Holly and Pohutukawa

How could holly be any more spiky? Have a look at this wintry image by Jesper Grønne, here.





Here in New Zealand it's summer and the pohutukawas are in bloom. Known as "The New Zealand Christmas Tree", they have become something of a cliché in our visual media. However they are still jaw-droppingly magnificent! I snapped these two in Sumner, yesterday:




If you like pohutukawas, you may like to hear about the work of Project Crimson, which campaigns for the protection and propagation of pohutukawa and rata within their natural ranges.

Falcons for grapes

Country Calendar has a nice feature on the Falcons for Grapes project in Marlborough, where New Zealand falcons are introduced to vineyards to discourage smaller birds which damage the grapes. They also look at research into the breeding patterns of these magnificent birds, which are rare and threatened, and the challenges of ensuring their long-term survival. You can view that video here.

The terrific NZ Birds site has background information on the NZ falcon.
And Te Ara has some particularly fine photographs.

More chances to see

When Douglas Adams and Mark Cawardine wrote their brilliant conservation book Last Chance to See.... in 1991, they visited kakapo on New Zealand's Codfish Island, along with a host of other critically endangered animals around the world. Adams himself died tragically in 2001, but zoologist Mark Cawardine is teaming up with the delightful Stephen Fry to revisit the animals described in the book and check on their progress. Fortunately, most of the animals featured have increased in number, the kakapo among them.

Stuff has an item on Cawardine's and Fry's visit to NZ, and says they will be visiting not only kakapo on Codfish Island, but also black robin on the Chathams, kiwi in Waipoua Forest and tuatara and giant weta in Karori Wildlife Sanctuary.

There will eventually be a BBC television series, but in the meantime Fry promises to post detailed updates on his redesigned website. And if you haven't already read the book, go to it!, it's hugely entertaining as well as informative and insightful.

More kakapo!

There are now 91 kakapo! That isn't very many, but it's 5 more than there were last year. Yay for DoC and all the kakapo volunteers who have looked after the breeding birds and watched over the nests. Stuff has the story here.

Trading in forests

Could anybody buy a bit of rainforest to protect it from logging? This article details how it could happen.

Lost and found

The BBC has pictures of a few of the 1.3 million animals which were presumed to have been killed in the conflict in Southern Sudan, which have been rediscovered.

Encyclopedia of everything

The Encyclopedia of Life is an incredibly ambitious project. The object is to catalogue all 1.8 million known species of organism, in a web-accessible form. Inspired by Wikipedia, public contributions and mash-ups of already-availible material will form most of the content, but experts will check it for accuracy. The EOL will take a number of years to evolve, and will be an unprecedented public resource.

Old technology

This fascinating story on Public Address Science is about the rediscovery of an ancient technique: Maori and South Americans blended charcoal into soil to improve its fertility; the soil they treated hundreds of years ago is still very fertile. And, what's more, burying charcoal locks carbon into the earth, preventing its return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Surely the week's cutest photo

Is this one. Thanks Matthew.