn their toes up.
Prior to this, these raucous, energetic songsters lead a very different existence. Buried under a metre of earth, they’ll spend their time feeding on plant sap - using a pair of needle-like mouth-pieces – one that digests the sap, the other that hoovers it up.
Blogger: Waste Minimisation Officer & Education Manager and former chairperson for the Wellington Branch Donna Sherlock
The 21st century landfill will ultimately become an energy producing station that can power anything from fleets of cars to thousands of homes.
And although this thinking isn’t new – Marco Polo used to cover sewage ponds to produce bio-gas and the streets of Exeter were once lit by bio-gas in the late 1800s – in the Western world it has gone uptapped for centuries.
In India, it is estimated there are over 2 million bio-gas digesters and many people use these to power their homes
So what is a bio-gas? It’s a gas produced from the breakdown of organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Think of a rotting egg – the whiffy gas produced is a powerful mix of methane (50- 70%) and carbon dioxide (25- 50%).
Biogas is the fastest growing renewable energy trend in Europe, following wind power. However in New Zealand, we’re lagging behind in capturing and re-using the gases that are emitted from our sewage outlets and landfills.
Last weekend saw more than 200 people head for the township of Twizel to engage in two days of discussions around the future of the Mackenzie Basin. Despite the last-minute boycott by Federated Farmers, it was a positive and constructive meeting that involved a large number of people representing a wide range of views. I heard positive feedback from many attendees.
Tekapo scientific reserve
On Friday 26th November, on a day that saw attendees get a first hand appreciation of the Mackenzie’s hot dry climate, we all piled into buses and visited a variety of sites in the basin, ranging from the site of a proposed site for a cow cubicle indoor farming operation to the canals where Meridian spoke on the hydro electricity in the region.
Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick
An army of miniscule tailed pathogens has been storming across our ancient kauri-land leaving skeletal remains in its wake.
In this video, I talked to one of the people fronting the counter-attack - Auckland Council Ranger, Nick Waipara. So far, it has spread to Great Barrier, Auckland and Northland, and it may continue its march south. Last week, I talked to Nick about this water-borne, soil-borne disease and what they’re doing with the 4.7 mllion to stop its spread.
In this blog, I have covered off the pertinent (how’s it spread?) and the pithy (can we still hug kauri?), but if there’s any more questions you’d like to ask Nick, please leave a comment below and I’ll get mister Waipara to answer it.
Bloggers: Fellows-in-conservation, Graeme Hill (writer, muso, RadioLive weekend variety wireless host and lover of NZ nature) and Forest & Bird Conservation Advocate, Nicola Vallance.
The deadly man-killing, dog-killing Urtica Ferox.
Nicola: Hot on the heels of the Forest & Bird “Bird of the Year” (BOTY) competition, the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network has launched their annual “Plant of the Year” competition. Voting closes on December 5th, so get stuck in and vote for your favourite plant or tree.
The competition has been running for seven years, and winners include the pohutakawa (twice), silver fern, and the coastal golden sand-sedge, the pingao or ‘Tane’s eyebrows’.
Like the BOTY competition, voters have traditionally gone for the ‘prettiest’ candidates (e.g. Chatham Island forget-me-not), however, the tide appears to be turning.
Currently leading the poll is one of our most stingy, prickly and nefarious plants, the tree-nettle - because as it turns out, this spiky character has same excellent qualities to it. The native tree nettle (Urtica ferox) or Ongaonga is one of those love ‘em or hate ‘em plants.
Genetic scientist Tammy Steeves is one of a few lab-rats in the country working closely with recovery groups to improve the genetic soup of our most imperilled species.
During her research career, she’s studied everything from the miniscule to the massive: marine snails to grey whales. Birds are now her focus.
A kaki- poaka hybrid. Scientists have questioned whether cross-breeding of poaka-kaki populations could lead to the extinction of kaki through hybridisation. Photo: Dave Murray.
And since 2004, this Canadian-born scientist has worked in our birdland on the recovery of our most threatened tweeters – namely our critically endangered kaki, or black stilt.
In the 1980s, this Mackenzie country wader was down to only 23 birds putting it at great risk of a genetic bottleneck but since then it has bounced back with 98 adults to its name.
And recent studies have shown that despite its small population – it has a surprisingly diverse genetic pool.
However, this tidy genetic picture is sullied by the fact that kaki will breed with their closely related cousin the poaka, or pied stilt if they’re short of kaki mates. And these hybrids are fertile.
The hybrids aren’t the problem – it’s only when they breed back with kaki that the genetic pool can be muddied.
In other words, these cross-breeds might have the potential to flood the kaki gene pool such that we would lose them as a distinct genetic species. But have we?
Blogger: North Island Conservation Advocate, Mark Bellingham
Wanted: Hoon-free beach wanted for critically endangered bird (no = 36) to live in peace. Must be free of cats, dogs, 4WDs and hooligans.
Fairy Terns, Photo: Brian Chudleigh
The longer you work in conservation, the more you realise the fickle nature of our moral judgements. One such species that has drawn the proverbial short-straw is the New Zealand fairy tern.
All 36 individuals may shuffle off this mortal coil in the next few years – and not many people would blink an eyelid save for a few birders.
And although it can claim the unenviable title of New Zealand’s most endangered bird, it looks like it will never be molly-coddled back from the brink like the kakapo.
In fact, 4WDs sometimes mow them down. Hoons at the wheel of ‘Remuera tractors’ frequently speed past the warning signs and set themselves on a collision course with nesting terns.
So why don’t they receive the same VIB treatment lavished on our kakakpo or kiwi?
To determine where to allocate their budget cash-strapped DOC perform calculations to determine which species to prioritise.
This priority ranking assesses certain factors: namely: the probability of success, the funds required, whether conserving the species would also benefit other species and the relative ‘value’ to New Zealand (or endemism).
Unfortunately, the Fairy Tern scores poorly on the last value. It’s specialness is diluted by the fact that they share a bunch of genes with terns in New Caledonia and Australia.
And although the fairy tern population has hobbled back from a mere 15 individuals, it is still facing a rather uncertain future given its less-than-abundant gene pool.
Blogger: eDay Communications Manager, Lara Charles
“Reduce, re-use and recycle” is an environmental mantra the world over. While this is a way of life for some, most of society have adopted “replace” as our mantra – updating and replacing household goods at a rate faster than any time in human history.
We are a society geared towards rampant consumerism – and while we’re more aware of how to recycle our plastic bottles, takeaway boxes and newspapers, if you quiz someone on the recyclable elements in their computer they’d probably draw a blank.
Some of the computers collected from last year's e-day.
This is rather worrying given our insatiable quest for the latest gadget du jour. Our landfills are awash with near-new computers, play-stations, x-boxes, crt monitors and ‘steam-powered’ mobile phones.
Everyday there’s an e-nami of new gizmos landing on our shores. This has resulted in electronic waste (e-waste) becoming the fastest growing waste stream in the world.
According to www.e-takeback.org, 133,000 PCs are discarded in the United States every day.
Locally, it’s not much better. The New Zealand Government estimates there are 80,000 tonnes of electronic waste disposed of into landfills in New Zealand per year.
Pull some of your gadgets apart and you’d find a bounty of recyclable elements.
