1Mar 22, 2013
Frogs typically make good captive breeders, so the fact that for eight years experts couldn’t successfully raise one froglet from our Archey’s frog was proving mind-bogglingly frustrating. Enter Richard Gibson – an English reptile and amphibian breeding expert with over 20 years of experience. He flew here in late 2011 to take up a position […]
2Mar 21, 2013
Last weekend at their conference, The Monarch Butterfly NZ Trust formally announced that they’ve broadened their conservation efforts to include native moths and butterflies – a move that was welcomed by the NZ’s growing brethren of butterfly enthusiasts. The club began seven years ago to protect an overwintering site of the monarch butterfly in the Bay […]
3Mar 20, 2013
Cast you mind back to summer 2011-12 and if you lived in Auckland you will probably be saying “what summer”? It felt like we emerged from winter into perpetual spring. The rain was constant and the sun fleeting. This summer is the polar opposite. It may have started off with a few hit and misses. […]
4Mar 15, 2013
In rivers, streams and lakes throughout New Zealand, a certain species of native fish is preparing for one of the most epic journeys known to the animal kingdom. Every year, New Zealand longfin eels (Anguilla dieffenbachii), leave the freshwater environments in which they have spent many years and swim downstream and out to sea, where […]
5Mar 13, 2013
Last Saturday (March 9), Conservation Minister Nick Smith announced that he had approved the creation of five new marine reserves off the South Island’s West Coast. On the face of it, that may sound like the sort of thing that Forest & Bird might applaud. And in many ways, this was good news. But this […]
6Mar 8, 2013
Recently, I got the chance to head down to the Denniston plateau – a piece of land that is currently being eyed up by coal-miners – to marvel at the ‘Persian carpet of biodiversity’ that the famed photographer Rod Morris talks so fondly about. I’ve been a macro-photographer for four years now, and as you […]