May 18th (Richmond’s Birthday!!)
Today we went to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. This is a closed environment used to preserve native New Zealand wildlife and to attempt to restore wildlife habitats to what they were before human interference. The sanctuary was enclosed by a giant fence that is meant to keep all mammal predators out of the sanctuary. This is needed because many of the native New Zealand birds are flightless due to the lack of native predators. They even had an area that showed the maximum jumping heights of various mammals such as the cat, rat, and stoat to show how the fence was intended to work. One of the first things that we noticed entering the sanctuary was the vast diversity of fern life. There were very large tree ferns scattered around the forest. The picture below is of a developing fraun. We learned that most ferns unfurl to the large ferns that we know. According to Bill the cells in the undeveloped and developed fraun are the same, they just get longer as the plant grows. We can quote him in saying that “ferns are pretty darn cool.”
Today we went to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. This is a closed environment used to preserve native New Zealand wildlife and to attempt to restore wildlife habitats to what they were before human interference. The sanctuary was enclosed by a giant fence that is meant to keep all mammal predators out of the sanctuary. This is needed because many of the native New Zealand birds are flightless due to the lack of native predators. They even had an area that showed the maximum jumping heights of various mammals such as the cat, rat, and stoat to show how the fence was intended to work. One of the first things that we noticed entering the sanctuary was the vast diversity of fern life. There were very large tree ferns scattered around the forest. The picture below is of a developing fraun. We learned that most ferns unfurl to the large ferns that we know. According to Bill the cells in the undeveloped and developed fraun are the same, they just get longer as the plant grows. We can quote him in saying that “ferns are pretty darn cool.”
Another distinct feature of the sanctuary is the bird life. Right after walking through the gates we could hear the various calls of the Tuis and the Kakas. The North Island Kaka (Nestor meridionalis spetentrionalis) is nationally endangered species. It is a large melodic parrot that has a large beak for hunting things in trees such as beetles. We watched one being tagged and the parrot expressed harsh screeches that are called skraarks. Once the bird started making these sounds the other birds reacted by making the same skraarks. This made us a little nervous of a bird attack. The tagging was a really interesting experience for us because we were able to watch some biology in action. The tagging was meant to follow the activities of the bird and monitor its growth. JT took a video of the entire tagging and maybe he could add the video to the blog.
One other bird that we saw a lot of in the sanctuary was the Tui which are beautiful black birds with small white tufts. This bird is endemic to New Zealand. The sounds of the Tui are very musical. In fact, some of the calls of the Tui cannot even be registered by humans. We could see the white patch under the birds beak moving but we would not hear any sound. We learned that the population of the Tui has significantly declined due to the introduction of the stoat and other mammals to New Zealand.
There was so much seen during this walk, and we will add more at a later date. That’s all for now!
-Jessica, Lacey & Katie
No comments:
Post a Comment