Sounds of Science archive

Transcript for episode 10

[ROBIN BIRDSONG]

[BELL]

[ERICA]: Kia ora, I’m Erica Wilkinson, New Zealand’s Acting Threatened Species Ambassador. And this is the DOC Sounds of Science Podcast.

[Music]

Every episode we talk about the work being done behind the scenes by DOC's technical experts, scientists, rangers, and the experts in between.

[MUSIC]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

Kia ora, I'm Erica Wilkinson, New Zealand's acting Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC "Sounds of Science" podcast.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Kia ora! Ko Erica Wilkinson tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki ngā Sounds of Science.

Every episode we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC's technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between. Today we are joined by the wonderful Jenny Christie. Kia ora, Jenny.

[JENNY]: Kia ora, Erica. Ko Jenny Christie tōku ingoa.

[ERICA]: It is so wonderful to have you here. I've been far too excited about doing this particular episode. So for everyone at home, can you just tell me a bit about what your role at DOC is?

[JENNY]: So I'm a Science Advisor for the Department of Conservation, and my responsibility is looking after climate change: adaptation, science, what sort of work is The Department doing in that area.

[ERICA]: Fascinating. And how did you get started in this field?

[JENNY]: Well, I've worked for the Department of Conservation for quite some time now, and originally I worked on small mammal pest research. And when climate change came back into the headlines-- I think about 2006 we started to get quite concerned then about what the risks would be for a native species-- it morphed from small mammal pests into, ‘well, how could these small mammal pests, which are invasives like mice, and ship rats and stoats get worse with climate change?’ And it just went from there.

[ERICA]: So how does climate change affect these small mammalian pests?

[JENNY]: We know from anecdotal records that things like ship rats, there's evidence that they may be limited by a mid-winter temperature isotherm. And so while we don't have specific evidence at the moment, certainly that risk is there. And that means when it comes into a mast year-- which is a year when the seed, like in beech forest, has a mass seeding event-- there's more and more numbers for them to go into a predator eruption.

It's also species like hedgehogs-- which traditionally hibernate during the winter-- could get a lot worse. If the temperatures get warm over the winter, they could have more young, the young could survive. They could colonize greater areas than where they are currently. And it's also going out of that small mammal invasive pests into species like rabbits which are now able to breed year round in all parts of New Zealand, I think. Whereas in the past, they couldn't. So it's subtle changes like that.

[ERICA]: So it's then stopping production through winter and then actually, they're not doing that so much anymore. And they can even almost breed through winter sometimes.

[JENNY]: Yeah. And that gives them a huge advantage in terms of numbers.

[ERICA]: Absolutely.

[JENNY]: And when you're managing invasive pests, it's all about managing those numbers. And less is better, obviously. And so if there's going to be more of them and over a greater part of the countryside, then that's a problem.

[ERICA]: That's a major problem. Especially when our native species are already suffering through winter. They're doing what they can to survive through winter, and then you've got hungry winter rats coming at them.

[JENNY]: Yeah, exactly.

[ERICA]: That's no fun. So how do you explain the difference between weather and the climate? 

[JENNY]: Well, weather is what you see outside your window now. It's what you're experiencing now-- weather is now. Whereas climate is the long-term average of now. It kind of smooths it out if you like, and it takes into account the extremes like the big storm in Southland recently. That's an extreme. And all of that gets munched up into that long-term climate average. So climate change is the shifting of that long-term climate average. So while one or two degrees might not sound like much -- because you're shifting the whole range, it's a lot.

[ERICA]: Definitely. So weather is what we're seeing at the moment, and climate is what we expect.

[JENNY]: Yep, yep, so long-term average.

[ERICA]: Right. OK, so part of your work, I know, is focusing on how The Department will need to adapt what it does to mitigate the effects of climate change. Can you tell me about that? What are the key elements there? What does that mean?

[JENNY]: So there's two types of climate change work: there's adaptation and there's mitigation. And adaptation is the side that I work on. It's like saying, ‘climate change is happening, so how do we change what we do to manage these impacts, to reduce these impacts?’ It's things like – if we use the predator control example I just used – it's like, OK. What extra invasive pest control do we need to do to deal with increased invasive predators?

But mitigation, in comparison, that's planting trees to store carbon; that's reducing the amount of carbon we're actually emitting into the atmosphere; it's using an electric bike instead of driving to work in your petrol vehicle.; it's those sorts of things.

[ERICA]: OK. And mitigations -- making it less severe? It's just working on those effects?

[JENNY]: Yep, yep yep, and both are really important.

[ERICA]: So your role must encompass a whole bunch of different things. No one day is the same. Do you have a weirdest day at work sort of story?

[JENNY]: I have plenty of weirdest days at work sort of stories! But probably the one that's most relevant to here is one day, I was in Wellington, and I was at a meeting about climate change, and how can we measure the effect it will have on New Zealanders’ well-being? And one of the things that came up was about burning coal, and how bad it was, and how we could stop burning coal, which was quite an interesting conversation.

And then the following week, I found myself in Arthur's Pass, in the field, so doing some fieldwork. And a really big storm came through, and we got stuck on one side of the river.

We had somewhere nice and safe to stay, but then it started to snow. It was very cold, and I found myself shovelling coal into the pot belly, when a week earlier I'd been at a meeting saying how bad this was.

[CHUCKLING]

[JENNY]: When people are cold they'll shovel coal.

[ERICA]: It's what you have to do. Looking back on yourself going, ‘yeah, I know. I'm the problem.’

[CHUCKLING]

[JENNY]: Yeah, that's it. That's the whole problem with climate change is that people make decisions in the moment. And we were cold, and there was coal.

[ERICA]: And you don't want to get pneumonia.

[JENNY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: So I guess there will always be exceptions to the rule in terms of yes, we trying to, particularly one way. But if you're stuck and it snows you in, then needs must. It is kind of that sort of situation, isn't it?

[JENNY]: It's exactly that sort of situation. And people have to make those decisions all the time.

[ERICA]: That's right.

[JENNY]: And they have to do what's best for them.

[ERICA]: That's right. I'm really interested in what climate change is already doing to native species – what can we currently see happening?

[JENNY]: What we're starting to see-- and a lot of it's anecdotal, we haven't got the scientific research to back it up-- things like the snails in Northwest Nelson in dry conditions, the ground gets really hard, and they start to die and suffer. And up North, kiwi as well, there's a drought up there at the moment* [NB: this was recorded earlier in the year]. The ground's really hard, and the kiwis struggle to get their beaks into that hard ground. And that's probably the most topical one at the moment.

But it's also things like native fish species in alpine areas. There's an alpine galaxis in the Manuherikia and it lives in a few small streams up here. And they are temperature limited to below 12 degrees I think it is. And I think last year the summer was so hot that the waterways were up to 13 or 14 degrees. And so it's like, well, how are these species surviving in that catchment?

And so it's all sorts of things like that. It's tuatara-- they've got temperature sex determination. So if the eggs get too warm, then are we going to have a lot of male tuatara? It will affect them in a large number of ways and in ways that we haven't thought of.

[ERICA]: Sure. Is that that thing where it's about one-degree difference for that male to female egg in tuataras, and that could be a functionally extinct population just like that?

[JENNY]: I must admit, I'm not sure, Erica, because one of the things about being the climate change science expert for The Department is that I have a overview of a whole lot of stuff. And so, yeah, it's tricky in that way. So I'm not sure of the exact degree difference, but what you're saying is conceptually right.

[ERICA]: I think you know quite a lot, Jenny.

[LAUGHING]

[ERICA]: Also on the kiwi thing, I heard that a Northland office was receiving about 20 phone calls an hour recently about kiwi that were in distress needing help out of the forest during the day. And they were saying how it could mean that there are more kiwi, and it could also mean that people are becoming more aware of these. It's great that you're seeing a kiwi, that's really exciting, not many people get to. But they're also realizing the stress that that's causing. So that could be a social change – things are happening.

[JENNY]: I think it's a really good thing. It's not a good thing that's happening, but it's a good thing that people are aware of it.

[ERICA]: Yeah

[JENNY]: -- and seeing that. And seeing that actually the native species that we care about are coming under impact from our warmer, droughtier conditions. And I think that's one good thing that we can take out of this.

[ERICA]: Seeing it in our backyard does make it -- really seems at home, doesn't it?

[JENNY]: Yeah and for people it feels like their backyard.

[ERICA]: Definitely.

[JENNY]: Which is great.

[ERICA]: Yeah. We are kiwis, we want too.

[JENNY]: Yeah

[ERICA]: And then in future, what impact do we expect to see sort of later down the track?

[JENNY]: I think it will be a continuation of what we're seeing now. It'll be hard to predict what some of those impacts will be.

[ERICA]: Of course.

[JENNY]: -- and often it's really tricky, because you can't see them till you're beyond them and look back. Especially for things like big tipping points where like forest might be affected by a drought and start dying. You won't see it until after the drought. And it's very hard to know what to do in situations like that. That's a massive change to that ecosystem.

[ERICA]: Absolutely, yeah. Or like in the alpine zone where rock wren are running out of space. Where they're having to go higher and higher. And then what happens, that could be a tipping point. Oh, they suddenly have no habitat.

[JENNY]: Yeah, exactly. There's that diminishing real estate issue there.

[ERICA]: Sure.

[JENNY]: Yeah, obviously as you get to the top of the mountain things get narrower and narrower, and you're just running out of space. 

[ERICA]: Yeah.

[JENNY]:  Let's hope it doesn't come to that though.

[CHUCKLING]

[ERICA]: I'm sure it won't. So I know that in your early days you encountered a lot of disbelief around climate change, that topic. Do you do you still get that? And if so, what do you say to people?

[JENNY]: Yeah, I did get that in early days. And I'd like to say that that's changed a lot. I don't actually hear that that often from people, that how do I know climate change is real? And how do I know it's human induced? But my answer is always well, in the Department of Conservation our job is to protect our native species from threats and pressures, and climate change is one of those pressures. So we have to manage for that risk. 

And so in some ways it's irrelevant whether it's real, whether it's human induced or not, but I would like to say that the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it is. But we need to manage it irrelevant of that, because we would look pretty stupid in about 45 years-- or even now-- if we were saying, oh no, this isn't real. We're not going to do anything about it. If we started losing species, and then we went, oh, it is real. Oh. That would be pretty silly.

[ERICA]: Let's not get to that stage.

[JENNY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: And there was a time you were sort of confronted by this on an airplane. Can you tell us about that story?

[JENNY]: Yeah, I was sitting next to someone who was a baptist minister, and we were having a good conversation about what he did for a job and what I did for a job. So obviously climate change came up, and he asked me about whether I thought climate change was actually real. And I thought that was a really interesting question from a baptist minister …

But I replied to him my usual response which is: it's kind of irrelevant whether it's real or not, because we manage risk at the Department of Conservation. And climate change as a risk to native species and ecosystems. And so we have to manage it whether it's occurring or not. We have to manage it whether it's human induced or not. But I will say, and I did say to him, that the evidence is pretty unequivocal these days that it is happening, and it is human induced.

[ERICA]: Yeah, that must have been an interesting conversation to have.

[JENNY]: Yeah, I reflected upon it afterwards, and I found it quite amusing.

[LAUGHING]

[ERICA]: Yeah, how about that?

[LAUGHING]

[ERICA]: Can you tell me about a time when you've been incredibly inspired by a colleague?

[JENNY]: Well, that's really tricky actually, Erica, because I feel like I've been inspired a little bit by a lot of my colleagues on a vast range of things. To how they deal with challenging conservation issues, to communicating the message in influencing the decisions that are made, to staying calm in tricky situations, to being able to do a huge breadth of work which is what's required for science advisors in the Department of Conservation.

And often I feel inspired every day, actually, by my colleagues. It's one of the things I really enjoy about working for the Department of Conservation.

[ERICA]: I absolutely agree with you. As soon as I started, it was just meeting these incredibly passionate scientists, experts. Every day there's something that they were really passionate about, and yeah, very cool.

So tussock mast monitoring is something that I'm really interested in. Can you tell us a bit about how-- because it's got some really crucial conservation development in it, doesn't it?

[JENNY]: Yeah, well from being able to see what or how how climate change is impacting on our native species in terms of phenology -- so that's the flowering of native plants-- we've got some … I was going to say old-fashioned techniques. Some “old fashioned!” techniques. We actually go out there in the field, and we count things. And so for tussocks at the moment-- if you want to know if it's a mast year, which is when they flowering on mass or a not my mast year-- then you go out and you count say 100 tussocks on an annual basis. And you count a number of tillers [stems] they've got, and you count the number of flowers they've got, and that's incredibly time consuming.

[ERICA]: That is intensive.

[JENNY]: As you can imagine. And involves crawling around on the ground and getting your hands really cut up, because there's silica in the tussocks, so it cuts your cuts your fingers.

[ERICA]: Oh, that's what cuts your fingers when you grab a tussock or something.

[JENNY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: Like a paper cut, isn't it?

[JENNY]: Yeah, so imagine during 100 tussocks.

[ERICA]: No, I don't want to!

[JENNY]: And so we're getting-- and that's really localized as well, that sort of information. So for climate change we actually need lots of information. And we need a big scale, so monitoring is really important. But fortunately this is where technology is really helping us out.

And there's this new tool, or relatively new tool, called remote sensing, and what it does is when images are taken from either a drone, or a fixed wing plane, or a satellite, and those images are certain resolution-- so that's like their scale if you like.

And then they have multi-spectra in them, so they have the colours you can see which are red, green, blue. That's what you and I can see. But they also have other colours that we can't see so in the infrared light beams. And so everything's got more colour than what we can see. And so what we've been doing with tussock is we've got a study site. We're looking at red tussock, because there's more of a colour change there. And we're looking at, can we tell from these multi-spectral images between a mast year and a non-mast year.

And so with the naked eye you can see that in a mast year the tussock flowers look paler when you look at the tussock, because it's like a field of wheat. And it's all these flowers, and it looks a lot paler. But what we don't know is if that's just a texture different that our eyes picking up, because our eyes are really sophisticated. Or if it's a colour difference.

But we've gone out there-- we've taken pictures in a non-mast year and a mast year-- and it looks like, with other fancy computer software, we can tell on a colour picture there is a shift. So tools like that are extremely important. And there's similar work going on with beech forest-- can we tell when it's flowering and when it starts flowering, which is information we've never had before. And that work is ongoing as well. So that's a huge leap forward in terms of tools that we've got. Because obviously if you can take a picture the computer will do some stuff and pop out and say, yes, mast year. It's a lot quicker than going out and--

[ERICA]: Getting your hands cut up.

[JENNY]: Getting your hands cut up. Yeah, so it doesn't fully replace the old counting thing, because there will be years in the middle where it won't quite mast, there'll be some flowers … but it's a huge step forward.

[ERICA]: Absolutely. I just saw that computer program you were talking about this morning in terms of a black bill gull colony. And the way they were zooming in and what they were going to be able to tell is 10,067 gulls in that colony. It's fascinating.

[JENNY]: It's amazing.

[ERICA]: It's incredible efficiency build.

[JENNY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: It's very cool. So some experts have said that the biggest roadblocks to climate change action are the social barriers that we have, like, ‘it's too confronting … I'd have to give up my way of life …’ Is this something that you see in your work as well?

[JENNY]: Yes it does, but I see it in a different way. The Department has got a tremendous amount of work that we need to do to protect our native species from the various threats they've got. So it's hard to add something else onto that, because we've already got more work than what it feels we can do in that area. But it's still crucial.

So for me it was about getting traction on this work was really hard for a long time. In a lot of ways The Department is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, but climate change is actually at the top of the cliff. And eventually we'll get to the bottom, but there's some stuff we need to be working on now. And it was getting that message through. And I feel we've certainly moved into that space now.

There's been a big shift in people's thinking, worldwide, that climate change is happening and we need to do something. And that has been hugely beneficial. And so, for the last year, I've been at work developing what is a draft climate change adaptation action plan.

So this is, how do we manage this in The Department? What sort of actions do we need to be doing? And it's a very practical plan, because we really need this to work. We need this to happen. So I've experienced that in the past, but now moving to actually being able to address this issue.

[ERICA]: Fantastic. Because you were doing talks on climate change 11 years ago, weren't you?

[JENNY]: Yes.

[ERICA]: So the room's changed quite a bit.

[JENNY]: Yes it has.

[ERICA]: Fantastic.

[JENNY]: Yes.

[ERICA]: That's hopeful.

[JENNY]: Yeah. No one [there] was a denier, but it was, this is just one more thing.

[ERICA]: Yeah, except for that one guy on the plane.

[JENNY]: Yeah, except for the one guy on the plane.

[ERICA]: So on that topic, climate change can make us all feel a bit helpless. Sometimes you do just want to lie in bed with your duvet over your head. There is that sort of ecological grief that goes with it. How do you keep your chin up?

[JENNY]: Well, I think it's important to realize that we've actually got hope. There's a lot of hope. There's actually things we can do. We can't manage climate unfortunately, apart from mitigating. By not driving in cars and stuff like that. But that's a huge collective thing. And it's important that everyone does what they can to stop burning carbon. But from an actual climate change adaptation viewpoint, you know, we can't manage the climate.

But going back to the example of the snails in the forest, and the kiwi in the forest, the ground's really dry, and there's forest dieback occurring as well or potentially occurring. What do we do about that? We can't stop a forest dying back. What we can do is actually we can control browsing herbivores. And that's things like deer, and goats, and possums. And those are things that eat our native forests, and so if a forest died or bits of the forest died, controlling those would actually mean that another forest could regenerate underneath.

And it also means that if we can control them then the undergrowth should thicken up. And if the undergrowth thickens up then it shades the ground. And then if the ground is shaded, it's just damper and so things like kiwi can get their beak in, and snails can thrive more easily. And it's also about thinking creatively about how we can adapt to these things. And I know some my colleagues have been working on in places where there isn't wide scale herbivore control. Can they do little fenced off areas for things like powelliphanta which is our native snail. Or for our native frogs.

And so they native species have quite a small range, so a series of small fenced off plots to keep the herbivores out can make a massive difference for them.

[ERICA]: Sure, almost like a Band-Aid. So while we're figuring everything out it's like a temporary--

[JENNY]: Yeah, it's a Band-Aid! Yeah it is. It's solutions like that. It's about thinking creatively to solve the problem.

[ERICA]: And it's that building of the ecological resilience that we're aiming to do, isn't it? That kind of thing?

[JENNY]: It is. Yep. We're trying to build ecological resilience. And we won't be able to save everything, and we won't be able to predict what might happen. But it's really important that we try.

[ERICA]: Absolutely. I think Don Merton in 1981… someone was saying ‘there are only seven black robin left, and they're all a bit genetically messed up. Is there much point?’ And he says he'd rather have seven messed up black robin than none at all. And it's that kind of thing that I think pushes us forward, isn’t it?

[JENNY]: It is.

[ERICA]: You look for that opportunity. It's never lost hope.

[JENNY]: It's never lost hope, and it's often not perfect. And I feel that's what working in conservation is like: it's often not perfect, but we've got to try, and there's always hope.

[ERICA]: Definitely. And what can listeners do at home? How can someone sitting on the couch stop climate change right now?

[JENNY]: I think, for climate change, it's thinking about what small thing can I do that might make a difference? And it's not changing their life open slather, because we all know that that's really hard to do in one go. But it's about thinking, OK, maybe I will bike to work one day a week. Or maybe I'll catch the bus. Maybe I'll have one least red meat meal a week. It's little things like that. It's those things.

[ERICA]: Yeah.

[JENNY]: -- Because it is really a collective change that's needed to happen.

[ERICA]: Definitely. And almost making it the social norm as well, that will definitely help.

