Marine and Coastal
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.
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Published in: General, Marine and Coastal, Otago, Southland / Stewart Island, Threats and Impacts
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Tue, 10 Mar 2009 8:29 am – Posted by Bev Woods | 11 Comments
Guest Blogger: Bev Woods, Secretary for the Northern Branch
Godwits on Manawatu Estuary
As many of you will know, our bar tailed godwits are fattening up for their 11,500 kilometre trip to the Alaskan-north, and will depart anytime in the next few weeks. Packing on an estimated 50% of their body weight in fuel, the birds are currently in the throes of what is best described as a feeding frenzy.
However, their attempts to pile on fat is being thwarted by a group of kite-surfers who race through their resting and feeding area, causing them to take flight and use up valuable fuel. This situation is set against a gloomy international picture in which habitats of godwits are shrinking. The drainage of wetlands, and the discharge of toxic discharges are just some of the reasons they have fewer and fewer spots to feed and rest-up. Two years ago, around 6000 godwits came to the Whangarei Harbour habitats. This year there have been only around 3000.
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Published in: F&B National, Marine and Coastal, Threats and Impacts
Tags: godwits, habitat disturbance
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Tue, 03 Feb 2009 1:50 pm – Posted by Kirstie_Knowles | 2 Comments
Google has just announced a new tool that allows viewers to take a glimpse under the sea, which goes a long way to addressing our “out of sight – out of mind mentality” currently plaguing marine conservation efforts.
Having just rolled out google sky following the ever-popular google earth, google is now giving us a chance to dive into an area that occupies 2/3 of earth’s surface.
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Published in: General, Marine and Coastal
Tags: Climate Change, marine
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Sat, 17 Jan 2009 1:34 pm – Posted by Kirstie_Knowles | 15 Comments
While the impacts of climate change on land are hotly discussed, its effect on our oceans and marine life tend to fall into the ‘out of sight out of mind’ black hole. Yet the effect of increased carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere is likely to have significant impacts both on our marine life and on us - our society and our economy.
Our oceans are one of our most important carbon sinks – absorbing around a third of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by burning fossil fuels. When CO2 is dissolved in water, a new compound is formed – carbonic acid. High concentrations of carbonic acid can have effects on other compounds in our waters – calcium carbonate being one of them.
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Published in: General, Marine and Coastal
Tags: carbon sink, Climate Change, ocean acidifiation
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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.
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Published in: F&B National, General, Marine and Coastal, Southland / Stewart Island
Tags: quota, sea-lions, SLEDs
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Wed, 10 Dec 2008 8:51 am – Posted by Fred | 5 Comments
How often do we hear that children have lost the ability to learn about life because they are wrapped in the cotton wool of bureaucratically-safe environments? Play areas must be free of dangerous objects, games must be safe, and children must be wrapped up warmly if outside in cold weather, fully protected from the sun’s rays in summer.
Swap sandpit with sandy beach however and the cotton-wool is discarded.
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Published in: Canterbury, General, Marine and Coastal
Tags: beaches, habitat preservation, vehicles
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Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:28 am – Posted by Kirstie_Knowles | 7 Comments
New Zealand sea lions once ranged right around our coastline, however today they are largely restricted to the isolated islands of the Sub-Antarctic – with over 85% of breeding at the Auckland Islands.
Each summer the Auckland Island squid trawl fishery takes to these water with large trawl nets that scoop up squid. As well as picking up squid however, the fishing nets catch a number of sea lions. As rule-maker & whistle-blower, one of the first questions facing the new Minister of Fisheries – Phil Heatley - is how many sea-lions can be killed this season?
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Published in: General, Marine and Coastal, Threats and Impacts
Tags: fisheries management, marine mammals protection act, quota, sea-lions, squid trawl fishery
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Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:44 pm – Posted by Kirstie_Knowles | 3 Comments
Why is it that a picture of a cute and cuddly kiwi or a doe-eyed dolphin gets a response, yet animals pre-dating our most ancient of species – the tuatara – get completely ignored?
Sharks are the living dinosaurs of our seas. Originating long before dinosaurs arrived, sharks are among our top predators and act as key regulators of life in our seas. They are incredibly shy and have developed as slow growing species, living long lives and producing few young – all traits that make them highly vulnerable to overfishing and habitat loss.
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Published in: Marine and Coastal
Tags: ban, finning, marine, sharks, sharks fin soup
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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
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