Against Expectations, Whio! Going into this Winter, I did not have great expectations or hopes about the success of the Whio or Blue Duck breeding season. The easterly weather patterns since last Winter had brought regular flooding, and the continuation of these patterns meant that the primary breeding streams in the Ruahine Ranges were experiencing [...]
The Return of What Was Missing In one of my last posts, I recounted Cyclone Gabrielle's effects on one of our trap lines. Roughly one-third of the traps are gone, with the Rangitikei River reaching heights not seen for decades and certainly not since most of the traps were initially installed some ten years ago. [...]
Gabrielle, The River, and The Birds Last week I spent a day checking the Stoat trap line we have downstream from River Valley Lodge on the Rangitikei River. This particular line of about 40 traps consists of a mix of DOC 200 single and double, kill traps. The primary target species are stoats, but we [...]
A Day in the Life of a Trap Checker For millennia, the islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand were separated from other land masses. This isolation led our endemic species (species found here and nowhere else) to evolve to occupy all the available niches in this pre-human landscape. Unfortunately, this evolution and specialisation made them incredibly vulnerable [...]
2022 Hui for Whio I have written regularly on the conservation efforts undertaken in the Ruahine Ranges to protect and enhance native bird life, particularly the endemic Whio or Blue Duck. The Ruahine Ranges run up the spine of the southern central North Island, from the Manawatu Gorge until meeting the Kaweka and Kaimanawa Ranges. [...]
From Zero to Ten is Huge! For the last decade or more, a dedicated group of volunteers have been sacrificing their weekends to take to the bush, and around here, that means the steep and rugged Ruahine Ranges. However, they are not sacrificing their weekends just for some ramble through the woods. Instead, they have [...]
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