[JENNY]: Yeah, it will, it'll make it socially acceptable, and it will mean that people feel like I have to do it.

[LAUGHING]

[JENNY]: Well, I don't know if they'll   feel like I have to.

[ERICA]: Bully people into changing the world.

[JENNY]: But social pressure as a huge mechanism for getting people to change.

[ERICA]: Very much so.

[JENNY]: If they see their neighbours doing it, or if they see people they like. It’ll inspire them to do it.

[ERICA]: Well, it's like the plastic bag ban. When all these different groups are doing it and, then eventually it got into legislation. So what's something about your work that you do that you wish everybody knew?

[JENNY]: Well, what I wish everyone knew was that climate change is going to affect everything that we do. Biodiversity is probably my speciality area, but thinking about The Department more widely, it's going to affect the tourism work we do; it's going to affect our infrastructure, it's going to affect risks to visitors … and there's an example of that-- recently there's been a few more extreme storms in Fiordland in the west coast with huts being damaged, roads being damaged, bridges washed away. And so that really changes things.

And if you look wider than the Department of Conservation as well, it's going to affect all of New Zealand. All parts of the government, everything we do is going to be affected by it.

[ERICA]: Yeah, I remember you saying, not always statistics can get through to people, but what people really want to know is, can I take my kid to the beach?

[JENNY]: Yeah. Yeah, it's that. People want to know, can I take my kid to the beach? Can I go camping at Tōtaranui  every year like I have with my friends and family. Can I go tramping on the Heaphy Track? It's stuff like that, and that's really important to New Zealanders, and it's important to the Department of Conservation.

[ERICA]: Yeah, that's our livelihood, isn't it? It's how we live as Kiwis. Thank you! So much for talking to me! You are the most interesting person award. I always get a little bit excited to talk to you about everything and anything. So thank you so much for talking to us, Jenny.

[JENNY]: Well, thanks, Erica. It's been a really enjoyable way to spend my morning.

[ERICA]: One of the different ways?

[JENNY]: Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[ERICA]: Thanks, Jenny. That's all for this episode. If you like what you heard, show us some love with a five-star rating. The DOC "Sounds a Science" podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe now, never miss an episode.

[MUSIC PLAYS OUT]

[ROBIN CHIRPING]

---

Transcript for episode 9

[TUI BIRDSONG]

[BELL]

[ERICA]: Kia ora, I’m Erica Wilkinson, New Zealand’s Acting Threatened Species Ambassador. And this is the DOC Sounds of Science Podcast.

[MUSIC]

Every episode we talk about the work being done behind the scenes by DOC's technical experts, scientists, rangers, and the experts in between.

[MUSIC]

[ERICA]: Here with me today we have plant pro, Kelly Frogley. Kia ora Kelly.

[KELLY]: Kia ora Erica. Kō Kelly Frogley tōku ingoa. Nō Ōtautahi ahau, mō Te Papa Atāwai.

Kia ora Erica, my name is Kelly Frogley and I’m living in Christchurch. And I work for the Department of Conservation.

[ERICA]: Fantastic! Thank you so much for coming in. So tell me about your role at DOC.

[KELLY]: I’m one of many botanists who work for the Department of Conservation, but I’m the only one who specializes in a small group of plants called non-vascular plants. This includes lichens, hornworts and liverworts. And essentially, my role is to identify all of the non-vascular plants that are collected from all throughout New Zealand as part of our monitoring programme.

[ERICA]: So tell me about how you got started in this field.

[KELLY]: It was really by luck and good timing. So I was a student at Otago University. And this was at a time when a lot of the field components of degrees were being cut.

And so I had a couple of professors who were really encouraging of me getting out there in my own time and doing botanical work. And one of these projects that I ended up doing was a botanical survey of a bog in the Catlins. And this included vascular and non-vascular plants.

[ERICA]: So just to clarify for everyone, what's a non-vascular plant?

[KELLY]: So a non-vascular plant is a plant that doesn't have vascular structures, which are specialized structures inside the plant that transport nutrients and water throughout the whole plant. Non-vascular plants don't have those structures. So they rely on absorbing the nutrients and water through the cell surface.

[ERICA]: OK. So like the tubes, is that another way of describing it? The vasculars have the tubes?

[KELLY]: Yeah. The vascular bundles that form tubes that transport. Kind of like veins and blood in the human body.

[ERICA]: Cool. So you went a bit into non-vascular and vascular. So then?

[KELLY]: Yes. So then the Department of Conservation had this monitoring program throughout the country monitoring biodiversity. And my manager at the time was really passionate about non-vascular plants and thought that they shouldn't be excluded from the monitoring programs. As traditionally, they have been.

And so she really fought to include them in the program and asked my lecturer had he any students who'd shown an interest in non-vascular plants. He put forward my name, and then I got hired straight out of Uni. And so I've just been on the job learning ever since.

[ERICA]: That is great timing isn't it?

[KELLY]: Perfect timing.

[ERICA]: Fantastic. So you've talked a bit about a non-vascular plant. So why are they important?

[KELLY]: Non-vascular plants are hugely diverse. They play a really important role in our ecosystem in so many ways. They are the first to colonize an area, a new disturbed site. They can modify the soil conditions, regulate pH levels, stabilize the soil, and make it habitable for other plants to then grow.

They also act as habitat for other insects. It's really cool sometimes when I'm looking down the microscope, and then I can see all these creepy crawlies moving around. I identified one once. And it turned out-- I had no idea about any insects. But I followed some keys that I found online, and it turned out to be called a moss bug. So there you go.

[ERICA]: They exist?

[KELLY]: I didn't know they existed, but it made total sense.

[ERICA]: That's so cool. So they're kind of like the building blocks of the ecosystem?

[KELLY]: Indeed, yeah.

[ERICA]: Very cool. So can you give us an example of a non-vascular plant that we might see in our backyard, that people might be able to recognize?

[KELLY]: Yeah. There's actually so many. Just in my backyard, I've got these old peach trees growing down the back. And they are covered in lichens, all different colours, different shapes, different textures. And then if I look down at the grass, in probably the damper areas of the grass, I can see all these mosses growing. They look like little fluffy green things with little leaves.

And then a lot of people in their garden will have what's called a thallose liverwort. And it looks like a green net. And it can cover really big areas of your garden. A lot of people don't like it, and they want to get rid of it. I mean, you've seen the spray and walk away ads.

[LAUGHTER]

[ERICA]: Oh, no. Is that what they're referencing?

[KELLY]: (IMITATING COMMERCIAL) Moss, mold, and lichens--

[ERICA]: Oh, no.

[KELLY]:  --spray them away.

[ERICA]: Don't buy them! So speaking of moss, I've heard that moss can be so important as, like, a sponge in an ecosystem. Is that right?

[KELLY]: Yes. So mosses, liverworts, and lichens can all retain huge amounts of water. Mosses in particular have cells that can hold huge amounts of water. Say, for example, sphagnum moss can hold up to 20 times its weight in water. And then through periods of dryness, they can release that water as it's needed. So they are sort of modifying the humidity levels around them.

[ERICA]: Right. And then if animals browse them and something like that, can that sort of deteriorate a forest like that?

[KELLY]: They can withstand quite a lot of disturbance. But say if it was on a walking track, and people were walking across or animals were walking across repetitively over time, then it will stop growing there. It will find somewhere nicer.

[ERICA]: OK. So can you explain to us what lichen, bryophyte, hornwort are?

[KELLY]: So there's a lot of words that you can use to describe the same thing. So non-vascular plants is just the big umbrella name for the four groups. Liverworts, they can look like two different things.

There are thallose liverworts, which are like the green nets that can cover ground. Or you can get leafy liverworts, which look a lot like mosses. They look like they've got little leaves. Most of them are green. They look a bit more fuzzy looking.

And then lichens are a whole other creature. They are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photobiont-- something that's photosynthesizes. It's usually an algae or a cyanobacteria.

And hornworts, I forgot hornworts. They're often forgotten, even by me. They look like thallose liverworts. But their reproductive part looks like a little horn. So they look like the thallose liverworts when they're not fertile. But if they are fertile, they'll just be covered in horns, which are really cool.

[ERICA]: That is very cool. So you can tell when they're fertile?

[KELLY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: And New Zealand's really rich in lichens isn't it?

[KELLY]: We do have a huge diversity of lichens. We have over 2,000 species.

[ERICA]: And lichen are an amazing thing right? Didn't they survive in space once?

[KELLY]: They did. They have been taken up into space, opened up into the atmosphere up there, and then brought back to earth, opened up again, and they just continue on their merry way. They can survive.

[ERICA]: And moss are pretty special too aren't they?

[KELLY]: Mosses-- one cool thing about them is that they've been known to survive under glaciers for thousands of years. For example, in Antarctica, a glacier retreated and there was moss underneath it. And it was alive. It started to grow. So this has been under a glacier since the last ice age, tens of thousands of years.

[ERICA]: And it was just sort of dormant?

[KELLY]: Yeah.

[ERICA]: Wow.

[KELLY]: Just frozen in time.

[ERICA]: That's amazing. So can you tell me a bit about the work that you do within the Monitoring and Information Systems Team here at DOC?

[KELLY]: Yes. So we have field team members, who over summer, go out to a network of plots that are scattered across public conservation land in New Zealand. And they do all sorts of measurements on the plot. They measure tree diameters, tree heights, all the species, vascular plant species, peace monitoring, bird monitoring-- so much monitoring.

And they also collect non-vascular plants and send them to me. So some people think that I must have a very glamorous job. They imagine me in a forest with all of these plants.

[ERICA]: That's where I've got--

[KELLY]: But in reality--

[ERICA]: --you in my head, yeah.

[KELLY]: --I'm in a little office with a couple of microscopes. It's surrounded in boxes and dry plants. So it's not so glamorous.

[ERICA]: That sounds really glamorous to me. And I've heard that also, while you're in your little office with your boxes, that you disappear into a cupboard with a UV light and some lichens.

[KELLY]: I do.

[ERICA]: Are you having a dance party? What's going on in there?

[KELLY]: I used to use the toilet because it was the darkest room in the office.

[LAUGHTER]

[KELLY]: But then we found this storage cupboard and that was a much better option.

[ERICA]: Oh, my gosh.

[KELLY]: I know. So I've got this little UV light. And some lichens reflect under UV light. And that can help me identify what the species is. And so sometimes I'll put my little UV protective goggles on and go into this little cupboard.

And nobody's ever really asked what I do in there. I don't know what they think I'm doing. But I'm identifying lichens. It's a legitimate reason.

[ERICA]: And now we've told everyone. It's fine.

And I should be congratulating you because you've just discovered a new plant. Is that right?

[KELLY]: Yes.

[ERICA]: Tell me about that.

[KELLY]: I'm very excited about it. So we haven't published it yet. But myself and a colleague have discovered a new species of liverwort. And we both independently found it.

I didn't physically find it. It came through in one of the collections. So one of the team members had found it in the field, and they sent it to me. And I recognized it as being totally different to what the rest of the related species were. So I know which genus it belongs to, Stolonivector.

[ERICA]: Which sounds like a wizard spell, which is awesome.

[KELLY]: But it was covered in little spines. And so it was completely different to any other species within that genus. So we've written this paper. We're waiting on some DNA results from Finland. And once they come back, we can publish. And then everyone can know about it. And that was me with David Glenny, who works at Landcare Research.

[KELLY]: Fantastic. Shout-out David Glenny. And did you get to call it something?

[ERICA]: Yeah. We got to choose the species name, which was really difficult. It's called Stolonivector echioides. And echioides comes from echidna, spines-- echinae that kind of thing. So it has to have a meaningful reason for why you choose the name, and that's what we went for.

[ERICA]: Not "frogley," which a lost opportunity--

[KELLY]: No.

[ERICA]: --I feel.

[KELLY]: It's really frowned upon to name something after yourself. It's probably going to be the last thing I name if I name "Frogley”

[ERICA]: I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask about threatened non-vascular plants. So data deficient species is a real concern, right?

[KELLY]: Yes. For all groups, but in particular for lichens. Over half of our lichen species are listed as data deficient-- so over 1,000 species.

[ERICA]: My gosh. So the work that you do, it must really make a difference with that?

[KELLY]: It has done, which is really cool. So data deficient really means that we don't know enough about it to say if it is threatened, if it's not threatened, what's threatening it. We don't know anything except that it exists.

And so with this monitoring program, we've got a whole lot of new records coming in, a lot of new identifications. And that data is able to feed into the threat listing process. And we have been able to remove some of these data deficient species, and actually assign them a threat classification.

And sometimes that's made it not threatened. Actually we've got this coming up in so many different plots. This is not threatened, people just haven't been looking for it.

And then sometimes we get a sense that this is actually quite naturally uncommon. So it is threatened, but it's for natural reasons. So we're actually learning a lot about these species through this process.

[ERICA]: That's fantastic. What about the one that you discovered? Do you know how many there are?

[KELLY]: We've found it in two places. We found it in the Copland Valley. And David Glenny found it on the Stewart Island. That's all we know about it. But what's interesting about this genus is that there are only six species in this genus. And four of them are only found in New Zealand.

One is found in New Zealand and Australia. And the others are only found on a little island, Heard Island, which is an Australian island. So it's got a really interesting distribution worldwide.

So at the moment, it's going to be data deficient. We have two records. It's tiny. It's one millimeter wide. So people obviously aren't looking for it. We were lucky that it was picked up in this monitoring program.

But now we know a little bit more about the habitat, that maybe when people go out to similar places, they might be able to look for it. Because we're not going to find anything out if people aren't looking.

[ERICA]: That's so true. And they'll be more aware to look for it. That's very cool. I love the term green blindness. Can you explain that phrase?

[KELLY]: Yes. So this is a term that I heard at a recent conservation network conference. And I thought it just applied to non-vascular plants perfectly. Green blindness is that sensation when you're walking through a forest, and everything looks the same. You don't really take it in. It's sort of like a green veil is covering everything.

And I'm guilty of doing this in the past. When I was growing up, I would go for walks in the bush and everything would just be a tree. I'd focus on the track.

I'd focus on my breathing. And I wouldn't really notice anything that was around me. And once I started to learn more and to look-- I have a completely new experience when I'm walking through the bush now knowing what I'm surrounded in, what these plants are.

[ERICA]: So you've taken your green blindness off?

[KELLY]: Yes, I've lifted the veil.

[ERICA]: Lifted the veil. I like that one. So how do you get people to lift the veil themselves, to start noticing things around them?

[KELLY]: Cool. Good question. One of my favourite ways of doing that is to find a really mossy rock or log and ask people to look at it and tell me how many different species they see on it. And this includes mosses, liverworts, lichens, hornworts-- whatever's on the rock/log.

And people just sort of look at it. They don't really know. And then they get all up in it. They start to look at different colours, textures, and shapes. And then they realize that actually there's so much living in this one tiny little area. And it's really fun watching people discover that.

[ERICA]: And seeing that there aren't just a couple of species.

[KELLY]: Mm-hmm. Everyone is always surprised.

[ERICA]: That there are more?

[KELLY]: That there are more, yeah. There are lots.

[ERICA]: Fantastic. So apart from hiding in the toilet with lichen, what's been your weirdest day at work?

[KELLY]: Well, there was this one time, I was visiting a colleague. And somebody from a local museum brought in a human skull. And this skull had a liverwort growing on the side of it. And he wanted us to identify the liverwort.

The skull was dated to be from the 1800s. And so I don't know how long the liverwort had been growing on it, but we identified it. And it's an undescribed species.

But we have known about it for a while, just no one's published the information yet, which is another issue in itself. But it's a liverwort that usually is found on limestone and other calcareous substrates. And so it sort of makes sense that it's growing on human bones. Right?

[ERICA]: Yeah, it does. So do we know where that skull came from?

[KELLY]: A walker found out in the forest. And then once it was dated to the 1800s, and then brought in to us to identify, I identified the liverwort and then handed it back to the appropriate people.

[ERICA]: That is so interesting.

What would you say is the best part of your job? What's what you love?

[KELLY]: I think the best part of my job is the fact that I get to work sometimes on my own, sometimes within a team. I get to work in an office, and then I get to go out into the field. I get to work with plants that I find really interesting.

I get to learn so much every day. And I get to connect with all these people from different organizations, people who have similar interests. And then I get to pass on everything that I've learnt to others. So it's a little bit cheesy, but I think that I sort of have the best of every world in my job.

[ERICA]: You've got so much variety.

[KELLY]: So much variety.

[ERICA]: That's amazing. What would you say is the biggest challenge in your field right now?

[KELLY]: The biggest challenge would be the lack of taxonomic research and literature out there. There are just huge gaps in knowledge, and not very many people filling those gaps. So progress is slow. And that can be a real challenge when you're trying to identify a species.

[ERICA]: Of course, because there are so many data deficient things, you're going, I want more about this.

[KELLY]: I know. And take, for example, the liverwort that was on the skull. People know about it. I don't know how many years they've known about it, but nobody has published the information because there aren't enough people out there with enough time to publish these things.

[ERICA]: Who are dedicated to liverworts--

[KELLY]: Exactly.

[ERICA]: --and lichen?

[KELLY]: Mm-hmm, yeah. So that can just place so much limitation on ecological work in this area.

[ERICA]: What's something about your work that you wish everyone knew?

[KELLY]: I wish that everybody knew and appreciated the fact that the tallest moss in the world lives in New Zealand. It can grow up to 70 centimetres tall. It looks a little bit like a miniature pine tree.

[ERICA]: Aw.

[KELLY]: So don't pull it out if you're weeding.

[ERICA]: Don't pull it out. Don't use it for your Christmas tree. It sounds pretty sweet though.

[KELLY]: It's really cool.

[ERICA]: So you've discovered your own plant … has there been a most satisfying experience professionally?

[KELLY]: I guess discovering a plant was quite satisfying. But in other ways, once I held a workshop for a roomful of vascular plant botanists. And I wanted to teach them all about the non-vascular plant world.

So it was three hours long, and they really delved into it. I created a workbook full of all these tasks that they could do. They were pulling apart plants, looking at them under a microscope, dissecting them-- all sorts of things.

And by the end of it, everybody was really enthusiastic about non-vascular plants. It was just really satisfying seeing everybody come in with a little bit of scepticism about why are these things so important? But then they left thinking, whoa, this is a whole other world I never had eyes into. And that was really satisfying.

[ERICA]: And you did that.

[KELLY]: I did that.

[ERICA]: That's a bit cool.

[KELLY]: And then, on a personal note, I overheard one of the organizers of the whole conference say, ‘that's how you run a workshop’. And that made me feel really good.

[ERICA]: Did you pay them to? [Laughs] That's fantastic. Have you had a toughest day at work?

[KELLY]: Yeah. I went on a field trip with one of the monitoring teams. And we were at this plot that was right in the middle of a swamp in Haast. And it was such a tough day because we spent the whole day wading through swampy water.

I wanted to climb across all of the trees that had fallen down across the plot so that I didn't have to get my feet wet. But then I would have had to crush all of the mosses and the lichens on the rocks. So I chose to get my feet wet that day.

[ERICA]: For the nature.

[KELLY]: For the nature.

[ERICA]: That's what you did that for.

[KELLY]: Yeah. But by the end of the day, I didn't realize straight away it was happening, but I obtained 89 itchy bites from mosquitoes all over my body. I counted them all because I had--

[ERICA]: How did you know?

[KELLY]: --calamine lotion or something spotted all over my body.

[ERICA]: Oh, my gosh.

[KELLY]: So 89 bites.

[ERICA]: And you got your feet wet.

[KELLY]: And I got my feet wet. Yeah, I know. Tough day.

