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• Post #4494252

  Jack Tame has a fantastic interview with Professor Marco te Brömmelstroet from the University of Amsterdam on how to make city streets better and do much more for societies than move people around in private cars. The biggest threat to children's lives in western societies is car traffic. There are other options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIjaWFrC5Q #nz #UrbanPlanning #BikeTooter #LessCars #cities #TVNZ #JackTame

• Post #4443673

  On Thursday I watched this tarāpunga (NZ Red-billed Gull) on the edge of the ocean repeatedly doing a slow shuffle dance in the wet sand. It would shuffle its feet to make a wet puddle then stop and eat whatever little invertebrates rose to the surface. Then it would do its dance steps again. Definitely full marks for style and smarts. https://flic.kr/p/2stT4kF https://www.inaturalist.nz/observations/389180275 #birds #seagull #nz #beach #Chroicocephalus #gulls #AnimalBehaviour

• Post #4349432

  The latest edition of the #PBS News show Horizons has an excellent piece on a science study published in Nature last month that found that over half of migratory birds globally are now in decline. Most of the show is a thoughtful interview with the lead author of that research, Peter Marra. The interview is quite sobering, although I appreciate Peter's hopeful response that birds have rebounded from stupid things we've done before (over-hunting of egrets and herons for feathers for hats...

• Post #4273562

  It’s fantastic to learn that tiger numbers are surging, the result of many years of conservation being done right in Nepal and China. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/tiger-population-surges-past-400-in-one-of-the-greatest-wildlife-comebacks-of-our-time/ #nature #PBSNature #wildlife #tigers #BigCats #conservation

• Post #4272030

  “Slide” by Salmonella Dub “This time it can simply slide” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnadpyfMEIk #JukeBoxFridayNight #Waiting #NZMusic

• Post #4235559

  Today I did my monthly biodiversity survey by bike along the Summit Road of the Port Hills of Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. And, along it I found the first ever Canterbury record, and second South Island record, of the toatoa bud gall mite, *Aceria victoriae*. 😀 These native mites make distinctive galls on the NZ native plant, toatoa (*Haloragis erecta*). Yet, after they were described as a species from specimens collected in Wellington in 1956/57, nobody recorded them. That is, until Nicholas Ma...

• Post #4135858

  Most of my afternoon today was spent in #QGIS with one of my Masters students Dee Patel. We're preparing my long-term bird monitoring data around Christchurch, NZ, for analysis. Today we gridded up my four standard bike transects into 1 km sections, surrounded by approximately 1 km square polygons. Dee's particularly interested in how the conversion of farmland to urban housing affects birds. Next Dee will be doing some clever analysis of my distance sampled bird counts to estimate th...

• Post #4081460

  @rnzbot_political What a strange half-article to be headlining the #RNZ website, since it summarises ACT’s new policy without giving any historical context or conservationists’ views. I accept that game animals like deer are a valued resource in NZ and there need to be places to hunt them. Still, that cannot be the whole country. There are plenty of well documented and often massive impacts that deer, goats, tahr, and chamois have on the native species they eat, and many of these species are th...

• Post #4058634

  This evening we discovered concert pianist Lord Vinheteiro’s unexpected prowess on the rubber chicken. Here’s his performance of Ah-ha’s “Take on me”. Hot or cold? 😄 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6uxMXaJoqc #JukeBoxFridayNight #HotOrCold

• Post #4030768

  Here's NZ's Southern Alps at sunrise this morning, as seen from Ōtautahi-Christchurch city. My wife described the sky as "mega-pink." My camera isn't quite doing justice to the intense pinkness of it all. I've just uploaded my big versions onto Flickr if you want to zoom in and get lost in them. https://flic.kr/p/2sqE94B https://flic.kr/p/2sqDvhZ https://flic.kr/p/2sqFvm6 https://flic.kr/p/2sqDvhP #sunrise #nz #photography #Flickr

• Post #3881453

  Here's something different for #JukeboxFridayNight."Katariina" by Finnish band Värttinä, set to an animated video by Noar Lee Naggan at some kind of village fair. I was lucky to see Värttinä live in Philadelphia many year ago and they were amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsOfUyh8EP0 #MarketsAndFairs #Värttinä

• Post #3853682

  The moon seemed pleased to be setting this evening in Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. 😀 🌙 https://flic.kr/p/2spfmQi #Moon #NZ #photography

• Post #3783607

  This week was the 18th birthday of fortnightly run route through southwestern Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. This is my 10.1 km route where I've been counting and mapping all the birds and butterflies and assorted other species. I started the route on 9 July 2008, while on parental leave, pushing my baby daughter around in a buggy during her afternoon nap. I wanted her to be able to know how the city's nature changes over her lifetime. I've been doing it ever since (and have added three...

• Post #3551807

  Here's Midnight Oil live in 2018 performing "Power and Passion" "People, wasting away in paradise Going backward, once in a while Moving ahead, falling behind What do you believe, what do you believe What do you believe is true" "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-_s2UzdSek #PowerPlay #JukeBoxFridayNight

• Post #3551616

  Here’s Nina Simone’s classic "Sinnerman” for the #PowerPlay theme for this week's #JukeBoxFridayNight. It's an old African American traditional spiritual song arranged by Nina. But the Lord said "Go to the Devil" All on that day So I ran to the Devil He was waitin' I cried, power, power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r57J0jPyZRs #NinaSimone

• Post #3455822

  Of all the headlines to all the internet articles you read today, can you top this one? "Two million years of Llamas" (It's an accurate title too, although the article's author @JKRevell@mastodonapp.uk goes on to clarify that they're "technically referred to as lamins", being the domesticated llama and alpaca, and their respective wild ancestors, the guanaco and vicuña.) Read on if you want the latest llama learnings. http://synapsida.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...

