Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick
We touched down on the moon in 1969. We travelled 11kms to the sea-floor in 1960. We peered into living cells and discovered DNA in 1951.
Moon-travel, deep-sea exploration, cell-research, we’ve done it all, and yet, we still know very little about the unexplored communities that live in the tops of our trees.
Although numerous botanists & entomologists have collected samples from these lofty forest communities, it was only in 1995 that scientist, Graham Dorrington, set off in a dirigible (airship) above the forests of Borneo that we really started to crack open this undiscovered world.
Still 15 years on and this tree-top world remains very much unstudied. It’s a sad fact that we know more about what happens 20 metres underwater than we do in the tops of our trees.
However, that’s all changing.
In the past month, Ark in the Park, the New Zealand Geographic Trust, DOC and Auckland University have been building upon the scant research into our tree-top communities by launching insect-o-logists, tree-o-logists and reptile-o-logists into our trees.
Blogger: Forest & Bird’s Web Manager, Mandy Herrick
In the weekend, over 80 people braved the wild weather to welcome two endangered kokako into their new 2000 hectare home in the Waitakere ranges.
Six kokako were released into the park late last year, so this release will help boost numbers to create a self-sustaining population.
This release is part of a broader effort to re-colonise this ancient kauri-forest with the creatures that were once abundant in these parts - such as hihi, whitehead and North island robins.
Kokako were last seen in the Waitakeres in the 1960s - but were wiped out locally due to predation. Their numbers are woefully low (read: 750), but the Department of Conservation is hoping to have 1000 breeding pairs by 2020.
The newcomers, which come from Tiritiri Matangi, are expected to fit in well with the kokako already at the Ark – despite differences in song dialects.
In this video, I spoke to one of the pint-sized volunteers and recorded the release of these blue wattled crows into their new homeland - a momentous occasion indeed!
For those of us lucky enough to live in the Waitakere Ranges with its awe-inspiring forests and thunderous coasts, communing with nature tends to be part of our everyday lives.
The many ways in which we do relate to the natural world and its other inhabitants has always been a source of fascination for me.
As a film-maker one often finds the best stories are on one’s own doorstep, in this case the activities of of local inhabitants, human and otherwise in our well loved local park, the Cascades Kauri Park in the Bethells valley.