[ERICA]: Here's to you, mosses and lichens.

[KELLY]: But there were a lot of plants on that plot. 78 species of non-vascular plants within a 20 by 20-meter plot. So it was really cool.

[ERICA]: That's huge. That's a huge discovery. And worth it in the end.

[KELLY]: Worth it in the end, yeah. Once the itchy bites had gone down.

Actually it was more than the vascular plant species on that plot. There was 70 vascular plant species and 78 non-vascular plant species. So there you go

[ERICA]: Living together in harmony.

[KELLY]: Mm-hmm.

[ERICA]: That's what I wanted to ask before. Do lichen live all in harmony together. Like on a rock, do they try to steal each other's algae?

[KELLY]: Sometimes there are like turf wars between lichens. So lichens have a whole lot of chemistry to them. They're riddled with chemistry. And sometimes their chemistry really doesn't match.

And so sometimes you can look at a rock, or anything, and a lichen might have a little black rim surrounding it. And it must have been incredibly slow, but it's like a slow-motion war for territory. And the secretions that occur around the lichen will prevent another one from growing over it, or taking its turf essentially.

[ERICA]: So it's putting up a fence in its backyard?

[KELLY]: Mm-hmm. A fence that--

[ERICA]: And then it thrives inside.

[KELLY]: --moves along. What is it called in a battlefield when you're moving forward? That's the imagery I've got going on in my head.

[ERICA]: Yeah. It's in my head. It's from Lord of the Rings, mainly. But I don't know what it's called.

[LAUGHTER]

[ERICA]: Do you have a favourite work story?

[KELLY]: My favourite work story, one that we haven't even talked about so far …

It was sort of cool, one day I was camping with the field teams again when I was at a plot. We were camping on top of a mountain. And it was getting quite late in the season, so it was quite cold.

And when I woke up in the morning, I went to brush my teeth, but my toothpaste was frozen because it was so cold. And then we had to crack through ice on a mountain tarn to get water for the day. So I just sort of-- that was really cool, but that was not my dark toilet office. You know? Quite a contrast.

[ERICA]: Yeah. That's a very different atmosphere. Wow. But then do you feel like living in the wild? That would be pretty cool.

[KELLY]: Yeah, totally.

[ERICA]: It sounds like you've had so many incredible experiences out in the field, doing the things that you love. But on a more serious note, have you noticed that climate change is affecting your work?

[KELLY]: At the moment, it doesn't affect my work. Because samples are being collected no matter what the climate is. And they are coming in, and I am identifying them.

But at the moment we're very much in the stage of creating an inventory of what we have and where it's growing. The next step will be to re-measure, re-identify. And then we can start to identify trends that may or may not be occurring.

So really it's just this big unknown at the moment. But it's going to be so important going ahead in the future. But at this stage, not really affecting work, but just this huge unknown.

[ERICA]: Yeah. Totally unpredictable.

[KELLY]: Yeah. We don't know how the plants are going to react to changing temperatures.

[ERICA]: Sure. With things like moss that has survived under a glacier, it can survive very harsh conditions can't it?

[KELLY]: Yes. But because the climate is warming, it's going to be the complete opposite of effect.

[ERICA]: Sure.

[KELLY]: And there's a limit to what plants can withstand, in terms of desiccation. Some are more adept at tolerating these kinds of conditions. So for example, mosses and lichens that you can find around urban environments, they might even be on your car, on the pavement.

In urban environments that are quite polluted, probably quite hot because of all the concrete-- so they do have these abilities to adapt. But I just don't know enough about all of the plants to know how they're going to react.

[ERICA]: It doesn't sound like anyone does yet.

[KELLY]: No.

[ERICA]: But you're finding out. And can't lichen be a pollutant notifier?

[KELLY]: Yeah. People can call them bio-indicators.

[ERICA]: That's the word?

[KELLY]: That's the word, yes. They can indicate air quality or changes in air quality. They're quite sensitive to what is in the air around them. They don't have the ability to just absorb the good air and reject any pollutants. So they just take in whatever is around them. And if that air is too polluted, then they will die.

And some lichens are much more tolerant to those kinds of pollutants, and so they're going to be the ones that are going to survive. So if you look at species assemblages in an area, that can tell you a lot about the quality of air. And which species are living there might indicate if it's fresh air or polluted air.

[ERICA]: Wow, that's such a key species. That's pretty cool.

[KELLY]: Very cool.

[ERICA]: And if people are interested in learning and studying in bryophytes and lichen, what can people do at home?

[KELLY] One of the most accessible ways to start learning is to use iNaturalist. I don't know how many people are familiar with that. But that's a really great platform to put photos up online or look at other people's photos.

And a lot of people around the country and around the world will look at those photos as well, and maybe identify them for you or provide details about them in the comments section. And this is just a really great way for people to look around them, see what's growing, take photos, put it up, learn a little bit. And there you go.

[ERICA]: Lift the veil.

[KELLY]: Lift the veil. You're right.

[ERICA]: That's fantastic. I told my mom about iNaturalist. And she thought, I'm not a scientist. I can't go on iNaturalist. I was like, Mom, it's for everyone.

[KELLY]: It's for everyone, yeah. So there's another thing that people can do at home. And this is for the people who are involved more in restoration projects, or maybe they want to create a planting on their property, and that's just to consider non-vascular plants as part of the ecosystem that they want to create.

And this could be thought of as which plants you're introducing, which plants should be there. But also sometimes there are invasive plant species that maybe you're introducing that you shouldn't be introducing. And this is in particular for one of the thallose liverworts that gardeners hate, the nurseries hate. They just spread throughout nurseries.

And then if people are ordering plants from outside their region, and then they bring them to their plantation, plant them in their area-- they are introducing it and speeding up the invasive species distribution. So that's something to think about as well. Just watch what you're bringing in, if you want to bring it in or not.

[ERICA]: Can you give us an example of the invasive species?

[KELLY]: So there's one big one, Lunularia. And that is a thallose liverwort, so it's green, it's matted. And if you look at it, and it's fertile, it has these little moon-shaped cups on the thallus. And that's the "Lun" part of its genus, from Latin.

[ERICA]: Oh, yeah.

[KELLY]: So if you look at it, and you see little moon-shaped cups, that's Lunularia. There's another thallose liverwort, Marchantia, and those little cups are full-circle cups, not the half-moon. But they're both invasive.

[ERICA]: Both invasive, and we don't like them. OK.

[KELLY]: We only like them where they're supposed to be.

[ERICA]: Yes. In the right area.

[KELLY]: Everything in moderation.

[ERICA]: That's so true. Kelly, thank you so much for your time. This has been a great reminder to decode the green and look at smaller species that are so often overtaken by the grandeur of a forest. It's been fantastic having you here. Thank you.

[KELLY]: Thanks for having me, Erica.

[ERICA]: Anytime.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[ERICA]: That's all for this episode. If you like what you heard, show us some love with a five-star rating. The DOC Sounds of Science Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe now – never miss an episode.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[TUI]

---

Transcript for episode 8

[North Island robin birdsong]

[BELL]

[NIC] Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, the Department of Conservation's Threatened Species Ambassador. And this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

[NIC] Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki ngā Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

[NIC] This podcast is an opportunity for us to share some of the work done behind the scenes by DOC's technical experts, scientists, rangers, and the miscellaneous experts in between.

[BELL]

[NIC] Today on the show, we have the dark knight himself, Colin O'Donnell. Kia ora Colin.

[COLIN] Kia ora Nic. Ko Colin O'Donnell tēnei. Yeah, I'm Colin O'Donnell. I'm the principal science advisor at DOC.

[NIC] What does that mean? Tell us about that.

[COLIN] Well, at the moment, I have responsibilities to oversee our research programs on threatened species and ecosystems. So I get to think about every threatened species there is and what sort of work we need to do to solve the problems behind it.

[NIC] She’s a big job. How many threatened species have we got at the moment?

[COLIN] Well, there's about 8,000 species on the list at the moment. So those are things that we've identified. [LAUGHS] So there's more out there, too.

[NIC] So this is a job for life, then.

[COLIN] It's definitely a job for life.

[LAUGHTER]

[NIC] One of your specialties that you are a little bit famous for in nature nerd circles is bats. It might surprise some New Zealanders to know that we have these couple of species of bats in New Zealand. Can you tell us a little bit about the different species we have here?

[COLIN] Yeah. Yeah, it is really surprising. Lots of people say, what, we have bats in New Zealand? I say, of course we do. And we've got two species, which have the inspired names is the long-tail bat and the short-tail bat. They're known as Pekapeka to Māori.

And they're threatened species, so they used to be much more abundant than they are now. In fact, some of the Māori stories talk about them being around the forests in thousands and thousands, and all over New Zealand. So there's nothing like that now. And most of them are hidden away in really remote forest areas.

[NIC] And when we think of bats in New Zealand, I suspect many of us who have gone and had a holiday on the Gold Coast or in Queensland, tend to be thinking of those big fruit-bat flying fox-type jobs that hang out of the trees and fly in and out of the city at dusk. They're not like that at all, are they?

[COLIN] No. No, our bats are really tiny little things. They're just, literally, the size of your thumb. Although, if you see them at sunset, they do look bigger, because they're like a huge kite with a tiny little body stuck in the middle. So they're quite cool things.

[NIC] And what is special about our bats compared to, say, other bats around the world?

[COLIN] Well, they're our bats, obviously.

[LAUGHTER]

I guess-- from a scientific, ecological, evolutionary point of view-- the short-tail bats, in particular, are one of the oldest lineages of bats that are known. So you can go back 20 or 30 million years with short-tail bats, sort of similar to what we have now. And they're particularly weird for lots of reasons.

One is that they run around on the ground to feed, a lot of the time. And so they're not spending all their time flying around, catching little insects in the sky. They've also got a few other things, like they can fold their wings away especially, so that they don't get all ripped and torn while they're running around on the ground.

[NIC] Yeah, they kind of tear around on their elbows, don't they?

[COLIN] Yeah, yeah.

[NIC] If a bat had elbows.

[COLIN] Incredibly fast. [LAUGHS] Yeah, they're really agile on the ground. And they also run up and down the tree trunks, and dig for insects in the limbs, and stuff like that.

[NIC] Why do you think bats have been missing from the New Zealand general public conservation psyche for so long?

[COLIN] You get bats all over the world. And we all know about bats. And we've all been scared or indoctrinated by some of the stories about bats. So it's not really a surprise. although we don't see them around our towns and cities.

The first time I saw bats in the real was when I was at a pub in the UK, [LAUGHS] once upon a time. When you have a pint, and you see these bats flying around your head, I thought that was pretty exciting. But you don't see that here now. I mean, they used to be in our cities, but they disappeared in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.

[NIC] What is it that has made them disappear?

[COLIN] Well, the same old reasons why most of our threatened species are in trouble, really-- firstly, habitat loss. I mean, our bats-- well, when I first started working on them, I thought I'd find this cave down on Fiordland, and I'd be able to study them in the cave, and find out what was happening. I found out straightaway that they lived in trees--

[LAUGHS]

--little cavities at the tops of-- 20 or 30 meters up-- the beech tree sort of thing.

[NIC] You've been keeping an eye out for bats for-- quite a long time. She said trying to be polite.

[COLIN] Are you saying I'm old?

[LAUGHS]

[NIC] I'm saying you're very mature.

[LAUGHS]

What was it that sparked your interest? What made you decide that, while everybody else was off chasing kākāpō and all the k birds, that you were going to focus on these things nobody really had heard much about and didn't know where to find them?

[COLIN] People talked about them a lot in conservation circles, because we knew that they were endangered, although nobody knew how to find them, or how endangered were they, or where were they endangered. So it was a fascinating mystery. And it's really partly about challenges, too. So how do you find a little bat the size of your thumb that's flying around in the pitch darkness in remotest Fiordland? It's kind of an impossible thing to--

[NIC] Living 20 to 30 meters up a tree.

[COLIN] Exactly. So there's a challenge side. But when I got really interested was when we were working down in Fiordland, Graeme Elliot, Pete Dilks and I had been working down for three years on how to control stoats, doing stoat-trapping trials to increase numbers of mohua, and parakeets, and things. We were just walking on the road in Eglinton one night. We decided to lie down in the middle of the road, because it was really warm.

[LAUGHTER]

Also, kind of relaxing. And we were just staring up at the sky as the stars were coming out. And we saw these bats just flying up and down the bush edge right above us. And I thought, wow, that's really cool. [LAUGHS] And it made me realize, well, this might be the place to actually try and catch and study them, because-- first, find your bats to study, is the first step.

[NIC] Yeah, it must have felt like you were chasing a ghost for a little while there.

[COLIN] Yeah. I think I was really fortunate. At the time I came along, there was all these technological developments that made it easier. I mean, the radio transmitters that you put on the kākāpō weigh 30 or 40 grams. I don't know what they weigh. But they're great, big things that way a lot more than a bat.

So the radio transmitters were just getting small enough so that you could put them on a bat. So, if you could catch one in the first place, you could put one of these transmitters on and figure out where it goes, and what it does, and where does it live, and what it might be threatened by, really.

[NIC] And how do you catch them?

[COLIN] Well, originally, we used mist nets, which are a net we use for catching birds if we want to catch those and put transmitters on flying birds. The trouble with our bats is that they echolocate. So they have a sonar system like a dolphin or a whale.

[NIC] Or a submarine.

[COLIN] Or a submarine, yeah. [LAUGHS]

That's another story, actually. Anyway, we put up these nets at night in the places that we were seeing the bats. And the trouble was the bats just flew around them. Or, if there was a hole in the net, they would fly through them, because one of these mist nets was like a brick wall to them.

[NIC] Oh so, their echolocation can pick up something as fine as a--

[COLIN] As a really fine net, yeah.

[NIC] Wow.

[COLIN] But, I mean, if you think about it-- OK, our long-tail bats can feed on sandflies, which is a good thing. But they can be flying around in the forest at 40 or 50 kilometres an hour in the pitch black and catch something the size of a sandfly. So they've got amazing navigation skills. After that, somebody told me about these things called harp traps, which were invented in the '60s. And they're literally what they suggest they’re-- just a big frame, strung with very fine nylon, like a harp.

[NIC] Yeah.

[COLIN] And you put one of these up on a fly away. And somehow, the configuration of the lines confuses the echolocation calls. So the bats can still detect them. And most of the time, they go around them.

But every now and again, one says, what's that strange thing in front of me, and bangs into it. And they just slide down the strings and into this catch bag. And so that's how we catch them now.

[NIC] Yeah. I have to say that one of my-- I think it's my favourite conservation experience ever was catching bats in the central North Island. And first of all, we know just-- well, everybody thought I couldn't do it, because you have to be quiet, don't you? You have to be quiet for ages while you're listening for the clicks of the bat detectors. And then having these tiny, little bats in your hand-- and then, once we had extricated the bat from the net, and we wanted to catch another bat to put transmitters on, somebody put it in a tiny little calico bag and said to me, here you go, tuck this down your shirt.

[LAUGHS]

And I was sitting under a tree, in the dark, in the mist, with a bat tucked in my cleavage-- for lack of a better word-- thinking, wow, look at this. This beats a kākāpō on your shoulder, any day.

[COLIN] Well, the thing about bats is that they have the single torpor, which means-- when the weather's cold, there's no food around-- they lower their body temperature. And so if it's a cold night, and you've caught them-- say, to put a transmitter on-- and they get a bit cold, they start to basically go down into this little hibernation-mode thing. And you really need to warm them up so it can fly off again.

[NIC] When it comes to finding the bats, I know we've got we've got radio transmitters. We've got bat detectors. I know a lot of community groups now are using bat detectors. And as the technology has grown, how has that helped us find where bats are around the country?

[COLIN] Oh, enormously, because we have automatic remote bat detector systems in the remotest parts of New Zealand now. We can answer questions like, are there bats there, and what species are, and what habitat they're living in. But 25 years ago, it wasn't quite that good.

I mean, I didn't know a thing called a bat detector even existed. And I guess New Zealanders don't know about the bat business, really-- or, at least, didn't then. And a German tourist on Milford Road told me, oh, why haven't you got a bat detector? And I thought, what's a bat detector?

[LAUGHS]

It will save me looking out in the sky and walking around the dark a lot. So a bat detector's just-- again, it's just a small handheld device. So it converts the high-frequency echolocation calls to an audible click. And so you can hear these click, click, click, click, click sounds as a bat flies around you.

And I know it was really inspiring to me, because I walked along the road, and I heard all this clicking around me. And I couldn't see anything. I thought, wow, there's bats flying around my head at the moment. [LAUGHS]

[NIC] Yeah, and you don't even know they're there.

[COLIN] And you just don't know they're there. You couldn't see them or anything.

[NIC] Yeah.

[COLIN] And before that, electronics being what they were, if you had a truck-sized bat detector, suddenly it became a handheld detector. So that's good, and cheap. Oh, yeah-- gone from $10,000 dollars to $100 sort of thing.

[NIC] Yeah. And I'm noticing, particularly communities now involved in predator free projects, are starting to use trail cameras to detect pests and other wildlife on the trapping programs, or the trapping trails, at night. But in the last little while, on social media, I've seen people starting to pick up what seems to be bats in areas where we probably didn't necessarily think they were before, and more bats around urban environments. Do you think people in urban areas have any idea about the bat populations around them?

[COLIN] Oh, probably most people wouldn't know. I mean, it goes back to most people not even knowing we have bats. So yeah, there's not that many urban areas where you get them, but there are a few. They're on the outskirts of Auckland, they are on the outskirts of Hamilton, for example.

[NIC] Geraldine.

[COLIN] Geraldine is another place. The best place to see them is actually Stewart Island at Halfmoon Bay along the-- there are three or four street lights in front of the school. And the bats fly backwards and forwards along there, feeding, every night. So that's a great place to see them.

[NIC] It's not all good news, though, is it, when it comes to bats. First of all, we should probably talk about the greater short-tail bat, which is a very recent extinction in our conservation history. What happened there?

[COLIN] Yeah, so the greater short-tail bat was a much bigger bat. They used to be all three in New Zealand, and really common, based on the amount of bones in caves around the country. And people suspect the kiore rat was responsible for its demise on the mainland. Those persisted until the '60s on some islands down off the southern Stewart island, so the southern Titi Islands.

[NIC] The Mutton Bird Islands.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] Yeah.

[COLIN] And unfortunately, rats got to those islands on about, I think, the early '60s. And so, by 1967, the last sighting was seen. And those bats were probably killed-- or most of them-- by predation from rats. So predators are the big modern threat to all of the bat species.

Rats, stoats, cats, and possums all have a go at catching bats. And a lot of my-- when I started working quite a while ago in South Canterbury, we went around asking people for bat records and sightings. And about a quarter of the sightings were people saying, oh, my cat brought in a bat last night, or some other time.

[NIC] And that's just in your work history.

[COLIN] Yeah, exactly.

[NIC] Yeah. And not to mention a pretty recent extinction within the last 50 years.

[COLIN] Yeah, yeah.

[NIC] Let's talk about cats, because the infamous bat-cat story was the one near Ohakune, wasn't it, or Ruapehu, where one cat-- I remember, at the time, the ranger kept finding little ripped up bits of bat wings beneath the bat colony.

[COLIN] That's right, yeah. So that was on the side of Ruapehu. It was a very long way into the bush, so many kilometres into the bush in high altitude where there's this known big old red beech tree, which used to have thousands of bats in it. And they figured out, in the end, a cat was just sitting there, catching them as they are coming and going, and eating some of them, but leaving others-- just killed them, or played with them, and stuff.

And then they caught it. And after that, they know that it killed at least 110 bats. But those are the ones they picked up the remnants of the wings for. So yeah, so that's just one individual predator having a huge impact on a bat colony.

