A graph of the counts of korimako (NZ bellbirds) one each of my bike ride to and from work between Christchurch and Lincoln between 2005 and 2025. The numbers of the endemic song bird have increased hugely over this time period, from less than 5 birds counted per ride in the first five years to over 50 birds counted on some rides in the past five years.

A graph of the counts of mallard and greylard ducks on one each of my bike ride to and from work between Christchurch and Lincoln between 2005 and 2025. The numbers of ducks have increased hugely over this time period, from less than 10 birds counted per ride in the first five years to over 100 birds counted on some rides in the past five years.

Here's some good news about local birds here in NZ.

Today I've been editing the final draft of a MSc thesis by Stacey Lewthwaite. Stacey has been applying her data skills to my 20+ year dataset of species counts between Christchurch and Lincoln. The bulk of her […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

One of my photos from today of a korimako, NZ bellbird, on campus at Lincoln University. They're an olive green bird with a red eye. This one's settled on the bottlebrush flowers of an Australian banksia tree planted on campus.

One of my photos from today of a korimako, NZ bellbird, on campus at Lincoln University. They're an olive green bird with a red eye. In this photo the bird has its head buried in bottlebrush flowers of an Australian banksia tree planted on campus. They feed on nectar and this tree is one of their favourites.

Bellbirds are back, baby!

The first korimako, NZ bellbird, was spotted today back on campus at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I got a photo and one of the postgrads recorded it singing.

About this time of year korimako have finished breeding in the forest reserves of […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of a small group from our class walking down a steep slope of burnt forest. In the background are mountains cloaked in mountain beech forest.

A photo in the forest of Frank Ashwood holding a rotting log while student Linus photographs a springtail and another student Viola looks on.

A photo of part of the class in an area of burnt beech forest. On the course we set up 30 m by 30 m plots in the different habitats to assess the vegetation, invertebrates, birds, and fungi. This photo is in one of the plots. Despite the fire being back in December 2024, the recovery has only recently started with most of the ground still being bare.

A photo of retired forester and restoration ecologist Nick Ledgard shows the class some of his restoration trial plots. There are cages and uncaged plots on the burnt forest floor, some with native seedlings planted in them and others have forest litter. The cages are to protect from the deer and hares that are widespread in the area.

I spent this week up in the Craigieburn Forest Park of the NZ Southern Alps helping to teach our Masters level Conservation Biology course at #LincolnUniversityNZ.

This is the first year we've run the course field trip at this location. We did so to better […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

It's a weird time to be working at #LincolnUniversityNZ.

We've bounced back from the earthquakes and covid lockdowns and there's been an optimistic buzz in the air. The earthquake damaged buildings are mostly replaced and in the last few years #LincolnUniversityNZ has had some of its highest […]

A photo of students crossing the pedestrian swing bridge across the Arnold River. On the other side is tall native forest and in it is the Raikatane nature walk.

A photo of WIll Godsoe, in a wide-brimmed sunhat, and a line of students, walking through an area of planted native trees along the edge of Lord's Bush, an old-growth fragment of forest. We spend part of the morning surveying plots inside the forest.

A photo of four students in the shade of the forest understorey looking at a tree wētā (big cricket-like insect) sitting on a beating tray. This is a square horizontal canvas sheet that entomologists use to knock insects out of vegetation. Each group of students photographs what they find they find in their 10 m by 10 m plot then lets it go.

A photo of a Kakaruai, the South Island robin, standing on the mossy forest floor next to a student's leg and shoe. Robins at grey birds with cream breasts, and they're famously curious and come in to see what you're up to, hoping that you'll stir up some insects for them to eat.

I've just returned from our three day annual Biodiversity Coast-to-Coast field trip with our second year ecology course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. We traversed NZ's South Island east to west and back again. The students surveyed birds, plants, invertebrates, and […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of Heidi Allan sitting on the mossy forest floors surrounded by ferns and equipment, including her laptop, containers for her flight intercept traps, and climate sensors (which she designed and made with the help of Tait Electronics).

