My life as a keaologist: Mt Cook trip # 2

Not just a pretty face, Photo: Margaret Wong

Not just a pretty face, Photo: Margaret Wong

During my first trip to Mt Cook I met a man named Jussey from Austria who was studying Kea’s intelligence. He had done many studies on a captive population in Vienna and was now in New Zealand to repeat the same experiments with a wild population. After some in depth conversations about Kea I showed him some of the photos I had taken of the lovable parrot and he suggested we keep in touch. A few weeks after I returned home I got an email from him offering me a permanent job based down in Mt Cook taking over the Kea intelligence studies. My second trip to Mt Cook was my induction to the new job.

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Loving the silent type

Guest blogger, Frog scientist & conservationist, Phil Bishop  

One of the commonest questions people ask me is “Why frogs? What makes them so special to you?” and it’s a hard one to answer. 

Often I reply with a flippant suggestion that maybe I was a frog in a previous life, but when I sit down and try to ask myself that question, I realise that at a very early age, roundabout 4 years old, I had an ‘up-close and personal encounter’ with a common British toad and basically fell in love (as much as a toddler could) with amphibians. 

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