[NIC] In one week.

[COLIN] In one week, yeah.

[NIC] Yeah.

Yeah, feral cats fly a bit under the radar, don't they, in terms of predators in the New Zealand environment? We don't like to talk about cats, because we don't want to upset people who have got pet cats.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] But a feral cat out there, taking out nature like that-- all at night, under the cover of darkness-- is something we probably do need to talk about a little bit.

[COLIN] Well, we do, yeah. I mean, these feral cats are definitely a threat, not just the bats, but to a very wide range of wildlife, really. Some of our threatened invertebrates, and birds, as well-- and lizards. They're major predators of our lizards.

[NIC] Yeah. I used to work in Otago with some of those giant skinks. And we saw the impact they were having there. And I guess the last thing I would say around that office-- feral cats don't have a very nice life. They ones that I experienced earlier in my career were all starving, diseased, fighting. It's not a muggy, cuddled up by the fire.

[COLIN] No, no, no. No, these are quite different animals, really.

[NIC] Yeah. No way to live, really. If we go back to the bats, people have all kinds of wacky ideas about bats. And maybe Dracula has got a bit to answer for it. [LAUGHS] But it's a common misconception that bats hibernate over winter. We touched on it before. But can you explain what's actually happening to the bat in those cooler temperatures?

[COLIN] Yes. I don't think any animals really hibernate the way that we anecdotally think about it-- like, at the beginning of the winter, you go to sleep. And then, at the end of the winter, you wake up, and that was it. So the bats-- they use a thing. It's called torpor. And that's where they can lower their body temperature right down to just above freezing. And like when they’re in deep torpor, they will take one breath every five minutes or so.

[NIC] Wow.

[COLIN] And that's a way to conserve their body fat through times when there's not much food around. But it's very much temperature dependent. So they can do it in the middle of summer, if you have a really cold night. Or in Southern New Zealand, you might have a light snowfall at the end of November or something, and have a cold week. Well, they're all go into this torpor mode then.

Same as during the winter-- if it suddenly warms up, and the insects are flying around, they'll wake up again, and start flying around, and look for food. But of course, in winter, on average, it's much, much cooler. So they tend to sleep most of the winter.

[NIC] Bit like a scarfie in Dunedin

[COLIN] Yeah, probably.

[LAUGHTER]

Hey, I went to Otago.

[LAUGHTER]

Anyway, so if they go to sleep into this torpor mode, once every 10 days to two weeks, they will wake up. They'll probably stick their noses out into the environment and say, oh, is it still cold? If it's still cold, they'll just go back to sleep for another two weeks. So I guess, in the autumn, they start putting on a lot of fat. And a little thumb-sized bat will suddenly look like two thumbs--

[LAUGHTER]

--little rotund things. And that fats meant to get them through the winter, until the following spring, if there's no food.

[NIC] So obviously, the New Zealand bats have a real sensitivity to the temperature around them. And one of the things that I know we're all becoming increasingly concerned about within the department is impacts of climate change on threatened species.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] What does climate change mean for a species as ancient as the New Zealand bats, for example?

[COLIN] There's various scenarios, actually. And some could be good, and some could be bad. And so if you end up with warmer winters, there might be more food around. And maybe that's good for them. Or you have an early breeding season, or a longer breeding season, so that the young have plenty of time to get raised. That's on one side of the equation.

But the other side is a bit more disturbing because, by the same token, if you get woken up more often in winter but there's not enough food around, then you'll run out of fat before spring comes. And that could increase mortality. And we've already actually seen a bit of a signal on that over our winter survival studies.

[NIC] Really?

[COLIN] So that's kind of scary. But I guess the scariest thing is an indirect thing, and that's about having more predators around because, with the warmer winters that we are experiencing-- and we have measured those-- we end up with Beech trees flowering and seeding more heavily and, therefore, having more frequent predator plagues. But more importantly, the over-winter survival of the rats might also increase. So with these predator control operations, we rely on knocking them down in the summer and, in the winter, knocking them down further so that, by the following spring, there are very few rats left in the forest, for example.

But as things are getting warmer, the rats aren't dying in the really cold conditions. And therefore, they enter the following spring ready to breed in much higher numbers. And that, of course, is a problem for bats and many other threatened species.

[NIC] Yeah, that's right. And you hear anecdotal reports around the country just through community groups this year alone in terms of the number of rats people are seeing through winter.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] Some of that will be a little bit observer bias, because a lot more people are tuned in to--

[COLIN] Yeah, and talking about it so they'll see them.

[NIC] Talking about it, yeah. Yeah, but some of it is probably true.

[COLIN] Right. I mean, we've been measuring it in Fiordland. And every year, on average, the winter temperatures are warmer for the last 25 years in the time that I've been measuring it. And the rat numbers are increasing steadily in the wake of that.

[NIC] And if you've got a colony of torpid bats tucked in for the winter, then it's basically like a fast-food joint for rats, isn't it?

[COLIN] Exactly. If you're sound asleep, to raise your temperature out of torpor might, on a good day, take 15 minutes or half an hour. All a rat or a stoat has to do is go in a cavity, find some deeply sleeping bats, and it's like opening the fridge at home-- food for ages. [LAUGHS]

[NIC] That is terrifying. Can you tell me a little bit about the predator control work in the project and the benefits in terms of the Eglinton Valley over time?

[COLIN] Yeah, sure. So as I said earlier, I've been doing it for 25 years. The first--

[NIC] You must have started when you were 12, Colin.

[COLIN] Oh, I must have, yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

Eight, I think it was.

[LAUGHTER]

So the first years-- probably the first good 10 years-- were spent figuring out what the problem was. So first, we had to work out how to find the bats, and then study them. And it took a very long time. It's like piecing together a jigsaw in slow motion, finding out little bits of information as you go.

But the result of that is that we were monitoring the bats. And each year, the numbers were getting lower. And they had these big drops in numbers, which coincided with the predator plagues that followed Beech masting. And we know that for other birds and wildlife, as well.

And so once we'd gathered that information, which probably took about 10 years, we could then start to saying, hey, this is a problem. We need to try and reverse this decline, because the long-tail bats down here are classified now as critically endangered. They were declining at a rate of about 5% a year.

[NIC] Wow.

[COLIN] That was quite dramatic. And so, after 150 years of predation, they're just reaching the bottom of that curve where they're starting to head towards extinction. So I definitely had to do something about it. And that's when we started to do predator-control experiments and then monitor the response and I guess, now, went from a phase of being quite glum and depressed about the future bats.

But we've been doing predator control for the last 15 years. And the numbers have been steadily increasing since then, so that's really exciting. The short-tail bats down there-- we found those in 1997. We thought there was probably about 300 to 400 there then. And over the last 15 years, the numbers have increased to well over 3,000.

We actually don't know how many there are now. But a couple of summers ago, the team out of Te Anau counted them coming out of one tree with infrared video cameras. And they counted over 3,000. So that's incredibly exciting. And the same-- the long-tail bats, they live in a much smaller colony spread through the environment, so they're a bit harder to follow. But the three studied colonies we have down there have increased in size by about five-fold as well.

So one of the colonies, which is at Walker Creek in the Eglinton Valley-- the one that I've been studying the longest-- that went down to just 24 breeding females in about 2000, following several of these rat plagues. And then, last season, it was up to about 120 breeding females. So that's really exciting stuff, from my perspective.

[NIC] That must make you feel very good about getting out of bed and coming to work every day when you can see results like that.

[COLIN] Yeah, yeah. The message, though, is that it's all long-term work. You don't see it overnight. But I guess, also, keep faith and keep working. Keep trying new ways to control things, and keep at it over time, and you'll see some really good rewards.

[NIC] Well done. I have a question for you that is completely unrelated to any of this and relates to tequila

[LAUGHS]

Can you please explain to us what bats have to do with tequila?

[COLIN] Well, all the tequila drinkers out there have got bats to thank--

[LAUGHS]

--because tequila comes from this plant, blue agave. And the only pollinators of blue agave in the world, the natural pollinators, are bats. So if we didn't have bats, there'd be no blue agave. And that's the case with-- I mean, a lot of bats pollinate flowers and disperse seeds. I read a study a few years ago where cocoa production was increased by 20% by bat pollination.

Bananas-- you didn't ask me about bananas. So again, the natural pollinators of bananas are bats. I mean, these days, all the-- I guess, the bananas that we see come from clones, and things like that. But if a disease took out all those bananas overnight in the world, then we'd need the bats to bring them back, really.

[NIC] It's such a great point you raise. And it's something I'm tucking away in my brain to explain to my neighbour, who loves tequila-- can't wait to tell her that story. But the bit about nature's contribution to people, what the ecosystem services-- we so often forget that, don't we? And earlier this year, I read one of the international reports that said, 75% of all our commercial crops-- so all the food we eat-- is pollinated by animals.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] And so the minute we lose those, we're basically starving ourselves, right?

[COLIN] That's right. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of plants only flower at night. So the plants know that there's these bats out there. And that's the thing-- bananas and the tequila flowers opening night with really nice nectar in them to attract the bats into them.

[NIC] And in New Zealand, of course, we've got our very special flower of Hades, or Dactylanthus.

[COLIN] Oh, is that what you call it?

[LAUGHS]

I thought it was called the wood rose.

[NIC] It is called the wood rose, which needs the bats just as much as they need it, right?

[COLIN] That's right. It's a parasitic flower that comes out of the ground, lives on tree roots.

[NIC] It's a zombie flower.

[COLIN] Is it?

[NIC] It sounds like one.

[LAUGHTER]

[COLIN] And yeah, again, the bats are the natural pollinator, because it has this incredibly rich nectar. And they just wolf it down and, of course, pollinate the flowers. And then they move to the next flowers and pollinate those.

But there's other plants in New Zealand that do similar-- just a tree like kohekohe. Its flowers come out of the tree trunk in inflorescence, so it's hanging out in the open. And that's an adaptation to bat pollination. So it's not just the dactylanthus.

[NIC] That's really interesting to hear. I want to talk a little bit about-- as we're seeing more bats around us, and as we start to cross boundaries with bats in New Zealand, one of the most terrifying facts I've heard recently is to do with, what happens when bats interact with wind farms? So wind farms are great, right?

[COLIN] Yeah, yeah.

[NIC] Everybody wants a wind farm, because we want clean energy.

[COLIN] Sustainable energy, yeah.

[LAUGHS]

[NIC] So what is the problem for bats when it comes to wind farms?

[COLIN] Unfortunately, yeah, globally, there's obviously lots of wind farms. And people have been identifying, for quite some time, lots of dead bats under wind turbines. And it is a global problem that turbines can kill bats. And for a long time, people thought, well, the blades are striking the bats and killing them. But it turns out to be a much more interesting and complex story than that. [LAUGHS]

What happens with wind turbines is that they heat the air. And insects like warmth, and so they get attracted to them. And the bats get attracted to them and feed around the blades. And there's a Canadian study where they use thermal imagery where you can see the bats actually flying around the curve of the blade, catching insects.

[NIC] In the warm microclimate.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] Yeah.

[COLIN] And so again, the bats have amazing skill, I suppose, with the echolocation. And they know the turbine blade's there, and they can fly around it, even how fast the blade is sweeping down. But the problem is a thing-- the problem is that the blade, at certain wind speeds, creates a change in barometric pressure. And the bats flying around the blade at that time pop. It explodes on the inside--

[LAUGHS]

--from the change in pressure. And it's not funny for the bat.

[NIC] No, it's not funny. It just sends outrageous. Is it like when you dive too deep, and you get the bends, and you explode?

[COLIN] Yeah, I don't know about that.

[LAUGHS]

But it's called barotrauma. And yeah, it will be something like that. So what people are starting to do, though, is figure out, are there bats at my wind farm, and then curtail the activity of the turbines at the times the bats are there. And overseas, especially in Germany, they're starting to put bat detectors actually in the turbines themselves. And they figure out the conditions when bats are most likely to be there. And they, basically, program the turbines to switch off when the bats are around.

So it's actually not an insurmountable problem. It's a problem, certainly in New Zealand, we really haven't thought about until recently. And hopefully, we end up with lots more wind farms in New Zealand in the future.

But we need to, firstly, place them in places where there aren't bats. And there's a hell of a lot of New Zealand doesn't have bats in it. So think about putting your wind farm in the right place. And then, if it is a batty place, then figure out ways of identifying when the bats are there and turning the turbines off for that period of time.

[BELL]

[NIC] You've been able to track bats all over the world and, in fact, Colin and a I share an office, and this is a constant source of contention for me, cause Colin goes to all the places I want to go to in the world, including-- you've been to Mexico. You recently got back from Madagascar. What's been one of your strangest moments, tracking bats in the field?

[COLIN] There was another time on that trip where we'd been trapping in the rainforest at night. And we went to check our traps. And we were walking back along the track. There were fresh tiger prints in the mud along the track that we'd just come along.

[NIC] Wow.

[COLIN] So that was scary sounding, seeing them.

[NIC] That would be enough for me.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] Yeah. [LAUGHS]

[COLIN] Another time, we were working in Mexico in the caves. And there's lots of different bats in those caves. And we were crawling through these spaces. And all of a sudden, I put my knee in this red jelly, I think it was. It looked like a big jelly on a thing, and was a bit gross.

But then I looked up above me. And above me were six vampire bats. [LAUGHS] And of course, this jelly was the excretion from eating blood.

But they were quite amazing looking bats. They were looking at you really intelligently, and following you around, and stuff. So that's kind of creepy. Vampire bats are only two species that drink blood out of 1,300 species in the whole world.

[NIC] Still, little bit terrifying.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] A little bit-- I was making that a little bit throwing-up-in-my-mouth face. I think that that would be enough bat hunting for me if I saw that. So vampire bats are probably the reason that people get the heebie-jeebies around bats.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] And it's created a bit of a PR problem, right?

[COLIN] I mean, we take out people in Fiordland every year. And we usually have about 50 people come out every couple of nights to see the bats in the Eglinton valley. And I'd swear that at least a third or a half are a bit nervous about it.

They just think, ah, I'm intrigued, because of the vampire thing and all that. I'm really intrigued. I'm going to go along. But I don't know if I'm going to look too closely. I'm definitely not going to touch them.

Anyway, we go out. We put some traps up as part of a normal routine work. And I'll swear that 99.99% of people just love the bats once they see them. There's been so many times when people have looked in the bat trap and say, but where's the bat?

[LAUGHS]

Because they're thinking there's this huge, ginormous, monstrous thing in this trap. But they just see these little, brown, cute, fluffy things running around in them. And again, once we put a long-tail bat in your hand, you'll be in love with them forever.

[NIC] I entirely agree. I think we're a bit short on supply of small, cute, furry things that belong in New Zealand. And having had a short-tail bat in my hand-- in fact, which then ran up and perched on my head--

[LAUGHS]

--that was it. That's my totem.

[LAUGHS]

What is something that you wish more people knew about your work, Colin?

[COLIN] Well, I think the first thing is I'd like to take everyone in New Zealand to see a bat, because they'll be sold. Most people would be-- yeah, just to see how nice they are. I'd like people to understand the role they play in our ecosystem.

So we talked about pollination before. But they're also a natural insecticide, so they can control insects. They love sandflies. They love mosquitoes.

But they also love-- a couple of their favourite things are grass grub beetles and porina moths, which are a big agricultural piece in New Zealand. So if we could bring the bats back to our agricultural landscapes, then they'll be doing us quite a service.

[NIC] They'd be the farmer's best friend.

[COLIN] Yeah.

[NIC] Beautiful. On that note then, what is it that we could each do? What could New Zealanders listening to this out there do to help contribute to the survival and the thriving of bats in our landscape?

[COLIN] Well, I guess there's a bunch of things that people could do. One is about awareness, and just understanding what we're trying to achieve, and to support the work that gets done in the big forest tracks with the predator control, and so on. But of course, in the places we have bats closer to people, or in small reserves doing the local trapping-- in your place is a really good thing to do-- people have been experimenting a bit with artificial bat houses.

So we have lost all the cavities in the trees to try and put up artificial houses to attract them. Now, that's sort of more a research question at the moment, because we don't know what sort of house to build to attract them, and so on. But these are experiments that people can do almost in their backyard.

[NIC] Colin, I could listen to you for days, and days, and days about bats. And that's only a fraction of the threatened species work that you do for DOC. I just really want to thank you for coming in and sharing all your cool stories. I'm definitely taking the tequila one away. Thanks, Colin.

[COLIN] Cool. Kia ora Nic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

---

Transcript for episode 7

[Kea song]

[BELL]

[NIC] Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, New Zealand’s Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

[NIC] Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki ngā Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

[NIC] Every episode, we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC’s technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between.

[NIC] Today, we're chatting to conservation expert and legend, Herb Christophers. Good day, Herb.

[HERB] Oh, good day. Kia ora tatou, kō herb Christopers tokū ingoa, Te Papa Atawhai te mahi. I'm Herb Christophers. I'm in the media team at the Department of Conservation.

[NIC] Kia ora Herb. I am really excited to be chatting to you today. Herb and I have known each other a long time. I think when I started my career in DOC about 16 years ago, you were on the team. In fact, you've probably been there since before I was born I was going to say, but for a long time before that. I've got a question here about what's your role at DOC, but in my view, you're kind of like a little bit of a DOC national treasure. So tell us a little bit about what your role is at DOC.

[HERB] Oh officially, my role is Principal Advisor. That means I just get to be a storyteller. And so I get to talk about biodiversity, pest control, and looking after natural things.

[NIC] How did you get started in the world of conservation storytelling? Because that's what you are. You're a storyteller.

[HERB] Yeah, I like to think so. Well, I guess it goes back to the time when I was working in Victoria University. I used to be in the botany department when there was one. And I was on the technical staff here. And I just I just enjoyed the environment. And I loved soaking up the information. And when it came out, I like to tell stories about it. And I was a tramper at the time. And so instead of just head down, ass up tramping, I'll be interpreting the landscape that we went through. Now I'm not an ecologist, but I had a fair idea what I was what I was talking about. And that just became a natural way of interpreting the landscape just as much for myself as for others.

[NIC] I think that's probably true. I think you're probably underselling it a little bit. Because if I think of all the times in my career in DOC where I've been struck with something I don't know, or I need I need a photograph of, or I need a context, the first thing that will happen is that I will pick up the phone to ring you or someone will say, you need to ring Herb. You genuinely live and breathe the New Zealand landscape, whether it's walking your dog in your local park in the morning or going skiing. What difference does that make in terms of being able to tell a credible story?

[HERB] OK. What it comes down to is I get paid for conservation five days a week. I do conservation seven days a week. And it comes down to just living it as part of my value set. I take my dog for a walk. I go through the local revegetation area. I look at the plants in the ground. Look at whether or not they're the right ones for the area. I listen to the birds, look at what's happening in the area, just all this stuff. It's a case of being part of what's around you. We are not apart from nature. We are part of nature. And so if you live your life as part of nature. It makes such a difference to your perspective on life.

[NIC] How do you reconcile that statement with the fact that nearly 90% of New Zealanders now live in towns and cities? And that's happened in pretty much just two generations. We all moved off the farm and into the towns. How do you tell that story to a bunch of New Zealanders who aren't necessarily opening their eyes to what's around them? What could they do?

[HERB] You've got to bring it down to the backyard. I think Predator Free 2050 is the best thing that happened to conservation in generations, and I mean that, generations. Because now people are taking ownership of conservation, was beforehand, everyone would say the Department of Conservation, what are you doing about that species? What are you doing about the landscape? And they'd point at us as if we had to do it.

