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 […]

Guest Bloggers: Campaign Manager for the Welcome Swallow, Phoebe Borwick & Haddon Smith The Welcome Swallow is a newcomer on the New Zealand native bird scene. Winging it from Australia in the ’20s, it has made a big impression in its short time on these shores. A welcome addition, it is thought to have come to […]

Guest Blogger: Campaign Manager for the Hihi, Emma Gilkinson

Guest Blogger: Co-campaign Manager for the Karearea, Alan Macdougall No animal should to be anthropomorphised – but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Karearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be […]