Southland / Stewart Island
Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:48 am – Posted by Mandy | 10 Comments
Guest blogger: Kakapo feeder Stephanie Gray
A curious kakakpo eyeballs kakapo feeder, Stephanie Gray
It was a quietly momentous occasion—the last two kakapo youngsters to be released this season stepping clumsily into new lives in the wild to the fanfare of bellbirds and kaka.Weaned from morning crop-feeds several days ago, the birds left their chick-pens in robust good health. Their first night in the bush was a mild one, the following day sunny, and their particular patch of bush is rich with hidey-holes.
Read more »
Published in: General, Southland / Stewart Island
Leave a Comment (10)
Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:29 pm – Posted by Mandy | 4 Comments
Guest blogger: Kakapo feeder, Stephanie Gray
Beginning with a hot-pink sunrise over Stewart Island’s Raggedy Ranges, my fifth day on Whenua Hou wrapped up beautifully with a game of petanque on Sealers’ Bay.
Sinbad, Photo: Stephanie Gray
In true island-style, we bowled over and around heaps of glossy kelp, skipped the jack to the creek’s edge, and considered the variable speed of steel through sand.
My feed-out route today took me southwest of the valley, through a verdant canopy of miro, kahikatea and rimu rustling with bellbirds, tomtits and ever-present kakariki. Having found my mud-legs by now, the climb is easy and sweet in the sunshine.
I find Heather’s feed station in a pool of dappled light, and laugh aloud at the state of it. Her water hopper has been ripped off the stand, and the snark (a receiver that collects information on the birds’ comings and goings) kicked to one side and chewed.
Read more »
Published in: Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: codfish island, kakapo, kakapoo recovery group
Leave a Comment (4)
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 9:27 am – Posted by Mandy | 14 Comments
Guest Blogger: Kakapo feeder, Stephanie Gray
By the look of the empty feed bowl, Sinbad enjoyed his kumara cubes and macadamia nuts last night.
Kakapo feeder Stephanie Gray gets to know one of the juvenile kakapo on Codfish island
He’s tidy too, leaving only a few crumbs, unlike the chicks who scatter lumps of pasty, half-chewed pellets up to two meters from their hopper—a kakapo feed station. I start to wipe down the hopper when, with a rustle of leaves and little grunt, Sinbad pokes his head through fern fronds.
The feed-out map and guide I carry mentioned that this particular bird may be roused from daytime slumber to visit, but I’m still taken aback at the sight of this beautiful, inquisitive creature. Sinbad ambles past again, lifting huge clawed feet high above the muck of peat mud and I blurt “Sinbad, you’re amazing. I love you.”
Read more »
Published in: Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: codfish island, kakapo, kakapo recovery programme
Leave a Comment (14)
Tue, 19 May 2009 12:33 pm – Posted by Tom | 4 Comments
Yellow eyed penguin, Andrew Walmsley
Guest blogger - Photographer, Tom Marshall
A comment my colleague and I often get as New Zealand photographers is ‘you must have had a wonderful time in Antarctica’. As much as I’d love to say ‘yes, it was awesome, but a bit chilly’, the truth is we’ve never set foot south of Dunedin and people are usually looking at our pictures of Fiordland Crested or Yellow-eyed Penguins.
Now I love ‘Happy Feet’ and ‘March of the Penguins’ with their iceberg-strewn backdrops as much as the next person, but it’s surprising how few people realize that we have some of the most amazing – and rarest penguins on the planet are right on our doorstep.
Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker said recently of a new tourism drive ‘I doubt tourists will want to come to the South Island just to see a penguin’ – but why not? From recollection they were fairly thin on the ground north of the equator last time I was there, and with a million birdwatchers in the UK alone, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who’d willingly put up with the West Coast’s finest sandflies for a glimpse of a Fiordland Crested Penguin in his dapper dinner jacket.
Read more »
Published in: General, Marine and Coastal, Otago, Southland / Stewart Island, Threats and Impacts
Leave a Comment (4)
Wed, 25 Mar 2009 1:38 pm – Posted by Emma Gilkinson | 4 Comments
Guest blogger: Kakapo nest-minder, Emma Gilkinson
It’s 8.30 pm and I’m glued to the black and white screen. Sarah the Kakapo is the star of the show. At the moment she is a still feathery pillow with eyes like shiny black berries that open and close from time to time. I’m sitting in a tent 300m away from her nest, in the heart of the forest of Codfish Island, the epi-centre of the Kakapo Recovery Programme. An infra-red camera has been installed at Sarah’s nest to relay her movements to the palm-sized monitor I’m watching.
8.36 p.m. Sarah’s left claw emerges to scratch her left cheek.
I note that down. I’ve come to Codfish Island to be a volunteer ‘Nest Minder’ for a fortnight. Nest Minders are required to keep a vigilant eye on kakapo Mums overnight during the breeding season. The nocturnal birds leave their nests at night to feed, but if they’re gone too long their eggs or chicks risk getting too cold and may need incubation or warming up on the nest with a ‘heat pad’.
Read more »
Published in: General, Native land animals, Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: codfish island, kakapo recovery programme, volunteer
Leave a Comment (4)
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 3:08 pm – Posted by Jenny Campbell | 2 Comments
Guest Blogger: Jenny Campbell, Southland Branch Secretary
Right. Lets not beat around the bush. We are running out of oil. The bounteous supply we have enjoyed in the past 60 years is now dwindling to a few inaccessible pools buried deep within the earth or reservoirs set in environmentally sensitive areas.
We’re populating this earth at great speed - with some predictions estimating that in 2030 the population will be double that of our population in 1980. Do the maths, and you’ll realise that peak oil is hot on our heels.
It begs the question - how is our oil-addicted society we going to survive without it?
Read more »
Published in: Climate Change, General, Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: cob-brick buildings, community gardens, permaculture, transition towns
Leave a Comment (2)
Tue, 06 Jan 2009 2:13 pm – Posted by Kirstie_Knowles | 11 Comments
Well it’s official. 113 is the new kill quota for our threatened New Zealand sea lions – a 40% increase on last year’s quota. Set by the new Minister of Fisheries Phil Heatley, the quota determines how many sea lions the Auckland Island squid fishery can kill in the 2009 fishing season.
Read more »
Published in: F&B National, General, Marine and Coastal, Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: quota, sea-lions, SLEDs
Leave a Comment (11)
Tue, 30 Sep 2008 9:22 am – Posted by Marina | 4 Comments
Welcome to Forest & Bird’s weblog. Like Forest & Bird itself, our weblog will touch on just about everything native and New Zealand: our native plants, animals, our wilderness areas and environment, whether they are on land, in our lakes, rivers and oceans.
We welcome your thoughts and ideas about how we can all contribute to helping preserve our precious – and vulnerable – natural heritage.
Standby for opinion pieces, diary-style web-logs, videos of our projects and much, much more. Just watch this space!
Published in: Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Canterbury, Climate Change, Energy, F&B National, Fresh water, Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, High country, International, Manawatu-Wanganui, Marine and Coastal, Native land animals, Native plants and forests, Northland, Otago, Regions, Southland / Stewart Island, Taranaki, Threats and Impacts, Top of the South, Topics, Waikato, Wellington, West Coast
Leave a Comment (4)