And let's be quite honest about it. Conservation was underfunded as New Zealand, but we were still expected to do a huge job, the heavy lifting. But having said that, you engage the whole of New Zealand, and the next minute you know you've got one hell of a big army behind you. If they say I can do this. I can make a difference. My tramping in my backyard is making a difference. And give them an incentive like that, and the next minute you know, you've won them over. To a large extent, there are some flies in the ointment, sure. There are issues about how we control some of the pest we're managing. Because conservation is to a large extent in New Zealand about managing pest, be they plant pests or animal pests.

[NIC] Yeah, I think you're right. And you're particularly right around the predator free movement. And even where I live in North Canterbury, which sometimes feels a bit like a ground zero for nature, all around me at least three or four times a week locals are contacting me saying, well, what can I do? And can I join you tramping project? And I'm killing possums over here. And what can we do here?

[HERB] You've got wine. You've got wine. Why would you want to move out of there?

[NIC] I know, 74 vineyards. Yeah. So what is it that-- Do you think it's something in our core that makes us kind of want to save the things?

[HERB] I don't know. That's sounding a bit twitty. Being a New Zealander, understanding what the values of New Zealand are. The values of New Zealand our point of difference. Point of difference is its biodiversity. Sheep are all over the world. You can get them anywhere, but you can't get a kiwi anywhere else in the world. You can't get any of our indigenous species anywhere else in the world. And if you can show that to people-- We sell ourselves as kiwis, but what are we doing? Kiwi are going down the gurgler. Are we doing anything about it? Well, maybe not immediately, but certainly there's an awareness now, far more of an awareness.

You look at the biodiversity strategy that came out 20 years ago. I wouldn't say it's not worth the paper it's written on. It had some great aspirations. And out of that came Restore the Dawn Chorus, which I think is a very admirable idea. But really, we didn't get very far with it. And that's because it wasn't passed on to the people in general.

[NIC] You've mentioned the biodiversity strategy, the last iteration. What's different this time round?

[HERB] Well, we've just launched the new the discussion document about the biodiversity strategy. So we are seeking public involvement. We want people to have their say. What we're trying to do is get to a point where we prioritize the work that can be involved. And a lot of it, a lot of it is aligned with the Predator Free 2050 initiative, so that people feel as if they're part of the solution and they're not always pointing out the problems.

[NIC] And I think that's something that we as New Zealanders really kind of-- that we play to that tune, don't we, because we love to focus on anything that is either supports and champions our values or might be a threat to our values. So any time you see New Zealand's values under threat, you see the country rally. They rally together. They look after each other. They've send food packages to each other. I mean, I experienced it in the earthquakes.

[HERB] You got food packages?

[NIC] I made food packages for my locals.

[HERB] Cool.

[NIC] And so it's turning into who we are New Zealanders, sticking up for the little guy even if the little guy is a waiter, right?

[HERB] Yes, I love waiters, actually.

[NIC] One of the things that I love about you, Herb. There's lots of things I love about you, but one of the things I love about you is your wordsmithery. So for your kind of career, you've focused on story. And words matter, how you tell a story matters. Sometimes I worry that the way we tell nature stories is just a little bit earnest and just a little bit worthy and a little bit [SNORE]. How do we get around that?

[HERB] Well it's very difficult because on one hand, you want to stimulate a sense of urgency. And that's we're going to hell in a handcart. We need to do something. We need to do something. People don't like to hear that. They don't want to know that we're going to hell in a handcart. They wonder how they can help. But somewhere along the line, you've got to inject some excitement to it. You know planting a tree is boring as a bitch to be quite honest. I've planted thousands. I've planted thousands of trees. But making that the right thing to do, how do you inspire people to do that? That's the right words as you say, and making a difference, connecting corridors, making the difference between that little remnant of bush and this remains the bush here. How do you do it? You connect the corridor. And you connect the corridors between there by planting there. Come back in five years’ time and you'll see the birds will be flying along there. Vision, aspiration, something people want to see. Something for the mokopuna. All that sort of thing

[NIC] Yeah, you're right Herb. Context is key. Tree planting can be a little bit boring, but then again I've been on tirtiri matangi with a bunch of kids from South Auckland Primary School. And we got them to plant some trees. And for most of the kids in that class, that was the first time in their lives, in their little 12-year-old lives they even planted a tree. And I did hear one of them say, I'm going to come back in 10 years and look at this tree. What are some of your most treasured conservation experiences?

[HERB] Well let's go back on that planting line. Mana Island. When I was a kid, I lived in Titahi Bay. And I looked out the window. And when I see [INAUDIBLE] straight out at Mayor Island. It was a farm. It was just a bare patch of grass with a couple of pine trees on the top of the north end, and the rest was just a farm. Over time, it obviously became a conservation asset and took all the pest off. Luckily, it was only just mice on there. So they got rid of those guys, and then the revegetation program started.

We're only talking about the 200 hectare Island. But for all of my life, it had been just a bare farm. And that planting was one of those pivotal moments, getting people out there, getting them excited, putting the trees in the ground, making a difference. And they can see that. Now you drive past and you can see the little patches of green that's coming away. Yeah, sure we left some grassland there, but that's for the Takahē to walk around and they love it. And I've just watched it over the years. So yes, that's one of the key ones, but there are many, many times that I've found lots of pivotal moments in conservation.

[NIC] Herb, your job has taken you from offshore islands to tops of mountains and everywhere in between. But I recall it in particular you working on some of our volcanic sites. Do you want to tell me a little bit about that experience?

[HERB] Sure, sure. Back in the mid 90s, there was a massive eruption on Ruapehu, in which the crater lake basically emptied itself and threw all its tephra that's just the volcanic soil, out of the hole. And it landed around what was at the time the crater lake. And it formed a dam. So that meant over the following years from mid 90s onwards, the dam started filling up with water. Now being the good old Department of Conservation, we weren't about to intervene with nature. And it became technically impossible to do so. And so we just had to monitor the dam until it blew. The problem with that is that it flowed down the Whangaehu to Tangiwai, which is where we had a major disaster back in 1953 when something similar happened.

So we're monitoring this over a number of years. It was 11 years in total. And as it got closer and close to the top, I was involved in a lot of the to and fro from the top of the mountain back down again with the scientists at the time. And one week before the dam broke, we were down below the dam with water pouring out. So we were about five meters below the dam. The water's pouring out in front of us, which meant that the level of the lake was above our heads. And the water was coming through the dam. I felt very uncomfortable then. And then one week later, I get a phone call. It's gone. The dam had gone. And the millions and millions of liters behind that. And we were just very lucky that we didn't get taken out.

Now it's very difficult when you up there with a mad scientist who just insist on getting that last sample. And that's what he was doing. He's just taking water samples to see what the acidity was so that he could carry on his research into the impact of lahars. But yeah, that was a particularly exciting time. I'm making it sound like it's bloody boring, but it was shit hot. Part of the reason, I got to ski down afterwards.

Yeah, well that's true. You're one of the most passionate skiers I know.

Yeah, never enough skiing.

[NIC] I mean that was a public arena situation in itself. This one was about health and safety.

[HERB] It was a very difficult situation because we were trying to let nature take its course. We had bridges across rivers that were going to suddenly become raging torrents. And those bridges were around the mountain walk. So we had to put signs on the bridges. We couldn't close the walks until we knew absolutely imminently that the lahar was going to break, but we never knew. We had to raise the bridges on the state highway between Ohakune and Waiouru, and so like last time they weren't going to take out the bridges. It was a fantastic amount of infrastructure, fantastic comms, and really fantastic working with the scientists at the time. But, yeah, it was pretty scary.

[NIC] I hinted earlier that you've been with the Department of Conservation for a wee while now. You're one of our most gifted science communicators, so over that time what are the real, kind of, neat science and technical advances that you've seen-- from the beginning of your career into DOC, and to now, and perhaps with a view to the future?

[HERB] I was thinking about this earlier on because I had asked myself this in anticipation. And one of the most simple straightforward things is GPS. You know. I went on to an operation one time with a map and a compass, and the guy next to me had a GPS. And so it was like you're replacing the old. And I was very adept at using a compass and map and I could find my way around the bush-- not blindfolded because I wouldn't be able to see my map. But this guy with a GPS, he was similarly also very adept at using the GPS. And I could see this coming a mile away. And the next minute you know, the GPS was involved in determining where our species were, how we manage our helicopter flights, everything. Just positioning. Because we're such a spatial organization GPS has made a huge difference to how we manage species and pests, just everywhere. How you identify where the pests are, how you identify where species are, what their habitats are. Everything has to do with that, and doing that without a GPS-- I don't know how the hell we did it.

[NIC] We just actually in my little volunteer trapping project we brought the DOC ranger up a couple of weeks ago and we GPS referenced all the traps so we know where they all are now. We put them on a map, yeah--

[HERB] Exactly, all that, you know. If you want to find a particular tree again that you found-- you, know, very rare tree in the middle of the forest-- how do you do it? Hit the old GPS, bang. You don't have to use a map and compass and try and triangulate and rely on the fact that the map might be slightly out, and the compass might be slightly out, and your navigation might be crap. So the other one about GPS is also migratory species.

You think of humpback whales. I know when they're going up to Tonga and coming back down again. The best way to track them? Put a GPS tracker on them and you can watch their migration tracks all the way up to Tonga and back down again because there's fantastic maps of them going to and from the tropics.

And the other ones are the godwits, you know. You stick a satellite tracker on a godwit and you can watch it go from Miranda to Siberia. And, you know, over the course of a couple of weeks-- flies up to, I don't know, on the Eastern Flyway up to Korea, has a cup coffee there, and it carries on to Siberia. Amazing stuff. Amazing stuff. And so you can track an individual bird. And, you know, that's also writing to the wider population. Just wonderful stuff. And Alaska, they also go to Alaska, so they've been tracking them over there as well.

I think the record for coming back home was because of a tracker, and they were able to get one guy, I think it was seven days or something stupid, to get from Alaska back down to Miranda.

So that was the other thing about GPS and yes, its technology and use from a science perspective. It tells us where the things are. But that's the bit that I remember-- when it came to the godwits-- is the story that came out about that bird-- E7 was her name.

[NIC] That's right, yes.

[HERB] Which would have just been the name of her band on her ankle or something. And so here's a bird who, somehow, after feeding her-- you know, gorging her face off up in Alaska-- flies, chases storms, 'cause these are birds that are only, what, the size of a small-- you know, smaller than a pukeko kind of--

[NIC] Yup, yup.

[HERB] And they've, somehow, ride the storms all the way from one end of the world to the other. And she did it in seven days. That's mind blowing. That's a story.

I don't know. I don't know how they know where to go. I mean, they've got their inbuilt GPS, they don't need one-- a technological one-- they got their own ones. And that's, those migratory birds are just amazing. The cuckoos-- how the hell does a cuckoo find its way back up to bloody Bismarck Archipelago? Mom doesn't say, now OK then, you just turn left at Australia and, yeah, then make a right there--

[NIC] Shoot towards Vanuatu.

[HERB] [LAUGHS] How the hell do they do that?

[NIC] Apart from your family, Herb, 'cause I know you're a very proud family man, what would you consider your greatest success story?

[HERB] Oh.

[NIC] And no skiing stories.

[HERB] No, no, no, no. It's kind of difficult because, you know, there's a series of things which I don't necessarily call personal successes, but being part of some of these successes. Returning a flightless duck to Campbell Island. You know, feeding flightless ducks their breakfast on the heaving boat in the roaring 40s. This is conservation. Here I am making a difference. You know, we were returning this bird to-- when there were very few left in the world, we got them breeding successfully in New Zealand. Yes! Fantastic. Now to take them back down there. Clear the rats off Campbell Island, whoof! 11,000 hectares of island cleared of rats. Neat. We can now take these birds back to their rightful home.

On the boat there, tossing and turning, 50 birds down to the island and releasing them into their natural environment-- that was a success. That felt really good. Very much of an achievement. Loved it. Loved it. Kākāpō, down on Codfish Island, back in 2002. At the beginning of that year there were not more than 50 kākāpō. OK. This was the last time we had a major-- well, one of the first times we had a major mast-- and we intensively managed the kākāpō. Being down there and standing still, pretending to be a tree, while Nora the Kākāpō walked across my feet. That is success. The fact that we had them breeding there, and we were able to take them from round about 50 birds to round about 75 birds. That is success, you know.

Going to Tongariro, down the Mangatepopo chasing whio. Wonderful. Running down there, and the birds, you can see them out there in front of you and in fact, sometimes behind you. Just wonderful. And then you get to the top there, and the guy says, the hotel's full, there's nowhere for them to go. We're running out of places for them to live. Now that is success. You have a secure area for them. And you've got nowhere to put them. That means you've got to expand the area they live in. That's success, you know. It's all those sorts of little stories. The transfers and all that, and that's what I think of as success.

[NIC] That is a really neat list for your CV. And with regards to the kākāpō, they just hit 200.

[HERB] I know, we're trying to work out when the-- if they all survive-- when is the 200th and whatever it is going to be? Because that would be really cool. To be able to announce that total number, whatever it might be, 200 and however many.

[NIC] And then we'll have the same problem you had in Tongariro with the whio where we're, where we going to put them?

[HERB] Where we going to put them? And we've got that problem with takahe, you know. We've taken takahe out of the Murchison Mountains. We've got them down at Burwood Bush. We've got them breeding successfully. We've got the pest control going to a point where we can say, we now have enough. We've got them all off their islands. We now have enough that we can transfer them to somewhere, but where's that somewhere? At the moment, it's Kahurangi. We've got them at the Gouland Downs in Kahurangi. Isn't that fantastic? Of course, you were involved.

It was fantastic 'cause I was there.

Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

[LAUGHING]

[NIC] One of the things I know you're really, really good at is bird calls.

[HERB] Oh, yeah.

[NIC] So can you please, immediately, I'll start you off I'll do a shining cuckoo. And then you do your favorite bird call. OK, you ready? Here's my best, best guess at a shining cuckoo.

[BOTH IMITATING BIRD CALLS]

[NIC] You win. You win. That was a ripper. What else? What's your favorite? I've heard you for years. I can find you in this building because I can hear a tui or a bellbird, and I go--

[IMITATES BIRD CALL]

Do you think if people kind of--

[IMITATES BIRD CALL]

[HERB] That wasn't very good, that was meant to be a warbler. I can only do it if I'm a bit more moist in the mouth but [SLURPS]

[NIC] We should have done this with a beer.

[HERB] Absolutely. Far better bird calls when we've had a few beers.

[LAUGHS]

[HERB] Now that's one of the things you do, it's like, round up the usual suspects. And you walk into the bush and-- ping, tui. Ping, warbler. Ping, oh, there's a few riflemen here, oh. Ping, there's the old pied tit, you know. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you think, OK, what's missing? Oh, no, kākāriki. They may be up on the ridge. So you walk up the ridge, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, boom. Got them. And so the next minute, you know, you've got this artificial list in your head and you're ticking them off as you go along, and you just understand what is happening in this bush, you know. And that, it's not going to be happening with everybody. Not everybody's a stupid nerd like me, you know. But that's how I got into it. Just doing those things.

[NIC] I do think there's something to be said for learning your birdcalls though. 'Cause I, to be quite honest, I went through six years of university, I got a zoology degree, I knew all the things, but I didn't know any birdcalls. And so when I heard birds, I wasn't hearing them, it was just noise. But the minute I could pick them out, then it's a story, and you're right. Oh, so there's a kaka, but there’s no kākāriki, I wonder where they are.

[HERB] Good stuff. That's what spins my wheels.

[NIC] This is a tough one for you, but do you have a favorite species?

[HERB] Well, yeah. Are we talking animals? Or let's go birds, let's go kea. And kea are really cool. Part of the reason is because, well, I've always had this affinity to the alpine regions. I love it. I love the alpine vegetation and I love the call of the kea. It's just so evocative. It just means I'm in the alpine zone of New Zealand. Oh, love it! And I've had so many interactions with them that have been, let's say, less than pleasant.

[LAUGHING]

You know, we went on a climbing trip one time when I was young and foolish, and we pitched our tent at the bottom of this thing called the Olivine Ice Plateau. And we were down in the valley and we pitched our tent, and the bloody keas came along and landed on the tent and shredded it! So it one tent down, OK.

Well, that didn't help us, so we put a line along the tops of the tent, because it was the type of the tent it just had a ridge pole. And you put a ridge line and you put a string along there to stop them landing on it. Yeah, that's fine, that stopped that. But then we go off to the loo. And where did you put the toilet paper? You put it on the tent pole. They pinched our bloody toilet paper!

[LAUGHING]

[NIC] They left you short.

[HERB] So sort of little rascals, but absolutely lovable rogues. Absolutely lovable rogues. We get up onto the ice plateau to do some climbing, and that's fine. So we go, let's go climbing for the day!

So we banged up the snow cave, because we'd dug a snow cave and we'd pulled our-- with-- there were six of us and we'd climb in pairs. And we banged up everything and put it all over the-- packs and everything over the front of the snow cave so nothing could get inside, including keas. Well, bugger me, they managed to pull away three packs and a whole pile of other stuff we'd put in there to stop them getting in there, and raided our butter!

Now, that was just the lowest of the low. Little bastards! They opened the can-- they opened a can. Butter came in cans, OK, because it was the easiest way to transport for this particular thing, flipped the lid off the can, and ate most of the butter! Little bastards.

[LAUGHING]

I love them anyway.

[NIC] I spent part of my childhood in Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, and I used to hear them every morning, 5:00 AM, running up the roof of the house, and skiing down!

[LAUGHING]

[NIC] For no other reason than just funsies!

[HERB] It's just having fun.

[NIC] Yeah!

[HERB] Yes, absolutely. They're still having fun these days, but not sliding up and down roofs, I think they're sort of raiding ski field car parks and pulling the bloody rubber off people's windscreen wipers, off the doors, and off the roof racks.

[NIC] Actually, that reminds me of a bit of a public service announcement, which is around that-- there's the saying "curiosity killed the cat," but it should probably be "curiosity killed the kea."

[HERB] Yes.

[NIC] And--

[HERB] Lead-head nails?

[NIC] Lead-head nails, yes.

[HERB] Mm, hit the nail on the head.

[NIC] Let's talk about that, because as a very staunch South Islander, it's something that worries the heck out of me! Why is lead such a problem for kea?

[HERB] I don't think they can process it. Apart from anything else, they eat it, and it affects their metabolism and they drop dead, I'm afraid, is what it comes down to. So dockers are running around pulling all the lead-head nails off its huts and putting alternatives in place so that they don't affect kea.

I mean, I'm sad to say that kea have got to the situation where their species are critically endangered, and we need to do something about that. And losing a few to things like lead-head nails is the last thing we need, the last thing we need. We've got enough stoats up there doing enough damage. But you know, if we can look after them as well as we can, by whatever means it takes.

[NIC] Yeah, I think you're right. I think they are one of those icons of the country, and probably people-- because it happens way out there in the nature, people probably have no idea that we're losing up to 95% of kea nests, chicks, eggs, mums, everything, every time there's a beach mast.

So yeah, they need every little piece of help they can get. So I've been really impressed with the work to remove the lead-head nails. But given that sort of lack of kind of clear understanding of really what's at stake out there, what's the-- what's something you wish people knew about the science behind conservation work in New Zealand?

[HERB] I wish they knew that they can't get instantaneous gratification. I wish they knew that science takes time. I wish they knew that people have got to look at condition and trend, and condition and trend doesn't happen overnight. You can't say, right, we're gonna control the pests, we're gonna save the fluffy duck, and then they get instant gratification as a result of that.