• Post #3357233

  It looks like the worst has finally happened. The deadly strain of H1N5 bird flu has arrived in Australasia, with a migratory brown skua in Western Australia testing positive (it’s since died). If this bird flu establishes in Australia, it is expected to then make the jump across the Tasman to NZ. This is the bird flu strain that has caused mass die-offs of many bird and marine mammal species as it’s spread across the world. The second link below is the fact sheet from NZ Ministry for Primary...

• Post #3350738

  For the #LifeWellLived theme of #JukeboxFridayNight, here's "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", an old song adapted by Pete Seeger in 1950 and reimagined here by Jackson Brown and Bonnie Raitt in 1998. "Now we're old and ready to go thinkin' about what happened a long time ago We had a lot of kids and trouble and pain But oh Lord, we'd do it again Kisses sweeter than wine" It's the simple things that make a life well lived. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDYu...

• Post #3304371

  In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, today there is a nationwide protest against NZ’s Definitions of Woman and Man Amendment Bill. To quote the rainbowgreens Instagram page, that’s “a proposed law that threatens the identity, safety and wellbeing of trans people”. Proposed by NZ First, the bill has the support of ACT and National, and so can pass into law unless we make a LOT of noise and make National realise that centre NZ abhors this. Personally, my daughter is trans and I am furious about...

• Post #3299355

  For #MusicMusiciansAndMashups on #JukeboxFridayNight, here's "Bridges" by Ani DiFranco, spinning up a song using spoken thoughts from Utah Phillips, an American folk singer, storyteller, poet and labor organizer. "“You sing a lot about the past You always sing about the past You kind of live in the past, you know?” And I say to him, “I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know And bring it back here and drop it on your foot Now the past didn...

• Post #3049644

  I was on the campus of the University of Canterbury (NZ) on the weekend and saw this protest poster on one of the campus street lights. I'm pleased that some university students have got this figured out and are making noise about it. As the poster says, "Gen-AI is not inevitable". https://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/55309028890/ #LLM #GenAI #ProtestSign #NoAI

• Post #3049643

  Here are five kererū perched up a tree last Wednesday in Cashmere, Ōtautahi, NZ. I saw these while biking into work and just uploaded them to #iNaturalistNZ While kererū numbers have been gradually climbing in the city, it's still rare that I see five at once. Always a treat. https://www.inaturalist.nz/observations/367675817 #birds #nz #kererū #iNaturalist

• Post #2562507

  In 2020, "cake" was mentioned on UK TV 10-times more than "climate change" and 79-times more than "biodiversity". This has been portrayed as the media, and people generally, not paying enough attention to the big issues of our time. Perhaps. I looked at English-language books in Google's NGram viewer. Good news! "Climate change" now beats "cake", although it's still nowhere near &quot...

• Post #2076934

  While helping out Heidi Allan with her field work earlier in the week, crossing NZ's South Island, I also (of course) counted nature along the way and took photos of notable species I found. I've uploaded some of them to #iNaturalist. When it comes to little things like insects and smaller plants, Aotearoa-New Zealand is still in the early stages of exploration. It's almost trivially easy to make important observations. There's so much still to document. Here ar...

• Post #1942641

  The global City Nature Challenge starts at midnight on 23 April, which here in New Zealand is now less than four hours away. If you’re new to the City Nature Challenge, it’s four days of observing nature, in hundreds of cities around the world. That’s followed by two weeks of uploading photos and identifying species on #iNaturalist. It’s a great way to get together with others and have some fun exploring your city and seeing what wild species you can find. https://www.inaturalist.nz/projects/...

• Post #1769624

  It's interesting to have lived through a time when operating system upgrades were major jumps in functionality, and now be in a time when OS upgrades are followed by app upgrades that need to turn off the new features. This is a screenshot on my Mac of the update window for TeXShop, turning off Apple's new Math Expression Completion feature (part of its Apple Intelligence). To quote the update "This addition is almost never appropriate in TeX source code". #ap...

• Post #1769619

  I was fortunate to spend today at Ōnuku, near Akaroa, on Banks Peninsula, NZ, helping the tūī team to catch and band tūī. This is part of the ongoing effort to understand and manage the tūī on Banks Peninsula. The species was lost from the Peninsula due to forest habitat loss and pest mammals. Community restoration work has been reversing both of these and a new tūī population was kick-started by the Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust, with the translocation of birds from the Maud Island sanctu...

• Post #1676300

  they paved Seagull Pit, put up a parking lot... I was disappointed to find this week that the seagulls have all been banished from the Christchurch "Seagull Pit" and it's now another car park. After the Christchurch earthquakes, the badly damaged PricewaterhouseCoopers Building was demolished, leaving the remains of the foundation, which filled with water. To everyone's surprise, a group of tarāpuka , black-billed gulls, found it and formed a breeding colony,...

• Post #1646474

  And the 2026 City Nature Challenge is GO with Aotearoa-New Zealand making the first observations! 😀 https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2026 #CityNatureChallenge #CNC2026

• Post #1449819

  If you're in Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ, next Sunday, and are keen for a nature walk, well, you're in luck! As part of the city's annual Walking Festival, Noah Fenwick and I will be leading a walk/explore around Waikākāriki Horseshoe Lake. We're two local iNaturalist fanatics and ecologists and are keen to see what we can find around this restored city wetland. The walk starts at 10 am and will go for about three hours. All welcome! https://ccc.govt.nz/ne...