Wed, 23 Jun 2010 4:34 pm – Posted by Mandy | 1 Comment
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.
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Published in: General
Tags: ark in the park, Auckland, kauri dieback disease, pest control, research, tree canopy, waitakeres
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Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:33 am – Posted by Guest | 2 Comments
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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Published in: General
Tags: intelligence, kea, research
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Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:03 am – Posted by Phil Bishop | 4 Comments
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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Published in: General
Tags: amphibian chytrid virus, archey's frog, frogs, recovery, research
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