It doesn't happen that way. It's time. And telling stories-- OK, you've gone and done some pest control in here and you reckon you're gonna save the fluffy duck. Yes, we are. Well, tell us about the results! I'm sorry, we can't do that for two years--

[NIC] Or 20.

[HERB] Or 20! To get a trend. You can show cause and effect and a knee-jerk reaction, but can you show advancement over time? It took 20 years to get a really solid bit of science behind you. So how do you sell that, eh?

[NIC] Do you think Kiwis a little bit take this stuff for granted? Do you think we think that kea are always gonna be there [INAUDIBLE], someone will always look after them, they'll always be [INAUDIBLE]. Do you think we need to back our ideas up a bit?

[HERB] Part of it's because the problem is not actually seen. Most people, I would guess, have seen a rat, sure. Most people won't have seen a stoat. Most people-- a lot of urbanites won't have seen a bloody possum. They don't understand the problem. They don't realize the threat, because a lot of it's nocturnal, and it's just there and we don't see it. And so out of sight, out of mind, not in the urban space, not in my backyard, you know?

[NIC] Herb, what do you think is the hardest part of your job?

[SIGHING]

[HERB] Having to go back round again. New audiences. You know, the messages go out there and you rally the troops, and then you find that there's a new wave of people who don't know the story that you've just been telling. And having to repeat it, I guess, but finding new ways of repeating it, finding new ways of engaging different audiences. You know, it's very difficult.

New media, just social media and things like that, there's a new way of doing things. I'm not-- I fight with a lot of the social media issues. I know you're a bit more up to date with it than I am. I see your tweets all the bloody time.

[LAUGHING]

But it's just that whole thing of how do you engage new audiences? How do you keep up the excitement?

[NIC] And on that note, how do you keep up the energy? Because I think that's probably the trick, isn't it? If you want to make people passionate about something, it takes a lot of heart and soul. What do you do to you replenish yourself?

[HERB] I go out and look at the mountains. And I don't know, and just connect. Connect to myself and understand that I think I'm in a right and a good place, and I think a lot of other people would benefit from being in a similar place.

And I know that I've made a difference with a number of people's lives and it's really nice to see that they've become passionate conservationists, apart from my family. My son called me a nature nerd. My daughter gets called a nature nerd, and that's wonderful! That's wonderful. And I think, well, if that's the case, I think I've succeeded in that respect.

[NIC] I think it's a badge of honor, Herb, and I am one of the people that you've had an impact on in terms of being lucky enough to be an apprentice for you over the years. So it's been a real honor talking to you today, and thank you very much. And I hope you get to spend more time in the mountains--

[HERB] Well, thank you. It was a pleasure.

---

Transcript for episode 6

[Cicadas]

[BELL]

NIC: Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, New Zealand’s Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

NIC: Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki ngā Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

NIC: Every episode, we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC’s technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between.

NIC: Today on the show, we have self-confessed insect nerd, Eric Edwards. Good day, Eric.

ERIC: Kia ora, Nic. Ko Eric Edwards tōku ingoa, kei Te Papa Atawhai ahau e mahi ana.

NIC: Kia ora! Eric, tell me a little bit about your role at DOC. What do you do?

ERIC: It's science advice for saving things, is how I describe it to people.

NIC: So what does that mean?

ERIC: So if I break it down, obviously I have a background as a freshwater biologist and an entomologist-- insect stuff-- insect nerd. The science advice … for me, it's about the places they live as much as the insects themselves. And so it is about whole ecosystems and how to manage a habitat, is often the sort of thing that I try to help with.

NIC: What got you into insects? You talk to a lot of people in DOC and they're all about the birds, and they love the big, feathery things. What was it that fascinated you about the little things?

ERIC: You're right. Now I'm in an amazing situation where I get paid to do what I'm doing-- I get to actually have a bug net in my hand and get out in the bush and look for things. That does sound childish, doesn't it?

And it starts, I guess, as a child. And so I was interested in snails and moths and stream insects from a young age. And it's one of those things that I always knew what I would try to contribute to, and that career has developed at university and in the role I'm in.

NIC: Do you think people pay enough attention to invertebrates as a whole?

ERIC: Yeah, it's a good question. Why place an expectation that all of society should be as galvanized and interested as I am? I think actually, it would be neat if more people were interested in making observations of what's around them and trying to understand. And so I always wanted to understand and know the plants and animals around me.

NIC: It's something I've been thinking about quite a lot lately, is a phrase that someone raised with me not that long ago. But it's been around for 20 years, about the extinction of experience-- how humans have become so disconnected from the nature in their everyday lives, they risk losing it because they've lost that connection. And I suppose with invertebrates and insects, when you're a kid, they are the very things that you are often putting in jars or poking and wanting to know more about. Do you think insects help us with the extinction of experience?

ERIC Sure. People mostly don't notice insects in their daily life, except if you--

NIC: If you get stung by one.

ERIC: They are actually everywhere. So even in the urban environment, there are insects everywhere, and you can tune into it. Your pet does and your children often do. And somehow or other, you eventually tune them out of your lives. But they are there.

NIC: What would you say is the best part of your job?

ERIC: Yeah, it's an extraordinary privilege. I guess-- I've worked for many years in field situations where you can be part of a team that looks at a piece of land and says, what is the future for that piece of land? And in some cases, you make a decision that becomes something that will last more than your own lifetime.

NIC: Yeah, that's a pretty powerful thing, isn't it? That influence around the policy table is something that might last for decades, or even hundreds of years, if you hit the impact right.

ERIC: Sure. I guess New Zealand has got far more to it than the stories that are told at times. And I wanted to protect more of those stories. And so we describe New Zealand as a place that is a biodiversity hotspot around the world. And so it is. But actually, that doesn't do justice to what New Zealand is really like.

We have things that are endemic to New Zealand. They're not just endemic to New Zealand. They're endemic to some part of New Zealand, and actually every part of New Zealand has its own stories. And quite often, it's the snail world or the insect world that actually powerfully explains that.

There are many creatures that are only found in one district of New Zealand.

NIC: I've started thinking about this a lot in terms of how, particularly the smaller things, can describe the history of the landscape. Like we've got mudfish species, for example, that clearly have become their own species through volcanic and tectonic action over time. Snails is a classic. Because they don't move very far, the retreat and descent of glaciers and the uplift of the southern Alps creates just this whole array of species which tells the story of the land.

ERIC: Absolutely. Snails' wings are quite poorly developed, so--

NIC: [LAUGHS] Said the entomologist.

ERIC: Yeah.

[LAUGHS]

Yeah, no-- 'cause moths are one of my passions, aren't they? But snails' wings aren't that well-developed, and so they do tell a powerful story about association with place and you referred to volcanism and also uplift. And so that's right-- it's like the history of New Zealand is so important to understanding what we have now and understanding the antiquity of the fabric of life on our land surfaces in New Zealand.

And sometimes the creature that you find-- the butterfly association, the host plant that it lives on, and the host plant's association with a certain class of soil in a certain climate. You realize that actually that insect won't be found in an adjacent place. It's because it's unique to that area.

NIC: Well, we've learned that the hard way with some of our invertebrates, haven't we? The Augusta snails on the West Coast which turned out to have evolved to live on a highly-rich coal seam on the west coast and don't really do very well anywhere else, is a sad example of just how niche our invertebrates can be.

ERIC: That's right. That's right. The basement geology has that patent on it. And you look down and there's a snail. There's also a moth, and there's a few other things, too. Yeah.

NIC: So your passion for moths has been around for quite some time. Do you want to talk me through what it was like? How you started in this field, right from when you're a wee fella, through to now?

ERIC: Well, yeah. I guess my family has a little bit of a farming background, but my father was a weather observer so I guess the idea of making observations in nature or outdoors is always something I-- I've had the privilege of growing up on the South Island, Te Waipounamu, and I've lived in almost every part of it on the West Coast and Motueka. I went to university in Canterbury and Otago, and then worked for many years based on the southern South Island, sub-Antarctic Islands and Stewart Island.

And because I'm an insect nerd, you get invited out to different things to get involved in surveying and interpreting and valuing in a team environment with bird people and lizard people and plant people. And so those jobs have been in the high country of the South Island. I've been on the West Coast. I've been on sub-Antarctic islands.

But I've also been in the Pacific Islands, actually. And I've worked in Samoa and Tonga and Nauru. I have crazy stories of adventuring and-- and with the people that you have the privilege to spend time and discuss their stories with.

NIC: What do you think happens, except for people like you and probably to a lesser extent, me and lots of our colleagues here in DOC-- but for the ordinary, average person? I think everybody go-- maybe they don't. You might be able to correct me.

Everybody goes through that thing when they're kids. I had a pet cat. I had several pet caterpillars. I had a pet praying mantis. I thought I'd discovered a whole new species of insect when I found a whole lot of damselfly larvae in my local creek that I had in a jar for a while. When you're kids, you're fascinated with the invertebrate world. And then, as you say, by the time you are grownups, you tend not to see them anymore. What do you think happens there?

ERIC: Yeah, it's an interesting story, that. I was at a Science Sunday at the Botanic Gardens in Wellington recently, and it was a rainy day. And a mob of children and about 20 adults were insistent to go out in it. So we walked up the path and I hoped that the kids would find something for me to discuss.

We stood underneath a canopy with the drizzle and someone found a spider, and we just-- we talked about spiders and their place. The adults there, they realized that their wonder and delight is not quite the same, and their perception of the environment is not quite the same. And you could contrast that I was cheeky with them and said, who loves spiders?

And all of the kids put their hands up, and two adults put their hand up. And I said, well, something happens between being an adult. But there's still something to value in and have respect for even if it's not something you want to care about as a part of your life.

NIC: What's your weirdest day at work been?

EIRC: Yeah, there's plenty of those out there, I guess.

[LAUGHS]

But--

NIC: Especially when you're a bug nerd.

ERIC: It is hard to say. I have been in some isolated places and remote places. And I guess I was working with Micronesian people in their own place, in Nauru. And I'd read before we went there that there was just one single invertebrate that was unique to that island. And it turns out that it's a true bug-- a hopping bug that lives on algae on coral stacks that stick out of the sea in the intertidal. So you can wade around--

NIC: Wow.

ERIC: So you can walk around in the tropical sea there, and these lumps of coral stick out with these true bugs on them. It's a family of bugs that's coastal, first described in Oman.

NIC: Wow.

ERIC: And there are only three species in the world, and one of them is unique to Nauru. And we tried to find it, and it's the size of a flea and hops like one. And so, there were Micronesians there with me going, what is this all about?

[LAUGHTER]

Why are we standing in these waves?

NIC: Trying to catch a flea?

ERIC Yeah. Trying to catch a flea off this big lump of coral. And you can imagine the delight when one actually landed on the surface of the water next to the coral. And we lifted it out on the net and had a look under a magnifying glass and said yes, we have rediscovered this, if you like, bug-- a true bug. But a flea-like true bug. And it's like, well, that's still the only unique critter for that island. And it's just neat.

NIC: They should put it on their flag. Yeah? [LAUGHS]

So that can't be your only weird experience you've had catching weird bugs. What else have you got?

ERIC: I guess what makes it weird sometimes is the people you're with, who are trying to understand what it is that excites you about this. But I have come back from Tiritiri Matangi island, once back in the day. And it turns out there's always a siege of things to do. And there was a meeting of the Bug Society in Auckland, and I went to that.

I have to curate on the run. And when I'm surveying, you have to try and understand and interpret what you're surveying as soon as you've done the survey. And so I collect examples of things and then try and work out what they are. And you've got to do that straightaway. And so I'm sitting there curating in this meeting in the back of a meeting, because I've got to get it done.

And Ruud Kleinpaste, a very famous entomologist in New Zealand, was there too. And a moth flew out from a jar. And so in the middle of the meeting, it was odd enough to be curating while it was going on, but he got on the desk and ran across the top of a desk all around, just chasing this moth.

[LAUGHS]

It was from Tiritiri Matangi and we had to catch it. And we wanted to know what lived on that island, so-- you could just imagine.

NIC: [LAUGHS] Well, can I just-- let's just talk a little bit about this weird curating. Because I've watched you curating, and I think you're being a little euphemistic.

ERIC: Yes.

NIC: One thing that always staggers me when I'm watching entomologists work-- and I think the last time I saw you do it, and Ruud was there as well-- was at Pukaha Mount Bruce. We did a bioblitz, and I think I realized then that you were like-- you were like some kind of-- like insect Jack the Ripper, because there was all kinds of catching and killing and stuffing things into jars going on. So how do you -- tell me a little bit about how you curate. And then, how do you reconcile that with your comment earlier about saving all the wee things?

ERIC: I know. How can you be a conservation biologist and also-- I've sacrificed so many insects? No, it's interesting. We are actu-- that's one of the fascinations of being an insect biologist, actually, is that we are still in the Age of Discovery-- very much so.

And so while for New Zealand's vascular plants and for New Zealand's birds. You can pick up a guidebook and pick up your binoculars, or go and look at a leaf. And you can say, oh, here it is in this guidebook. I know what it is. Try doing for insects, OK?

It is not the case with insects. You can't. We don't have good guidebooks that can do that. And besides, the way that insects are small and fly past you or hide under leaf litter or something, you've got to be much more enquiring to do it. And--

NIC: And a little bit bloodthirsty, 'cause just to paint the picture of what I saw, it was probably about 10:00 at night, and here was this madman sitting on a sheet in the middle of the bush, surrounded by people catching everything that was coming towards-- and you had light, didn't you? So like a light trap. Can you explain what that is for the uninitiated?

ERIC: One of the neat things about moths is that quite a lot of them are day-- there's a few day-active moths. But actually, a lot of moths are night active. And they're pretty silly when they're night active. You put a bright light out, then they just wander towards it on the wing. They fly in, and so you can quickly get a good sample of what lives there, and it's a powerful story.

When it comes to curating--

NIC: Killing.

ERIC: Yeah, killing. OK. Sacrificing.

Now, you have an insect that has a threat status the same as a kokako, let's say-- a treasured bird. Kokako’s breeding biology-- the number of kōkako that live in the world-- so different. So, so different to how insects live. Now, they can breed in tremendous numbers in a short amount of time, and they can be incredibly abundant, though you can't see many of them.

The population biology of them are such that if you sample a couple of individuals, it makes no difference to the population. But it makes a powerful lot of difference if you can tell the story from taking those individuals and pointing out what they are. That the ability to interpret is actually in the greater good for that population.

NIC: You guys really are pioneers, because one of the things that I've learned recently is-- and you can correct me if I'm wrong-- but my understanding is that of all of our data-deficient species that live on land, so data-deficient being things we kind of know about, but we don't really know how to manage them or really where they are or what they're up to-- 89% of those are plants and invertebrates, so you've got a job for life, right?

ERIC: Yes, that's right. Where do you start? Because it takes time. It takes time to find the cryptic things and then to identify what it is that you're holding, and to develop that experience and ability. There's not many people that have. And so I wonder how society will take that on in terms of retaining what is the legacy that we have in front of us now and how it's declining.

NIC: So what do you consider as one of your greatest success stories so far? Because you said you've got lots of ideas. [LAUGHS]

So while I have a role to do with native invertebrates, because I'm an insect person, I also understand the invasive pest insects. I'm aware of wasps in New Zealand and the tremendous impact that wasps have. A million hectares of the South Island beech forest is infested every season in such a way that there wasps outweigh the birds and the possums and stoats around the tremendous impact that those wasps have. You feel it as an entomologist, because they are omnivores.

They are consuming the insects-- insect life and honey juice out of the beech forest. And so I got involved in that. I guess one of the things that is exciting was to lead a project to fully recognize incredible research that was done at Nelson Lakes National Park. A piece of research that had evolved through time with the staff there and with the Crown Research agencies scientists working together.

And they had developed a system of bait stations for controlling wasps where otherwise in New Zealand, all you can do is try and find the nests and then destroy those. So how would you protect five hectares of bush? Trying to find each nest? That's a tremendous challenge.

And so wasp bait stations can be used, it turns out, over 500 hectares or 1,000 hectares, or along a 40-kilometer trek. And so my job, I decided, was to unlock that potential of that tool. And was a tremendous process to go through.

And now we have a product that's manufactured. It's called Vespex, and you can use it all over New Zealand to control wasps. And it's now something that the beekeeping industry has embraced, and so have foresters. And in Abel Tasman National Park, for example, that coastal trek-- it used to be a place where baiters and trappers every year got stung quite a lot.

But now they're not. And so there are places all over New Zealand where people tell a story of how their lives are changed by being in the outdoors without wasps because of this. And so it was great. To unlock that potential and be a part of the team that did it.

NIC: Well, I think you've done an incredible job. You touched on your time down south, I just want to briefly travel you to the Subantarctic Islands and what on earth you were looking at down there. I've been lucky enough to travel around the Subantarctics a couple of times, and they are-- I've heard them described as the Galapagos of the South. Do you think people truly understand the natural splendour and just nature overload of the Subantarctics?

ERIC: Of course it's a privilege that I've had that others haven't had. The Subantarctic is-- you just have a sense of history when you're there.

NIC: What kind of invertebrates do you find down there?

ERIC: There are giant weevils living on giant herbs. Streams are interesting there, too, because I have a background as a stream ecologist. So there are-- it is cold, and it does form blanket peat on many parts of those islands. And the streams flow underground. They actually tunnel through the peat-- the streams. And they're like cave streams with like a cave fauna inside them.

And so it was interesting to sample streams and the peat, where I basically had to lie down in a hole with only my feet sticking out trying to take a sample of the insects that were in that stream. And I discovered that actually, the crustaceans that live in the sea had migrated well up into the streams. I guess these are far offshore islands, and so the fauna is-- it's not a really rich fauna, but it's a unique fauna and a unique situation. And so the insects that are represented there-- there are many that were unique to the island, and then they have unique associations as well.

NIC: I've got a note here about Adams Island and something about an interaction you had with a poo patch. (LAUGHING) Can you tell me what on earth that is, please.

ERIC: Sure. I talk about marine life bringing-- the birds bringing resources onto the land. And so Adams Island is one of those places that no rodent has ever been on, and it's hard to say for New Zealand. And there's been no fire there, and there's been no pigs or any other sort of thing on that island.

It's far enough north that it still has tall forest on it. And so it is actually one of the most pristine places on the planet, and a very, very important legacy that we must take into the future as it is now.

But the giant albatross that live the-- Antipodes albatross that live on that island, with a wingspan of two meters. They produce pretty-- quite a sizable poo patch around their nests. [LAUGHS] It's meters wide. It's several meters wide. And so all the tussock is lush there, and the herbs are extraordinary around there. And believe it or not, the insects are, too.

So yes, it's where some beetles and moths do rather well. And so that's a place where you dive down on your hands and knees and just poke a stick around and just see how it contrasts. Then you do that in an adjacent area that isn't a poo patch and see the difference. It's marvellous.

NIC: It is. And I always feel that there's the one thing people miss when they're talking about restoring places on the mainland. And they want to bring back this kind of bird or that kind of bird. My view is, we should always try really hard to bring the seabirds back first, and let them poo all over the-- let them create poo patches, and drive that ecosystem function.

ERIC: There's modelling that tells us where the birds once lived. And so I'm interested in those sorts of places. And I'd like to fast forward it. I often think we should get a crop-dusting aircraft and just go across them and actually redistribute the guano into those places and drive that ecosystem like it once was driven.

NIC: And without waiting for the birds.

ERIC: Yeah, without waiting for this birds to arrive back.

NIC: That's not bad. Invertebrates often rely on moist, cool environments, particularly in New Zealand, which has evolved in a temperate area. How worried are you as an entomologist about the impact of climate change? And are we're seeing it already?

