1Oct 3, 2019
New Zealand’s longest-running conservation magazine has just been added to the National Library’s Papers Past website. The first two decades of Forest & Bird’s nearly 100-year-old magazine are now available online, spanning the period before the Great Depression to the end of World War II (1924-1945). These magazines document the fledgling society’s earliest conservation campaigns […]
2May 14, 2015
In September last year, the Frog Lab group at the Department of Zoology (University of Otago) had the privilege of hosting the Kiwi Conservation Club for part of the day. We wanted to help them learn more about New Zealand’s very own rare native frogs and get up close with some that we have in captivity. At […]
3Apr 20, 2012
Rambunctious. Confused. Operatic. The spirited call of the tui with its clicks, coughs, wheezes, bells and whistles has been pinned with many an adjective. And now a scientific study has proven one of them to be true: elaborate. The very first study into the tui’s song has revealed that it song ranks as one the […]
4Mar 12, 2012
Border collie-cross Manu joined her owner, lizard expert Marieke Lettink, at the Denniston BioBlitz on March 2-4 to track down skinks and geckos. Manu reveals how she copes as a canine superstar. Q: What’s it like being a lizard dog? A: The best job in the world, I get to run around and search for lizards […]
5Jun 23, 2010
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 […]
6Jun 15, 2009
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 […]
7Feb 18, 2009
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 […]