A photo of entomologist John Marris standing in a forest with a flight intercept trap. The trap has two clear sheets of acrylic above a funnel and a container. Flying insects hit the acrylic and drop into the container, which contains a preservative. Heidi's project has many of these traps strung up at three heights, the forest canopy, mid-height, and near the forest floor. She's operating these for most of a year, checking them every six weeks.

A photo of Heidi Allan in the forest sitting on a tree stump like its a throne, next to one of her flight intercept traps that's handing on a yellow rope. This is the lowest of three traps along this rope, the highest being up in the tree canopy high above.

A photo of Jennifer Gillette, smiling in the forest, with a female tree wētā sitting on her thumb. Tree wētā are large bodied flightless relatives of crickets and grasshoppers. This one's about as long as Jennifer's thumb.

Earlier this week I had the good fortune to help #LincolnUniversityNZ ecology Masters student Heidi Allan with her field work.

Heidi's got an ambitious big-scale discovery project going, looking at the beetle communities in native NZ beech forest canopies all […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

I could add that while I'm fortunate to be helping with Kate's MSc project, she is being supervised at #LincolnUniversityNZ by Will Godsoe (@GodsoeWilliam). Will is, aside from being a talented naturalist, also freakishly good at the maths that underpins ecology and evolution.

My photo of an orange-fronted karariki in captivity at the Isaac Conseravtion Park. It's a small green parakeet with an orange and yellow patch on its forehead, and it's perched on a branch in a tree in its aviary.

My photo of a shore plover in captivity at the Isaac Conseravtion Park. It's a small wading bird with a brown back and white belly and banded black and white head with an orange beak with a black tip. It's standing on river rocks in its aviary.

A photo of the inside of part of the kakī-black stilt aviary. It's large and mesh with natural light and a stream naturally flows through it so these braided river birds and can experience close to a natural habitat before they are released into the wild.

A photo of an adult male kakī-black stilt, a black wading bird with a long black beak and long pink legs, next to two juvenile black stilts, which are white and black. On the river rocks by them is a tray with ox-heart, a fat and protein rich food that supplements the invertebrates they catch from the stream that flows through their aviary.

On Friday I was lucky to get a tour of the Isaac Conservation Park, west of Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ. It was set up by Sir Neil and Lady Diana Isaac, who had a vision of channelling their business success in quarrying and construction into nature […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of the claw of a NZ southern koura crayfish. The claw is covered in lots of pink blobs with tentacles. These are a kind of flatworm specialised at living on crayfish.

One of the highlights of my day was when William Harland, a talented ecology undergrad here at #LincolnUniversityNZ, stopped by my office to show me his photos of temnocephalid flatworms. These distinctive squat tentacled flatworms live in colonies on NZ's […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

I spent part of my summer on Banks Peninsula with a team from #LincolnUniversityNZ monitoring lizards, invertebrates, and birds. We also, optimistically, put out a set of bat recorders.

Native bats haven't been reliably sighted on Banks Peninsula in many decades but there's always hope that […]

A photo of a small copper orange coloured butterfly with dark brown veins. A pair of dark lines run parallel along each wing vein, a feature of male butterflies of this species.

I just got back from the first lab for my Biological Diversity course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. Today's lab was about the local butterfly species, plus we began to teach students the local birds. Near the end of lab we went out for a walk across campus to practise […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of five students at night gathered around our moth light, a bright mercury vapour bulb set on a small tripod above a white sheet. You can see moths settled on the sheet and others swirling about the bulb.

A photo of two students botanising in the tussock and herb fields above the forest tree line up Mount Faust. Far down in the background you can see the valley floor where the Boyle River Outdoor Education Centre is where we stayed. We spend the day walking up the mountain from there to collect daisy seed heads.

A photo of four people (I'm bottom left) near the top of Mount Faust, with the Boyle River Outdoor Education Centre building far off in the distance down on the valley floor. Connor, top left, was doing his project on the insects that each daisy seeds and we all climbed the mountain with him to help.

A photo of two students working in forest. Ashley, on the ground, is setting out a peanut butter baited tracking tunnel at one of our stations for monitoring pest mammals in the forest. For her project, Ashley will be using the past 15 years of class data on mammals and birds to see how the pest mammals affect the forest's bird populations. Abby, standing, is measuring the diameter of one of the trees, as part of her project that's looking at how forest structure affects birds.

