Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Silvereye, Stacey Wood Silver-eyes are fairytale critters – their biography reads like something out of Beatrix Potter. Their nests are tiny cups of grass, moss, hair, spiderweb and thistledown suspended from a small tree or shrub. Their eggs are small, fragile and pale blue. They measure just 12 centimetres long […]

Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Falcon, Alan McDougall Recently, I managed to obtain an interview with Kakarapiti, a cocky young male kārearea resident in Wellington, to ask who we should vote for for Bird of the Year. His answer was not what I expected. AM: What do you spend your time on at the moment? […]

Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Bar-tailed Godwit, and Labour’s Spokesperson for Climate Change Charles Chauvel. Between 85,000 to over 100,000 bar-tailed godwits visit New Zealand every year, and it is estimated that between 8,000 and 18,000 birds remain to winter over in New Zealand.  They come to New Zealand from Alaska, and make some of […]

Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Skua, Tom Hunt “Tough to love, and impossible to forget,’’ is how bird enthusiast Scott Weidensaul describes the skua. I am not backing the skua in this poll because I particularly like them  – after all, who could? They are nasty and ugly creatures. From making smaller birds regurgitate prey, […]

Blogger: Singer-songwriter and Campaign Manager for the weka, Don McGlashan Wekas are the coolest bird. They’re intelligent, diffident, mischievous, and scarce. Connoisseur’s birds.  Quietly inscrutable.  Not gaudy scenery-chewers like the Kakapos or the Tuis. If Wekas were a band they’d be The Fall, or The Monochrome Set. If they were a car they’d be one of […]

Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Black Stilt and Painter, Grahame Sydney Have you ever seen one? Probably not……. very few New Zealanders have. Black Stilts  ( “kaki”) are the world’s rarest wading bird, and just 30 years ago were perilously close to total extinction. Seeing one is a rare experience. And when you do, it’ll […]

Blogger: North Island Conservation Manager, Mark Bellingham The oft-quoted phrase of Captain Cook’s naturalist, that the sound of NZ ‘birdsong was deafening’ is one of those throwaway lines of a colourful diarist not a detail-orientated natural historian. Birders, like myself, would have given a royal sum for a little more information on the constitution of […]

Blogger: North Canterbury Branch Member, Eugenie Sage Conservation Minister, Kate Wilkinson’s dismal decision to reject the application for a 530 ha. marine reserve inside Akaroa Harbour highlights once again the current Government’s callous attitude to nature conservation. The reserve application was lodged by the Akaroa Harbour Marine Protection Society (AHMPS) in 1996. It survived for […]

Blogger: Karen Baird, Forest & Bird’s Kermadec Advocate On Monday, we rolled into wind-lashed Raoul island – an anvil-shaped volcanic island at the northern edge of the Kermadec ridge. The island has poor anchorage and setting foot on the island was further complicated by the fact our dinghy’s motor was now defunct . Under the watchful gaze of three Galapagos sharks, we […]