Questioning Happy Feet, unhappy ending?

You’re out walking through forest or along a beach. You find an injured bird. Maybe you find many, maybe thousands, like residents of the Kapiti Coast did recently when a southerly storm delivered a “prion wreck” to our shores. What should you do? The prion-wreck last month was a natural event. Prion-wrecks occur every 10-30 [...]

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Keeping corals alive

Published 21 June 2011 Studying something that his children’s children may never see adds a certain urgency and poignancy to Simon Davy’s daily routine. The United Kingdom-born associate professor in Victoria’s School of Biological Sciences is New Zealand’s only active coral symbiosis physiologist. His research focus is on the symbiotic relationship between algae and invertebrates, [...]

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Climate change increases value of native plant

Monday, 21 December 2009, 11:12 am Press Release: NZ Plant Conservation Network Climate change increases value of Kiwi native plant The golden sand sedge – pingao – has won the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network’s 2009 favourite plant poll, and could be a valuable defence against climate change effects. The pingao topped more than 100 [...]

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Zoos leap into action to help save frogs

Scoop: Zoos leap into action to help save frogs Image by  Paddy Ryan Auckland Zoo is inviting Kiwis to join it in leaping into the global Amphibian Ark Year of the Frog campaign, which will be helping to save the four endangered New Zealand native frog species. Tonight’s Wild Bean Cafe ZooMusic Katchafire concert will [...]

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Forest understory takes off

Whakatikei Restoration project click on images for larger ( phone camera ) versions Five finger of various variety , plus many of the broad leaf plants and smaller trees, have very much made a strong comeback, with not only seedlings quite thick on the bush floor in many places, but with many of the third [...]

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Honda Tree Fund Community Planting Day

Greater Wellington – Mauriceville community planting day Mauriceville village will be further enhanced next month with the planting of native trees and shrubs during a HondaTree Fund Community Planting Day. The HondaTree Fund has provided the funding to purchase 300 trees and shrubs for this year’s event along with mulch and fertiliser. The event has [...]

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Science Supports Forest Regeneration

  Scientific research being carried out in the Ngāi Tūhoe forests in the central North Island is delivering valuable knowledge about indigenous forest ecosystems and giving Maori landowners tools to restore and preserve their native forest resource. Over the past four years, Landcare Research scientists have been working with the Tuawhenua Trust, to investigate why [...]

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Research looks at native trees, carbon emissions

Scoop: Research looks at native trees, carbon emissions rimu and miro in the whakatikei river valley Are our native trees adding to or reducing New Zealand’s carbon emissions? That’s the question Rotorua scientists are hoping to answer with one of their current research projects. Two projects investigating native trees and carbon emissions are underway at [...]

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Takahe leave island for mountain homeland

Scoop: Takahe leave island for mountain homeland The flightless takahe, the largest living member of the rail family, was rediscovered in the Murchison Mountains in 1948. DOC’s work to recover the species has been focussed on establishing self-sustaining populations in Fiordland and on predator-free islands. Since the late 1980s DOC has been managing takahe nests [...]

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Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder

Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) » Celsias I know this won’t come as a surprise to many of our readers, nor to the many organic beekeepers that have been commenting on our posts, but there have been several reports of organic bee colonies surviving where the ‘industrial’ bee colonies are collapsing. Here is [...]

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Time for action on troublesome trees

Scoop: Time for action on troublesome trees before after Wilding conifers are increasingly a scourge on the landscape. Now for the first time, all agencies and land managers concerned about the pest trees have banded together, forming a group to research the extent of the problem, and how best to deal with it. Blogged with [...]

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Matiu/Somes Island a resort for ‘lounge lizards’

Scoop: Matiu/Somes Island a resort for ‘lounge lizards’ Reptiles being rescued from the perils of city life to enjoy the tranquillity of Matiu/Somes Island are to be outfitted in the style of lounge lizards sporting “ipods”. Green geckos rescued from the clutches of urban cats or raised in captivity, will be fitted out with tiny [...]

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TINY BONES REWRITE TEXTBOOKS:

first New Zealand land mammal fossil “This amazing find suggests that other mammals are waiting to be found there, and that New Zealand belonged to the birds only in more recent times,”

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Perspective | Futility Closet

Perspective | Futility Closet Earth seen from 4 billion miles away, photographed by Voyager 1 on June 6, 1990 Of the “pale blue dot,” astronomer Carl Sagan said, “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out [...]

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Global warming could wipe out most birds: WWF

Global warming could wipe out most birds: WWF | Top News | Reuters.com By Daniel Wallis NAIROBI (Reuters) – Unchecked climate change could drive up to 72 per cent of the world’s bird species into extinction but the world still has a chance to limit the losses, conservation group WWF said in a report on [...]

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