I've been up in the North Canterbury mountains this week, helping to teach our third-year undergraduate field research course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. It was great fun, as always, helping students to carry out their first ecology research projects.

I'm collapsed […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of my hand holding a mesh bag containing four geckos, while in the background Jennifer Gillette is making measurements on another gecko. Once the measurements and photos are made, the geckos are carefully released back into their shelter.

A photo of student Max Mulvihill as we walked down through the young forest of Panama Rock. Max is carrying a box filled with 12 pitfall traps that we've just got from further up in the reserve. Off in the distance is the white university ute waiting to pick us up before we head off to our next site.

A photo of Jennifer Gillette and summer student Sam looking for one of our lizard shelters, while student Max admires the view. We're on the grassy flank of a hillside overlooking Akaroa harbour.

A photo of our audio recorder set up. We use two AudioMoths for birds, one set to record in the daytime and the other in the nighttime (so we can record for longer) and there's also a black tubular DOC AR4 recorder which we set to record at higher frequencies to detect any bats that might be present.

For the past week four of us from #LincolnUniversityNZ were based at Hinewai Reserve on Banks Peninsula, NZ. We visited a set of monitoring sites in and our of the predator control area of the Predator Free Banks Peninsula project. Predator Free Banks Peninsula […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

A postgrad student at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Noah Fenwick, is studying the ecology of these NZ blue butterflies for his Masters thesis (with me and a couple of our entomologists). Hopefully in a year's time we'll know a lot more about the blues' habitat and host preferences, how their populations […]

A photo of a stick insect sitting on an arm. It looks like a brown stick but, no, that's just what it wants you to think.

A photo of Jennifer Gillette, Lincoln University's lizard expert. She's smiling and in her hands she's (carefully) holding a brown gecko that she found.

A photo of George Gibbs (entomology postgrad student) on the left with a stick insect he found that's sitting on his arm. On the right is Mac, one of our first year ecology undergrads, taking a photo of the stick insect for iNaturalist. This is during our lunch break so in the background there are students sitting in the sun on the grass eating their lunch.

A photo of two brown geckos being held in the hands of a trained lizard expert. The geckos are Waitaha geckos, Woodworthia brunnea.

One of the fun things about working in an ecology department at a university is being surrounded by people who are *really, really good* at finding interesting critters.

On Thursday we took our annual first year ecology course field trip to Ōtamahua/Quail Island […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

NEWS FLASH: We have CLAMS living on campus!

As part of last week's Sustainability Weed at #LincolnUniversityNZ, our freshwater ecology tutor Elysia Harcombe did some kick sampling along a farm ditch. Yes, she found clams!

It's the first record on #iNaturalist of clams on campus, or anywhere in […]

A photo of the cover of the student magazine, RAM, with a stylised drawing of a kereū bird, drawn by the partner of one of the postgrad students.

A two page magazine spread on Sustainability Week on campus. The page on the right is The Great LU BioBlitz with instructions on how to use iNaturalist.

A two page magazine spread on the scavenger hunt happening across campus for Sustainability Week. There’s a map and a list of things to find.

This week is Sustainability Week at #LincolnUniversityNZ. Here’s the student magazine with all the details. I’m looking forward to today’s tree planting, 11–1, at the site of the university’s old Burns Building.

Burns was damaged in the earthquakes and […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Susie Wood stands next to a slide that shows the lakes of NZ and shows the nutrient status of them. Almost half now are classified as eutrophic, supertrophic, or hypertrophic, all categories that mean that they contain nutrient levels that are far too high.

Susie Wood stands next to a slide that shows the fish eDNA in sediments of Lake Waihau in Gisborne, which used to be surrounded by forest and is now surrounded by native pasture. Fish DNA collapses in the past 50 years, including the extinction of the common bully, which is a resilient generalist native species. The other fish featured, the banded kōkopu, went extinct in this lake in Māori settlement when the forests were burned off.

Susie Wood stands next to a slide that shows detection bird DNA in the lake sediments of Lake Paringa on the South Island West Coast. It shows the extinction of moa, kakapo, and South Island kakapo, while kereru continues to be detected.

