In Northland, many great native forests and their wildlife are collapsing. When the sun goes down, thousands of possums relentlessly consume the forest canopy, slowly killing ancient forest giants like tōtara, pūriri, pōhutukawa and northern rātā. Rats come out to consume our native birds, insects and lizards. Dean Baigent-Mercer takes us on a tour of Northland’s forgotten […]
May has been a fantastic month for the volunteers at Ark in the Park, Forest & Bird’s 2100 hectare open sanctuary in the Waitakeres. 100 pōpokotea (whiteheads) and 10 kōkako were translocated to the Ark, helping to restore our dawn chorus as John Staniland, one of the project’s founders, explains. Last week while doing my monthly trapping […]
By Hauraki Island Branch member, Rob Brennan. A good news story from the Hauraki branch of Forest & Bird – kākā are breeding on Waiheke Island! Not only that, but they have chosen Onetangi Reserve, a 56 hectare reserve that Forest & Bird has owned and been looking after since the early 1960’s, to make their nest. […]
Over the past six weeks I have spent many evenings outside keeping an eye out for pekapeka, the long-tailed bats flitting like giant butterflies past the house and over the pond. After many evenings of observing bats close by, I mentioned it to Jono Moore, the conservation ecologist who does bat population monitoring for the […]
This weekend, people all over New Zealand will flock to their backyard, contributing to conservation by taking part in the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey. This annual citizen science project asks people to count birds in their gardens, helping researchers to understand the population dynamics of common garden birds. The Garden Bird Survey started in 2007 when Eric Spurr, […]
After a weekend doing ground-based pest control, I can better appreciate the value of aerial 1080. I slid down a muddy bank with nothing to grab but a soggy tree fern stump that lifted from the soil like a mushroom. Through the rain and the supplejack lassoes I could see Ian and Merryl a few […]
Windthrow is a natural part of NZ’s forest dynamics of catastrophe-regeneration. Thousands of hectares are levelled every year in our public conservation land forests and have done so for millenia. It is a part of the natural forest cycle in this windy country. Yet we do not intervene to sell the fallen timber in protected […]
Wandering through much of Aotearoa’s remnant bush in 2014 can be a lonely experience. One has more chance of seeing a hobbit than a kaka or kokako, and the experience is a long way from Joseph Banks’ much repeated description of the the dawn chorus in Queen Charlotte Sound in 1770: “I was awakened by […]
The Mackenzie Country is for many of us one of the reasons why we love this country so much. But those of us who have been there recently will know that it’s also a part of New Zealand that’s disappearing fast. The Mackenzie is being turned from a hundred shades of brown – which looks […]