ERIC: Sure, we're seeing it already. And sure, it's a concern. And how resilient are our systems going to be, our ecosystems in New Zealand? How will they be? There are tragic things that are well underway now.

We've lost our snowbank faunas from the alpines. It's a story that's not that well-told yet. But snow lie on the ground for two or three months of the year. That creates a situation of extraordinary herb and short grass associations and things that live on those. Whereas when the snow doesn't lie like that, it only lies for a few weeks or less, then the tall grasses take over and those systems disappear.

Or the hydrology changes, actually. The moisture regime in the soil changes. It's been changing rapidly. It's changing rapidly as we speak.

And so the richness of the indigenous component of our Alpines in New Zealand-- it's going to have to-- that pattern will be expressed very differently. And in some cases, some things will be lost. And the Department of Conservation or any steward of those landscapes, whoever they are, is not going to be able to push that back. And so retaining resilient ecosystems and retaining as many species as we can, we have to think pretty crafty about it. We've got to bring technology to these things.

NIC: What would your one wish be for the more than 87% of us now who live in towns and cities and aren't particularly connected to the nature, especially the little creepy crawly nature that sometimes bites and stings?

ERIC: Yeah.

NIC: What's one thing we could all do to turn that around?

ERIC: I guess it's to be early adopters of the new ideas, actually. That is something that I have been thinking about when I talk about what's controlled before. That's just a step. There are other pieces out there, and killing wasps over 1,000 hectares is-- that's extraordinary relief for those ecosystems and for people. But you'd like to be doing it over much more than that.

And so the nub of the idea in Predator Free, I think there is something about us all embracing that and being prepared to take the risks of not doing this as something. We talk about the risks of a new idea or a new tool … oh, this hasn't been tried before. So we've been cautious about it. But actually, what's at stake is a rapid change if we don't try these new ideas.

NIC: Eric, you have been fantastic to yarn to, as always. I always love to yarn to entomologists. I secretly think you're all a bit mad, but I kind of love that.

ERIC: Yeah.

NIC: And I think you're also kind of a philosopher and an entomologist in the same box, and I think that's really to be admired. So thank you very much for your time. I hope now that everybody listening will immediately go out and maybe not kill so many things as you do, but go and have a look at the little things and think about what we can do to help them out in future. Thank you very much.

ERIC: Kia ora, Nic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NIC: That's it for this episode. If you like what you heard, show us some love with a five star rating. The DOC Sounds of Science podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe now and never miss an episode.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[Cicadas]

---

Transcript for episode 5

[Australasian bittern/matuku boom]

[BELL]

Nic: Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, New Zealand’s Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

Nic: Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki nga Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

Nic: Every episode, we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC’s technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between.

Nic: Today on the show we have the wonderful wetland bird ecologist, Emma Williams. Kia ora, Emma.

Emma: Kia ora, Nic. Ko Emma Williams tōku ingoa, kei Te Papa Atawhai e mahi ana. Hi, Nic. My name is Emma Williams, and I work for the Department of Conservation.

Emma, tell us a little bit about what your role is at DOC.

Emma: So I'm a science advisor. So basically, I do science and I try to address knowledge gaps with some of the species that DOC works on.

Nic: And primarily, you are, and have always been, a bit of a bird nerd, aren't you?

Emma: I have. I have mostly specialized on cryptic species, and wetland birds because a lot of wetland birds are cryptic.

Nic: Tell me a bit about what cryptic means. To me, it sounds like they've got old Harry Potter's invisibility cloak on over their heads. What does it mean to be a cryptic species?

Emma: That's pretty accurate. A cryptic species is one that's difficult to detect. So there's four different ways that a cryptic species can be cryptic. One is they can be visually cryptic, so difficult to see. As it's like your camouflage, like your chameleons. And they can be vocally cryptic, where you can't hear them. And then, there's two other that are more to do with us, like we can't find them because they're inaccessible. Spatially cryptic we call that. And then, temporally cryptic because maybe they only call at certain times of the day when we're not there.

Emma: So wetland birds do that quite a lot. They call around sunrise and sunset when we're not really out in the wetland that much.

Nic: So what is a wetland?

Emma: That's a tricky question because there's so many different types that if I was getting all science-y on you. There's ephemeral wetlands and coastal wetlands, so there's a huge variety. But basically, it's anywhere that's swampy and muddy.

Nic: What is it that got you into wetland birds, specifically?

Emma: Because wetlands aren't that accessible. Especially large wetlands, getting into the heart of them is really difficult. You've got to get a boat in and you're quite loud when you move through a wetland. And so it's got that extra element of a challenge. So that was what attracted me to it.

Nic: Does it have, also, the extra element of the challenge that we've managed to destroy most of the wetlands in New Zealand in the past 100 years or so?

Emma: Yeah, so we've-- and particularly in New Zealand, we've got the need to work on wetlands because we've lost 90% of our wetland habitats here in New Zealand, and the remaining 10% is severely under threat.

Nic: So I know, for example, that one of your great loves in terms of species is the bittern. And I'd almost guarantee there will be people listening right now who've never heard of one. Can you tell us a little bit about a bittern and what makes it special?

Emma: So bittern are in the heron family. They're about knee high. And it's not a surprise that some people won't know about them because they are masters of disguise. They're amazing. And I call them the ninjas of the wetlands. And it's just because they've got all those problems that I described about being cryptic. They've got all of them. They live in an inaccessible habitat, they've got this beautiful plumage that makes them blend perfectly into their background. So basically, they look like the reeds.

Emma: And they can actually manipulate that plumage, that coloration, to do whatever they want to do. So if they want you to see them, then they'll be more relaxed in their body, and the lines across their body won't actually line up with the vegetation so they stand out.

Emma: And as soon as they don't want you to see them, they straighten their whole body up, they put their big up to the air, so they look really silly if they're standing on a road or something further than the wetlands. The lines move perfectly so that they line up with the reeds and they're gone. So they can disappear right in front of your eyes.

Nic: This is where I'm actually cursing the fact that this is a podcast and not a video cast because I am not very good at impersonating many animals, but I do know that when a bittern doesn't want to be seen it does this.

[Movement]

Emma: Yes! So Nic is, right now, put her hands above her head.

Nic: Staring the ceiling.

Emma: And is staring at the ceiling, yeah. Amazing.

Nic: Another thing that fascinates me about bitterns is that the noise they make.

Emma: Yes.

Nic: Tell me about that.

Emma: It's only the males that do this. But they boom, which-- so to fully appreciate the sound, you have to understand the morphological-- the body change that they actually go through to be able to produce this sound. So it's to do with testosterone, hence why it's something the males do it. So as he approaches the breeding season, the male-- his testosterone will start to build up and then his neck will thicken. So can if you ever have one in the hand you can feel it. It feels like jelly.

Emma: And it thickens because, basically, they're going to become like a bagpipe. So they need to be able to cope with a lot of air being squeezed out of them within a short space of time.

Nic: I'm sorry. I just have a picture in my head. I've seen pictures of you holding bittern, and now I have a picture in my head of you squeezing one.

Emma: That is not recommended. Please do not do that at home. No, the bittern does it themselves.

Emma: So what he does is he does these big inhalations, gets his chest full of air, and then he'll make himself an amphitheatre by squishing down the vegetation around him. He'll hunker down-- so I'm actually doing this right now. And then, he'll just suddenly make a wooo noise.

Emma: So he'll do that in a sequence. So that's what we call a boom, it's actually a sequence of those noises. So do you want me to teach you how to do it?

Nic: Yes, please. I would definitely want to learn this. This will be my next pub trick.

Emma: OK, so you have to suck in as much air as you possibly can. You ready?

Nic: Yup. [BREATHING]

Emma: More, more! And then go: [WOO SOUND]

[WOO SOUND]

[WOO SOUND]

[WOO SOUND]

[laughter]

Emma: And that, friends, was a poor train boom sound at the end there, which also happens with bittern. So what they're trying to do is they're competing with each other. So you and I were basically having like a little standoff there where you were you're telling me you're the sexiest male ever, and I'm going no, no, no, no, I'm the sexiest male ever.

Emma: And to be sexy, you have to get the best sounding woo boom, and the most of them within a train. And the longer you go for, the more likely you are to kind of go ‘ugh’. That's what they're competing to do. So they're trying to make the other birds collapse-- go beyond his abilities.

Nic: And is it like kākāpō, who also boom, but slightly different technique? And for a kākāpō, they're going for the Barry White, where the lowest boom is the sexiest boom. Is it the same or is it just the volume and trying to outcompete the fellow down the road?

Emma: We think with bittern it's the volume. They're actually trying to advertise the furthest. They want to get their message out across the whole of the wetlands. And then, you have the quality of the call and the length of the train is there because you've got to be good at it to be able to do that.

Emma: In September until December time is when they're booming. And at the beginning of that season, they will have to practice. Because they're going through that morphological change-- that body change. And so even if they were good at it, normally, and they're an old male that's generally quite sexy, at the beginning of the season he will need to practice still. So you can hear them going [UGH] and making all sorts of noises.

Emma: And the ladies will be going around checking them out, going, oh, he's not so good. I'll try this one.

Nic: That is fantastic! I’m actually a little bit cross because bittern is on a list of very few species in New Zealand that I have not seen.

Emma: You will have to come out with this at some point, Nic, to see them. Yeah, for sure.

Nice: Well, I want to come out with you because I understand you've just found out some pretty amazing information about bittern.

Emma: We have. So since I've been working on bittern, which is quite a while now, we've had two big, I guess, ground-breaking discoveries. One was in 2016. We discovered that there were a lot rarer than we originally thought. They used to be nationally vulnerable, and now we know they're nationally critical, which is the same threat classification as the kākāpō. And the only way it can go if it gets worse is extinction. So there's a lot that needs to be done with them.

Emma: And so we started managing them then. But we thought at that time that they were quite localized in they're movements. That they would stay within a region, and just use a small network of wetlands. But very recently, thanks to GPS technology, we've actually worked out that they go very long distances.

Emma: So this happened last October time. We put a GPS on our first Canterbury bittern. And it disappeared off-- all of a sudden it turned up in Blenheim, and that was new information for us. So that's 330 kilometers, and that's showing that, actually, these are national birds.

Emma: We haven't had one go between the North and the South end yet, but this is early days. But basically, the whole of the North Island is the same population of birds.

Nic: What kind of population is there do you think roughly?

Emma: So the official estimate that was from the 80s, and was that we had 1,000 birds, 1,000 bittern. But that was not doing any national census, so they will have been double counting some birds. So that was, basically, a bunch of experts get together from different regions going, oh, well we've got about 20 in our region. We've got about-- and then the other region saying, OK, we've got about 30. And then adding it all up.

Emma: And so now that we know that they move across regions--

Nic: They could have been counting the same guy twice.

Emma: Yeah. And they're doing this across the breeding season, so within a relatively short space of time. Yeah.

Nic: So I suppose what you've just told us just demonstrates that value of science advice, doesn't it? Because that whole learning new things, throws the management process we had for bittern before out the window essentially, doesn't it? And it just says, ‘whoops, instead of managing the small area which we thought was going to be good for bittern, you now have to manage the whole lot’. How does that work?

Emma: Yeah, so it's completely thrown everything out because DOC's whole system of managing wildlife is by a site by site basis. We have these things called EMUs, which are Ecological Management Units, and we have SMUs as well, which is—

Nic: Species

Emma: Species management units, yes. That's right. And unfortunately, that means that we're managing on a site by site basis. So basically, says Whangamarino wetland is an EMU for bittern. But Kopuatai wetland, which is actually quite close to Whangamarino wetland, isn't for bittern.

Emma: But we know now that bittern need both of those sites, and also need the sites in the Bay of Plenty, and also need the sites of the Northland. It's the same bittern. So if you're only managing a tiny proportion of an animal's habitat, it's like, in humans terms, having good health and safety in one part of your-- just being safe at home, but the rest of the time when you go to work you're doing crazy things and not being safe. It's not going to work.

Emma: I've worked out of one site that in one year the bittern were spending 70% of their time outside of the managed site, and the rest of the time they're on farmland, and they're in drains. And there's no predator control in those places. There's no protection. People don't even know they're there. I had one farmer in the Hawke's Bay when I told them that a bittern was in a little patch of raupō at the bottom of their land, they were really, really excited. And they were like, oh, well thank god we found that out because we were going to remove that patch of raupō.

Emma: And that's the only little patch that that bird has throughout the whole winter. So it was hanging on that one patch if they'd removed it, it wouldn't have had anywhere else to go. So it's really significant to us, and makes a big difference.

Nic: So you've just touched on something which I think is almost the key to a lot of your success, which is around advocacy. Because you love to get out and tell people about bittern and get people excited about these invisible species we've never heard of. And you've got a bit of a partner in crime in this, haven't you?

Emma: I have.

Nic: Tell us about Kimi.

Emma: She's actually better than I am. She's awesome. So I have a conservation dog, Kimi the bittern dog. And she comes round and does school visits with me. And yeah, she loves bittern just as much as I do. But she has some quirky little-- she does some little tricks for the schoolchildren, and we get her out to help demonstrate how hard it is to be in the wetland and that kind of thing.

Nic: So how did it come about that-- because I've met Kimi. We've been lucky enough to have a school visit at work with Kimi. How did it come about that she became a bittern dog?

Emma: It was completely random. She actually started out as a search and rescue puppy-- not a bittern dog-- for the first six months of her life. So what happened was I was in Palmerston North doing my masters on bittern. Early days. So I'd only just started on bittern.

Emma: I was, at the same time, doing a bit of work for DOC, and also in my spare time doing search and rescue. And I was helping hide for the search dogs, and it was great fun and I loved it. It's fantastic. And decided I wanted to learn how to train a dog. And so they supported me and encouraged me. And we got Kimi.

Emma: And Kimi was a little bit too quiet as a search and rescue. If you've ever met a search and rescue dog, they have to bark manically at people until the handler gets to them. And if that person moves, they stay with the person and they just bark and bark and bark. And Kimi was this quiet little lovely puppy. I think she absolutely could have done it, but she wasn't naturally-- didn't fit the mould. It will be--

Nic: She’s not an extrovert.

Emma: She's a totally introverted dog. And all these dogs barking like crazy all the time, and she's like, what on Earth is going on? And at the same time, it just happened to be-- for my master's-- I had to write a piece on what an ideal-- or the different ways that we could start trying to find bittern. Because my task was, actually, not about saving bittern at that time, they weren't considered to be endangered. And that's how can we find them, and find out more about them?

Emma: And there's four different ways that you can detect a bird. Seeing them, hearing them, of course, through booms, and through their heat, so using thermal imagery. And then, there's through scent as well. So I was writing a little piece about scent, and I had to write the ideal characteristics of a dog. And Kimi was lying on the floor in front of me at my feet as I was writing this.

Emma: And the other thing she used to do as a search and rescue dog when we were training, she was always running off and standing in wetlands because she loves water.

Nic: Because she's a Lab, isn't she?

Emma: She's a Lab. And she's a black Lab, so on a hot day she just loves to be in the water. That's her happy place. So I was writing this, and it was coming out so-- must be a-- she's also a small Labrador – it must be a small dog, light, quiet, commonly introverted nature, not too barky, and then loves water. And there she was.

Nic: So you literally had that light bulb over your head while you were finishing your chapter.

Emma: Nice.

Nic: I'm a massive fan of the conservation dog program, and it's supported by Kiwibank.

Emma: It is, yes. It is. They give a lot of support to all different types of conservation dogs because we have a variety of different types of dogs.

Nic: What makes a conservation dog different from any other dog on conservation land?

Emma: OK, so conservation dogs are official certified dogs. So here in New Zealand, we have the Conservation Dogs Program, which is run by DOC. And so Kimi and I have a series of mentors and trainers and assessors, which make sure that we're up to a certain standard. So safety of the bird is paramount. And Kimi always wears a muzzle, even though she is specially trained, so she doesn't touch the bird.

Emma: Even then, just to make sure there's no mistake because at the end of the day, we're talking about an animal and wildlife, and the bird can be just as bad as the dog sometimes. So she always just wears a muzzle to just make sure there's absolutely nothing that can happen.

Nic: So tell me a little bit about what a bittern dog does.

Emma: So she's helped me recapture birds, and find birds that don't have transmitters on. So we have, at the moment, we have some great methods that we've developed for catching male bittern because they're easier to get into traps. But we haven't got good methods for finding the females or the chicks. Ones that aren't booming and that won't respond to playback. Because that's how we attract them into the traps is through playing their calls. Getting really wound up that testosterone so they think it's another male. And then, they come in to investigate that other male, and that's how we catch them.

Emma: So she helps with that. And she also helps me recapture radio tagged birds. Because while I'm in the wetland, I can follow them with the radio transmitter to a certain extent. But as you get really, really close, it gets very hard to localize them. And they also tend to start hiding. So one of the things they do is really hunker down and sit-in the water. And it suppresses the sound of the transmitter. And so then, she helps me find that, and it helps me catch them.

Nic: So she's trained to smell out bittern, and ignore all the other wonderful smells around her.

Emma: Yes. And she's trying to take me to it, so take me to the live bird.

Nic: But she doesn't pick it up or do anything.

Emma: No, she's not allowed anywhere near it. And actually, she doesn't want to because of that introverted nature, she's frightened of them. She is a little bit frightened of them, it's true. When you get really close to them, I could tell because she starts looking back at me like, come on, come on. You take over now. And it's because bittern are actually quite aggressive. So if you're ever picking up a bittern, I would totally recommend that you put safety goggles on. And because they are part of the ninja of the wetlands style behaviors are that they're very, very fast at stabbing things.

Emma: And there was this one occasion where I was releasing a bittern, and we name them all after deceased crooners. So this one was called Bing Crosby. And I came to release it, and I had it tucked under my arm. And me and the bird were quite relaxed, and I was just looking around for a nice quiet place so I could put it down and let it go.

Emma: And by the time I had realized that-- so just to explain how you hold a bittern, I've got it under my arm and then my hand around the base of its neck.

Nic: Like a bagpipe.

Emma: Like a bagpipe, yes. And this bird managed to get out. And by the time I realized it got his head out of my fingers, it had already hit my glasses by the eye. So they do go for the eyes because your pupils look like something that's--

Nic: They should attack.

Emma: Yeah. And they can watch it moving. Like a cat, they've got really sensitive eyesight.

Nic: Actually, on that note, I think people really underestimate bird ecologists and birds scientists in terms of how strappy and dangerous birds can be. We tend to think in New Zealand we don't have lions and tigers and bears and so everything's all benign. And birds are fine. A little blue penguin chick gave me a black eye once. And when I was doing my dissertation I was studying penguins. And I didn't like to hold them too hard because I didn't want to hurt them, but you do have to hold birds quite firmly.

Nic: And the first day of my fieldwork, a penguin wiggle its arm out and smashed me in the face. So birds are dangerous, and have to be very tough-- you have to be like a lion tamer to work with some of our birds.

Emma: Bitterns are definitely one of those type of birds though. Yeah, they can be quite stroppy if they don't want you doing something to them so, yeah. And so Kimi is totally aware of that. And when we get really close to the bird she's like, it's your job now. You grab the bird!

Nic: You deal with this!

Emma: Yeah. I found it, I showed you where it was.

Nic: Yeah, it’s your job now.

Nic: Bitterns are the apex predator in a wetland, aren't they?

Emma: Yes. So

Nic: What does that mean? If you lose bittern from the wetland, what does that mean in terms of the function of the ecosystem overall?

Emma: I mean, they're very important in that tree. I mean, they eat mice and rats as well as their native food. So they're important for keeping those kind of populations down. And they're an important part of the balance in the wetlands ecosystems Yeah, without them, you'd have other species-- a lot of their prey would become out of control.