Susie concluded with this Māori whakataukī: Me hoki whakamuri, kia haere whakamua Current and future activities should be guided by lessons from the past

The other ecology seminar we had this week at #LincolnUniversityNZ was on the state of New Zealand's lakes, by Professor Susie Wood. Susie has spent her career working on projects understanding and monitoring the health of NZ's lakes. She took us through some of […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A slide from Lou Sanson's seminar, showing some of the achievements Australia has been making as part of 30x30. Unlike NZ, Australia is signed up to the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People. The text reads as follows: AUSTRALIA 22% LAND - 48% OCEAN (#8 IN WORLD) 30x30 Critical Goal Dept Restructured to Deliver 30x30 Aboriginal land focus a priority Nature Positive Integration Division (nature based solutions/blue carbon) Nature Repair Market estb High Ambition Coalition for Nature Independent EPA ($121mil) New World Heritage Areas (Flinders/Cape York) Doubling Indigenous Rangers (3800 by 2030) Primary Forest Logging Ban ( WA/Victoria)

A slide from Lou Sanson's seminar, showing New Zealand's backwards progress in conservation. Unlike Australia, NZ has decided not to join the 122 other countries that have signed up to the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People. The text of the slide reads as follows. NEW ZEALAND 30% LAND - 2% OCEAN Min of Oceans (Shane Jones)/Min of Environment(Penny Symonds) Fast Track Legislation (overrides Conservation Act) Kermedec Giant MPA Stopped Freshwater Reforms Stopped Pvt Land Protection(SNA's) Stopped EV Subsidies Stopped $4.5 bill Climate Emergency Response Fund Stopped No plan for 30x30 or OECMs (not High Ambition)

We had a couple of interesting ecology and conservation seminars this week at #LincolnUniversityNZ. The first, on Monday, was by Lou Sanson, ex-Director General of the NZ Department of Conservation.

Lou is now involved in the 30x30 initiative to protect 30% of […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of six audio recorders sitting on my office chair. They're long thin black plastic units, with a microphone at one end covered in sponge and protected by a metal grill, and the rest of the unit is solid plastic inside of which are the batteries and electronics. This is the AR4 model designed and manufactured by the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

A photo of one end of an audio recorder with the plastic gnawed right through, almost all the way around the unit, exposing the SD card and electronics. It's definitely not waterproof now!

We just brought it six audio recorders from across campus at #LincolnUniversityNZ, which students had laid out as part of our long-term monitoring of campus birds.

To our surprise, and annoyance, some pesky varmint has done its best to gnaw right through one of […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

An undergraduate student here at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Shuizetinglan, as interested in exploring tide pools so we suggested he visit Inainatu/Pile Bay in Lyttelton Harbour. It was an extensive rocky platform that's exposed at low tide where various intertidal creatures can be found […]

Original post on mastodon.nz

It's always a treat to find earthstars and today was the first time I'd found some on the campus of #LincolnUniversityNZ where I work.

They come out of the ground like little brown flowers and their central balls puff out spores when the rain hits them. And, then, they're gone again […]

Original post on mastodon.nz

A female korimako (NZ bellbird) has been spotted at #LincolnUniversityNZ! These photos were taken on our campus on Tuesday by student William Harland. I checked on #iNaturalistNZ and, of the 153 korimako observations from Lincoln town and surrounds, this is the only the second female bird seen […]

A photo of Abby, a Lincoln University student, holding a whistling frog in her hand at night.

A photo of a whistling frog. They're a small brown frog with a darker brown strip along the eye.

A photo of a whistling frog. They're a small brown frog with a darker brown strip along the eye. The frog in this photo is looking straight at the camera.

Frogs! So many frogs!

