Being a New Zealand bank, it was only appropriate for us to select the yellow-eyed penguin since it appears on the New Zealand $5 bill. Click here for The Co-operative’s Bank Yellow-eyed penguin video. Let’s be honest – it takes something special to make it onto one of the nation’s most popular pieces of paper. […]

What:  Every year, Forest & Bird holds its Bird of the Year competition. And this year, I am the campaign manager for the rightful winner of that competition, the takahe. Who: Yes, the takahe. There’s one, right there, comin’ at ya. It’s the pukeko’s bigger, cooler, rarer cousin. And the news that the pukeko won […]

A bedraggled-looking possum floating on a log near Kapiti Island has hit the headlines recently. In a situation reminiscent of Robert Hewitt’s epic survival tale, where the keen ex-navy diver floated in the Kapiti currents for four days and three nights until being found by his navy friends off Mana Island, a possum floating on […]

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 […]

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 […]

“It’s crazy and ambitious, but it might be worth a shot.” Those were the words of Sir Paul Callaghan in his last public lecture in Wellington this year regarding the idea of getting rid of predators in New Zealand. For good… Recently, I was lucky enough to attend the Transit of Venus forum, brainchild of […]

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 […]