Energy and Resources Minister Phil Heatley ‘met the press’ on The Nation on Saturday, the day after former Energy Minister and opposition spokesperson David Parker had offered some comments in the New Zealand Herald. I want to respond briefly to Mr Heatley’s comments, and explore Labour’s, because Heatley got an absurdly easy ride on The […]

Dear New Zealand, It’s time we had the talk. You know the one? The one we’ve been putting off for aaages and aaaages because, well, because we love our pussycats in this country. We have one of the highest cat ownership rates in the world, if not the highest. Almost half of all households in […]

Australia’s Land for Wildlife (LFW) program has grown to include over 15,000 landowners wanting to restore wild-life areas, and I recently got a chance to travel there in the hope of re-creating a similar scheme here. The program was started in 1981 by two determined birders – Ellen McCulloch and Reg Johnson – who wanted […]

“A large land, uplifted high” is how, in December 1642, the Dutch led by Abel Tasman first described what was to become known as New Zealand. They were looking upon the western side of the Southern Alps which rise precipitously from a narrow coast to top at 4068m (12,349 feet) above sea level. Of course, […]

 I recently returned from a trip to plant trees on one of our most windswept and distant archipelagos – the Chatham Islands.   The two week Department of Conservation trip begun with a car-ride around the main island which has been stripped of most of it trees, seeded with grassed and populated with cattle and […]

I am fifty three years old and for 3 generations our family has farmed cows on the same farm. Twenty years ago intensification began replacing traditional farming methods and farmers, like myself, were caught up in this drive to reap more milk. I call it the ‘moron theory’ – we’re morons the more we put […]

It was a four-day whistle-stop tour of the top of the south. There were long-tailed bats, fantails, royal spoonbills, pukeko and a whale. It was definitely a whale, and definitely not a rock. Forest & Bird’s National Volunteer Co-ordinator Heidi Quinn had spent the last seven weeks on the road visiting almost every single Forest […]

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 […]

For the past four months or so, I have spent much of my time watching the watchful karearea (New Zealand Falcon – Falco novaeseelandiae). Stillness and patience allowed me to observe their progress through aerial courtship displays, mating, nest finding, laying, incubating, hatching, brooding and feeding, to finally fledging a chick. Ironically, after all that […]