Our field ecology course at #LincolnUniversityNZ was up in the Southern Alps mountains of Boyle, North Canterbury, NZ, this weekend. Despite the winter cold, hundreds of whistling frogs were noisily calling at night from a nearby pond. We […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A screenshot from the iNaturalist website showing a map of the campus of Lincoln University in Canterbury, New Zealand. The points on the map are the observations of the Department of Conservation's environmental weeds of NZ. The campus has 952 observations of 109 species from this list. https://inaturalist.nz/observations?place_id=67596&project_id=environmental-weeds-in-new-zealand&subview=map&verifiable=any

Today I was teaching a lecture about environmental weeds, for our Applied Ecology and Conservation course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I showed the class the "Environmental weeds in New Zealand" project on #iNaturalist. That was made by staff at the […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A macro photo of a grey weevil standing on the side of a branch. It has a big black eye and two blunt spike-like protrusions from the back of its abdomen.

A photo of a plump bluish springtail with yellow bumps protruding from the sides of its abdomen. It's got a beady little dark eye. It's sitting on some moss and is about 4 mm long.

Here's a couple of the invertebrate finds from our three-day field trip into the mountains with weekend with our Field Ecology Methods course at #LincolnUniversityNZ

The weevil somehow ended up in the hair of student Emilie while she was walking through the […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of a woman holding out her smart phone to photograph a NZ robin, which is perching on a branch at eye level right next to the phone. NZ robins are famously curious and bold around people. My full-res photo is on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/54696752798/

This weekend I've been up at the Boyle River Outdoor Education Centre helping to teach out field ecology methods course at #LincolnUniversityNZ.

That's our second-year undergraduate ecology course that gives students practical experience with a lot of common […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

The native plant curator at the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, Luke Martin, standing next to an enormous single leaf of the (definitely not NZ native) titan arum. The leaf is twice as tall as Luke. The photo is in the tropical section of the glasshouses.

A photo of me (foreground, older white guy with glasses) and Luke Martin (bearded younger man) standing next to a glasshouse bench covered in pots. Each pot contains a threatened NZ plant. This work is a collaboration with the Department of Conservation to prevent NZ's rarest plants from going extinct (some species are right on the edge at the moment).

A photo of a thin-leaved daisy plant in a small pot on a glasshouse bench. This is the swamp Celmisia from Travis Wetland in Christchurch city. It is similar to Celmisia gracilenta but likely a new undescribed species, which will likely make it an endangered species.

A photo of a printed aerial photo of what the Christchurch botanic gardens looked like around 1935. It's amazing how many tall trees there are here, when the city was only founded in 1850 and the gardens in 1863. On the left there's a small lake with two islands in it the shape of New Zealand (that was too hard to maintain and no longer exists).

Yesterday afternoon I was at the #ChristchurchBotanicGarden, with an undergrad student at #LincolnUniversityNZ who will be interning at the garden during the next teaching semester. Luke Martin, the curator of the native section of the garden, gave us a […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

A photo of a close-up of part of a steel and bronze sculpture by NZ artist Bing Dawe. It shows four small eels on the left, in metal, and on the right they're shapes are cut out of a section of metal.

A photo of a steel and bronze sculpture by NZ artist Bing Dawe. It shows four small eels on the left, in metal, and on the right they're shapes are cut out of a section of metal. In between they're connected by a ring with a thin flowing line connecting them.

A photo of the sign explaining the sculpture. It begins are follows: Bing Dawe Under a Night Sky. Composition with Tunariki, Branches and Voids 2019 Painted steel and bronze For 40 years, sculptor and printmaker Bing Dawe has drawn on the natural environment and our native species to inform his work. In his Under a Night Sky series, Dawe focuses on the vulnerability of tunariki (baby eel) - exploring both their presence and absence through the clever use of positive and negative space. This work comments on the intensification of rivers and waterways; human impact on the delicate ecological balance of our environment. Known for his expertise as an exceptional craftsman, Dawe successfully depicts both the beauty and delicacy of the natural world while also hauntingly showing a world in decline.

We don't teach an art degree at #LincolnUniversityNZ, Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki, but we're filled with art. We're a smaller university that specialises on land management (agriculture, landscape architecture, environmental policy and planning, conservation and […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Original post on mastodon.nz

I used this paper as one of the options this year in the final assessment in my 200-level Biological Diversity undergraduate science class at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I've spent most of today reading students' thoughts on this paper and its implications for NZ conservation. It's been an interesting […]