Kiwi call count monitoring has finished at Tāwharanui Regional Park for another year. Thank you to those who braved the cold and were so co-operative when filling gaps in the roster at the last minute. Each session is a bit of a juggling act but people’s happy faces when they Read more…
After a three month hiatus, the nursery group got back into action on Thursday 11 November. Since then, under Covid restrictions and guidelines a limited number of volunteers began the task of pricking out about 12,000 seedlings for the 2022 planting season. On 11 November, 400 flax urgently needing a Read more…
By good luck and good management, hundreds of volunteers planted 17,000 trees from the TOSSI nursery before the Covid Delta variant struck, locking Auckland down for seven weeks. Planting the steep and slippery slopes of Slip Gully was a challenge and after four seasons of dedicated volunteers struggling up and Read more…
Public planting days have been held at Tāwharanui Regional Park for many years. Prior to the onsite nursery being established in 2007, plants were sourced from other nurseries. For a couple of years this included plants grown at Pāremoremo Prison and delivered to the Park on the back of cattle Read more…
Fungi seems to be back in vogue, featuring on Netflix, RNZ, in an audio book I recently listened to, and even in a conversation with my son. Maybe I have become more aware of the weird and wonderful world of decomposers and consequently, I am tuning into fungi facts when Read more…
Next year TOSSI reaches 20 years! It will be a time for celebration of all the achievements at Tāwharanui. A book was suggested to follow up on The First Ten Years written by Maggie Cornish, an important historical record of the establishment of the Sanctuary by a keen bunch of Read more…
Sometimes in the city, when you see everyone frenetically rushing about on their daily business, you wonder if we are ever going to reduce our emissions, save our planet and its wildlife. Then you come across people such as Brian Midgelow-Marsden of AECOM who was alongside me helping put out Read more…
Volunteers at Tāwharanui are fortunate to have the opportunity to keep in touch with the natural world and adapt to the changes. And changes in nature can happen quickly. So as well as monitoring bird species, volunteers are now monitoring cat traps. Twenty-five cat cages have beenset out around the Read more…
In a major first for Tāwharanui, a pair of Cook’s petrels raised a chick that fledged in March 2021. It is thought that this success is the first on the mainland of Aotearoa in a long time, maybe more than 150 years. In 2019, the mainland burrow was discovered by Read more…
There is plenty of debate about climate change and often, we struggle to identify how we can make a difference but there are tangible ways we can have an impact. Biodiversity has the power to mitigate the progress of climate change and conversely it is greatly affected by climate change. Read more…