Equipped with a pair of large pink over-sized feet and a fleshy bill designed to prise algae from rocks, Blue ducklings make a dash for independence earlier than most birds. After they’re two days old, they’ll begin their lifelong task of looking for food on our frothy alpine rivers –stripping rocks of algae and catching […]

It is the beginning of tadpole season and if there are frogs in your neighbourhood you should starting to hear their raucous calling. The frogs you will be hearing though are all Aussies brought here in the latter half of the 19th century. The endemic Leiopelma species do not use calls to attract mates – […]

In the spirit of the Olympics, I thought it timely to feature some of our extreme athletes of the natural world, masters of swimming endurance, strength and agility. I am of course talking about wriggly, wonderful, whitebait. They would clock up a series of gold medals, being so tiny yet having been found 200km out […]

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”  Henry David Thoreau I remember many years ago when I was a journalist in Timaru, I was doing some research on the history of an area known as Maori Hill.  […]

Everybody’s got an eel story in New Zealand. When we were kids we used to go eeling, digging what Dad called a “Maori eel trap” – a trench next to a lakeside or stream, dug long and thin enough for an eel to swim up with some meat in some pantihose staked to the top […]

Euphoria often takes a while to sink in.  Shock.  Disbelief.  They’re the emotions that come first. And so with the Mokihinui.  A river I know intimately, having been tossed into it from a raft at the whim of a wave. On Tuesday, Meridian Energy announced its withdrawal from plans to dam the Mokihinui, the mighty […]

Although a National government has been returned, in a way Kiwis did “vote for nature” as our election campaign asked. The prospects for Nature in the next three years are not all quite as bleak as you might imagine. It is a very interesting Parliament and there are some reasons to hope that Forest & […]

Blogger: Campaign Manager for the whio and Forest & Bird’s Marketing and Promotions Project Manager, Phil Bilbrough The whio (or Blue Duck) is a seriously cool bird. It lives in white water. It is a torrent duck, and how cool is that? If kayaking is a cool whitewater sport but it is just a sport, then […]