Nic: Even this one will probably be a bit hard for you because you do tend to have quite a few of these, but can you tell us a little bit about one of your greatest conservation science success stories?

Emma: I think it's got to be when we finally caught our first bittern. Because before we started the project that's now the bittern project, the DOC bittern project, there had only been one person that had caught bittern before in the past, and that was in the 80s. Philip Teal, who works now for fish and game. He did his masters on bittern at Whangamarino wetland. And he was tasked with trying to catch them.

Emma: And he tried so many different methods, which were the latest at the time, and didn't succeed with them. It's a very difficult site to work in. It was just why we didn't start there. And we learned from him. But he did manage to catch three in the end, but using a helicopter and a net gun from a helicopter. So flying over top of the bird, and the downdraft meant that they didn't want to take off. And then he would get the net gun out.

Emma: Nobody nowadays is going to let me do that. I failed as a student to convince anybody to give me a helicopter to just try-- and we don't want to do it anyway because it's not the best way for the bird. So luckily for me, since then, the British team and the American team had come up with different methods of catching their bittern, which are different species from ours.

Emma: So one of them is using mist nets, and then you play calls. And so you're trying to attract the bittern towards a net, and then you use calls either side of the net to make it fall into the net.

Nic: We use mist nets a lot through forest-- across New Zealand, don't we? Primarily forest birds, bats also. They basically look like-- just for the listener-- a badminton net strung between two sites, and then we're trying to do everything we can to lure them in. Does that sound about right to you?

Emma: Yeah. And the other method that the Americans have used was a cage trap, which is quite large. It could fit Kimi in there. It's got a mirror in the back of it. I don't put Kimi in there just to—

[Laughter]. Nic: Great disclaimer!

Emma: She did once accidentally walk in because I'd set in the field. Because it's going a mirror at the back, and then we smash a track, which has this trap in the middle of it. As you're walking down the track, all you can see is the mirror. That's the purpose of the track is to line them up with the mirror.

Emma: So when we went to check a trap once and she was with me, she saw her reflection and she was like, oh, it's a Labrador, hi. It's like no, no, no, no, no.

Nic: [Laughter]

Emma: Kimi no! Anyway, I digress. So there's these two different methods. So we started off with trailing those. And with the mist nets, we spent two weeks battling away trying to get a bittern into a mist net.

Emma: And the one that we've now caught-- we called Barry White-- was the first one that we ever caught. And we got him so wound up with this mist net that he was walking up and down it, he was going around it, over it, under it, everything but going into it. It was a really frustrating time for us as a team. Because we were right there with almost catching but not catching, and at the same time we weren't getting any success with the traps.

Emma: And then we realized through the process of working on the mist nets, and getting that behaveour where the bittern-- because what a bittern actually does-- we only worked this out through trying it and failing miserably. Is when you play a call, if you're trying to catch a kaka or a morepork, they will fly in and then be around the net.

Emma: But a bittern doesn't actually do that. If you boom at a bittern, it will just boom back. And say it's 400 meters away, it will then-- after an hour of booming, it will move maybe another 100 meters closer. Then, after an hour, it might move another 100 meters. But basically, they just sit there for ages yelling at each other because they're having that standoff.

Emma: So that meant it took a long time to get the birds near the nets. And we were, as a team, staying up until 3:00 in the morning trying to catch these birds and being exhausted. So that was also-- through seeing that, we realized why the traps weren't working as well because ethically, we were checking the traps every hour. So the same thing is happening to the traps in that it's taking the birds a long time to come in to the traps.

Nic: And then you stomped past and scare them all away.

Emma: Exactly. But of course, you don't know that because you don't see the birds. This is one of the difficult things about working on a cryptic species. You don't even see what they're doing, and how they're responding. And so from this experience, we finally-- it's actually one morning after four days of trying to catch Barry White and getting all these behaviours. The whole team is absolutely knackered from these early mornings. And we decided, OK, we're just going to have to have a day off. And I sent the team home.

Emma: But I thought I had one person that was on standby that lived locally. And so when I got off after having a bit of a lie-in it just kind of came to me that the trap-- because the bird had been attacking the speaker the night before and walking up and down. I've got the right behaviour that I wanted, but it wasn't the right tool using the mist net. So I just randomly decided, OK, I'll go and stick this trap out and we'll see what happens.

Emma: I still wasn't expecting it to work because we'd had so many failures. It was like moving down a decision tree and that was just the next step to try to see what happens. And so I stuck this trap out. And then, as I was walking back, I thought, I better check in that my standby person is there because ethically, we needed two people to handle the bird.

Emma: So I rang him up. And I didn't realize is he'd gone to the airport to pick up a family relative, so he wasn't around. So I went back to this trap to close it because I didn't have the standby person. And when I arrived there, in this trap was a bittern. And I honestly couldn't believe it. I was in a state of shock.

Emma: And I started running back. We covered the trap to keep the bird quiet, and make sure that nothing can harm the bird. So a harrier can't hurt it. And then I started dashing back to the field center in an absolute panic because we can only keep the bird for a certain amount of time before we have to release them. So I needed somebody else to come and help.

Emma: And I rang Daniel Winchester who works for DOC, and at the time he was working out of the Napier office. And what I didn't realize at the time was he still had his mobile phone on Bluetooth mode from the night before because he'd been out with us at the mist nets. And we'd been Bluetoothing the speakers and the sound across to the speakers from our phones.

Emma: So my voice-- he told me this later-- came broadcasting out from his car as he was driving because it's synced with the radio. So he gets me on loudspeaker going, Dan-- I was running so I couldn't breath-- Dan I've got a bittern!. And he apparently went [SCREECHING NOISE], almost crashed his car. Had to pull over so that he could be safe, and he was like, you've done what? I was like, I know. I thought I had John on standby, and there's been a miscommunication, and I caught a bittern. I need somebody to get here ASAP. And he said, don't worry about it Em, we'll be there.

Emma: And then, it was like a DOC SWAT team just descended on us. Just like, whompf, and we got the job done. So yeah, and because you need a little success like that to be able to-- I mean, we were really demoralized at that stage.

Emma: We'd been working so hard and then not appearing to get anywhere with these birds. And then, all of a sudden catching one. And from there, everything got easier because once you put your first transmitter on, then you're able to follow birds, you're able to test methods on a bird that you know is there, you can train your dog on a bird that you know is there. And yeah, everything goes easier.

Emma: So I think that's probably the greatest-- what I'd say was my best success story.

Nic: Well done. Can you tell us a little bit about what's been your weirdest day at work?

Emma: Because every day is different, that's a really hard question because every day is weird. But it's not weird, it's actually normal to us science advisors. And when I knew you were going to ask me this question, I thought about it. And actually, the days that stand out as weirdest are the ones where somebody else-- you've done something in the presence of somebody else, and they've you've what you've done through their lens, and you've realized, oh, that's not normal.

Emma: So these things have happen time to time too, so I could give you a couple examples of them. It usually happens every time I go into my Mitre 10 because when you're buying pieces of equipment for-- we're doing the weirdest things. We're trying to create a cage trap or putting harnesses on birds, and we're using everyday items to do this.

Emma: So I think every science advisor will have a story where they've got it into Mitre 10 or Bunnings, and they've gone, I need this little piece of plastic that's about a centimetre long. It's got to be soft. It's got to have a hole that's three millimetres. They're looking at you and go, OK. So they'll show you various things. None of them will be what you want because it's so specific what you need. Eventually they'll go, what do you need it for? And you'll be like, oh yeah, it's for a weak link of the harness of a bittern. You know. [Laughter] whaaaaat?

Nic: What do you wish that the New Zealand public understood more when it comes to wetlands and a wetland bird species like bittern?

Emma: I wish they understood how valuable wetlands are. It is true how they're the kidneys of the environment. And so it's essential that we do look after them, but they're seen as swampy, mosquito infested places. A lot of the wetlands that I visited people would dump stuff in them, and it's just tragic really.

Emma: And I also wish that people understood more about how tragic it is to lose things. Because not only is it irreversible, but even if you can get some of that back, the cost of getting that back is so much more. And we do have a water quality problem here in New Zealand, which is receiving some attention now, thank goodness. But the cost of us now recovering that is-- it just would have been better 30, 40, 50 years ago if we just hadn't have got to that situation in the first place.

Emma: So yeah, I just wish everybody knew how wonderful wetlands are, and protected them. Even those small patches that are around the bottom of your land that you just think are just nothing. That's probably where bittern are hanging on.

Nic: That's so true. And there was a Colmar Brunton report that came out recently that demonstrates that 70 something percent of New Zealanders consider fresh water quality the highest priority issue. So second only to concerns about housing. But there's a disconnect, right? So we're all really, really, really worried about freshwater quality, and yet, we've got this ecosystem over here of wetland, which filters water and makes it high quality, and we haven't quite worked out how to value those.

Emma: Yeah. It's really tragic.

Nic: So given those concerns, what is something that we could all do to help protect wetlands?

Emma: OK, so talking about wetlands, and wetland birds, and the water quality issues. So advocating for your wetlands. Looking out for your local wetlands. So you all know where they are. And making sure that they are protected. That nobody's destroying them because we've got hardly any left. So we really do need to protect every single little bit now.

Emma: It's everybody's job. Everybody can do that. Everybody can advocate, and everybody can try to do trapping and predator control in their back gardens. And everybody can try to recycle. And just be more sustainable in the way that we are as a nation is a really important thing.

Nic: I think that's very good advice, and a nice way to finish off what has been, as usual, a fascinating series of ripper yarns. We didn't even get onto half a dozen of the other species that you're working on. So I should bring you back in. Thank you very much, Emma, and all the best with the future work.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nic: That's it for this episode. If you like what you heard, show us some love with a five star rating. The DOC Sounds of Science podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe now and never miss an episode.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[Australasian bittern/matuku boom]

---

Transcript for episode 4

[Australasian Gannet bird song]

[BELL]

Nic: Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, New Zealand’s Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki nga Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

Every episode, we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC’s technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between.

Kia ora, everybody. And welcome to another exciting episode of the DO   C Sounds of Science podcast. And today, we have the privilege of having our inventor extraordinaire, Stu Cockburn on the show. Kia ora, Stu.

[Stu] Kia ora, Nic. Ko Stu Cockburn toku ingoa. Hi, my name's Stu Cockburn. I'm a Technical Advisor for the Department of Conservation with a focus on conservation technology. I guess my main role is developing technology for doing conservation work where that technology just doesn't exist.

[Nic] Because we tend to think of conservation work as something that's out there, hands on, hands on the birds, letting them go, and not so much about the tech. But what you guys are doing is kind of revolutionary. And to me, you are like the Q from James Bond for the Department of Conservation, right?

[Stu] Yeah, I guess so. We're not necessarily building the highest technology things in the world all the time, but the tools we build are built for purpose. And like I say, they're for doing things that only we do. So they have to be built for a specific task. And we get to do something really satisfying.

[Nic] If you can talk me through some of the kinds of creations that you guys build and then test out in the field, it would give us a real sense of what you're doing.

[Stu] Yeah. OK. I've been doing this a long time, nearly 20 years. It's mostly around wildlife. So I've done things-- that I like to tell people that one of the first things I ever built was a 90 kilo camera that went 900 meters underwater to film sea lions and nets. And I've done everything from that to a variety of tiny little devices that hang around various animals that weigh a few grams.

So one of the other big areas that we work in which we don't do for wildlife is visitor counters. So we've built a network of devices that count people moving around the tracks that DOC manages.

[Nic] What does it mean? Why do you need a visitor counter?

[Stu] Well, you know DOC invests a lot of taxpayer's resources into managing these tracks and these facilities. And we need some background information on how much they're being used, when they're being used, how they're being used. And this is one of the main tools we use for doing that. And it can be to make investment decisions about upgrading tracks or even closing tracks down because they're not being utilized a lot. Yeah. So that's a useful tool for informing the management.

[Nic] One of the stories that I've always loved about the technical program is the doorbells, for example. Can you talk me through some of the tech that's used to make sure that we can look after kākāpō?

[Stu] So the way I kind of think about the work we do for kākāpō; is the kākāpō team, the scientists behind kākāpō; have developed a series of interventions they use on kākāpō, things they do to improve the success of kākāpō so that they survive longer and that they breed better. What our technology does is provide them the information to make decisions on what interventions are necessary.

Nic: Like snarks.

Stu: Like snarks. So snarks is a crazy name we came up with. It's actually named after a kākāpō chick from many years ago. It's just basically a device that records the presence of kākāpō using the transmitters they all wear. So every kākāpō we know of has a radio transmitter on it. And these things to take the presence of the kākāpō and record it.

Or they can make decisions like we have a device that unlocks a feeding station. And so we can choose to feed one particular kākāpō out of a feeding station using this technology. We also hook scales up to the feeding stations, so we not only know who's been there, we know how much they weigh as well, which is really important for managing their health. If we detect a mix of loss and weight, we can go and actually go and say maybe there's a problem here.

The doorbells you're talking about is in the kākāpō nest. We also have of technology now that monitors the nest. So the doorbell is a doorbell. It's a little beam sensor that sits across the entrance. And as the mums come and go, the doorbell goes. And it lets either people on the site that the bird's left or arrived. Or what we have been doing in the last couple of seasons is that data is actually transmitted remotely to the hut. And so back at the hut we know that the mum has come and gone to help us help the rangers make decisions to go and intervene or do things if they need to.

[Nic] I understand that you've also, when you've been out in the field, you've been able to assist them as prod boy. Tell us what that means.

[Stu:] Oh, yes, this is a day with Kate McInnes who you interviewed a few weeks ago.

[Nic] A wildlife vet.

[Stu:] Yes. All days with Kate are a little bit weird, but this one was particularly weird. There was some of the early experiments in trying to produce kākāpō sperm from male kākāpō and that used an electrode ejaculation system. And I got to be the ground prod. So I spent a day holding a copper rod up the cloaca of male kākāpō. That was one of my weirder days at work.

[LAUGHING]

[Nic] I bet.

[Stu] It had nothing to do with my electrical qualifications. It was just I happened to be the boy on the spot. So.

[Nic] It wasn't part of your engineering requirements?

[Stu] No, no. I was just a helping hand that day.

[Nic] Or a helping prod.

[Stu] A helping prod.

[Nic] Well, I don't know many people that can add it their CV. So I'm pretty impressed with that. It seems like, you know, you say you've been doing this for 20 years. This is a very niche being the wildlife inventor designing the tech to save the things. Is this something that you decided as a kid was going to be your career pathway? How did this happen?

[Stu] I was brought up in Ashburton where there's not an awful lot of wildlife. So it wasn't something I'd sort of come across. And I had no interest in electronics. So quite how I ended up here, I don't know. But I guess the story started with somebody you met not long ago as well, Lynn Adams. So Lynn has known that she's wanted to do this since she was a little girl. And Lynn and I went to school together. And not long after school, we got together and have been together ever since. And that's how I discovered conservation, basically.

I already started my engineering career, but once I discovered conservation I knew that's what I wanted to do. And then this job appeared. And now I consider myself a conservationist not an engineer. My next job will be in conservation.

[Nic] What has been-- apart from, obviously, having been with your childhood sweetheart for all of this time--

[[Stu] oh go on!

[Nic] And she is a sweetheart. We did interview Lynn. She's one of our favorite herpetologists. But what's been your greatest achievement? If you look back on the last 20 years in this role, what are some of your greatest achievements in terms of the things you've been able to design to turn things around?

[Stu] Yeah. It's kind of hard to pick one thing out.

[Nic] Pick a few.

[Stu] Pick a few? I think from an engineering point of view, one of the things I'm most proud of is the bat recorder we developed seven or eight years ago. It's kind of interesting that it was only in the 1960s (PS: Stu would like to add post recording that apparently he’s found out there might have been in the 1920s) some time that humans discovered that bats used ultrasound for navigation, which isn't very long ago. And since then, we've been developing techniques for capturing those sounds as a method of detecting bats.

And in all that time, there's only a handful of methods that have ever been developed, bat engineering sensor for detecting bats. And we created a new one. So we developed a new technology. And I will always remember the day we went up to Pureora, an amazing place, and we put out these new recorders which theoretically we thought would work. Put them out in the field. And then we went and gathered them the next morning, put the recordings into the computer. And there was exactly what we'd expected and intended as theory by not just the engineering theory, but also what we'd read about the biology of bats and what we should be seeing. That was a pretty good moment.

[Nic] Are you able to describe how they work?

[Stu] Yeah. So the trouble with recording bats, obviously, is that they use ultrasound and humans can't hear ultrasound, of course. So what you need to do is develop a technique so that we can electronically convert the ultrasound into something humans can interpret. And there's several methods of doing that. Some of them involve shifting the sounds down electronically so that we can hear them or just recording them and interpreting them on a computer. And ours is a form of that.

As the bats pass by, we record them. We convert it into a thing called a spectogram, which is an image representation of sound. And then we save that as an image. The trick with it is because of the high recording rates, you end up with huge files. And we've compressed those images in a way that makes them much smaller and easier to handle. So it's kind of a new technique, a new way of doing it. And it works.

[Nic] So as a conservationist engineer, what does that mean for the bats? Because bats are tricky, A, most people don't know they exist, B, when you know they might be around, they're really hard to pin down, and, C, because they move around so much, really tricky to try and look after. So what does your technology mean for those bats?

[Stu] It solves a lot of those problems that you just talked about. So what it's done is it's meant we've been able to produce a cheap, easy to use tool. We've made 3,000 of them. And so they used all over the country. And people use them to identify the locations of bats where they are. At least two new populations of bats have been discovered using our recorders.

So really what it means is it puts a detection and monitoring tool into the hands of our conservationists, our field staff, in an easy to use and cheap format. We can build them for our own staff for about a quarter of the price as we can buy something commercially. So it gives us this incredible tool that we can just go out and use, find where they are.

[NIC] What was it like for you guys the first time you trialed them waiting to see those results pop up?

[Stu] It's always a little bit fraught when you develop something new. Yeah. I think I made the point at some stage that there's a billion ways of making things that don't work and very few of making ways of things that do work. So you've always got an expectation of having problems. So on that first morning where it just worked perfectly the first time we put it out to record bats was, yeah, yeah. It's a bit of a buzz.

[Nic] Nailed it

[Stu] Yeah.

[Nic] Yeah. Who inspires you in terms of your work and how you go about it?

[Stu] I knew this question was coming. And so I had a bit of a thought about it. And I decided I'd tell you a story about Raoul Island. So I was really lucky that before I started this job-- so over 20 years ago-- I spent most of a year on Raoul Island. And I was extra lucky that, as part of this job, I got to go back almost exactly 10 years after I left almost to the day. And I arrived on Raoul Island.

And in that time, DOC had cleared all the pests off it, the rats and the cats. And that had been done about four years before. And the weed program, which was the main program under area had carried on. And that was just a great day, because I arrived on the island 10 years after I'd left. And the island was booming. It was full of birds where it had been pretty empty. And the weeds were not gone, but had a big hole in them.

And I think what inspires me about conservation is that it was just the effort of a whole lot of people who just kept on going and don't stop. And that's how conservation wins. It's endless effort from lots of people over a long period of time. And we get there. And that was a great day to see just what the outcome can be.

[Nic] I completely agree. And there is something really special about and-- hopefully more will be able to see more of this on the mainland-- but the minute you set foot on one of those islands and kōkako just starts trilling off in front of you or you trip over a takahe on your way up the track, that's the moment where are all the pieces come together, isn't it, about what you're doing and why.

[Stu] Yeah. And it's inspiring to me that just so many people can put so much effort in over a long period of time and get that result. In the time I spent on Raoul Island in the '90s, I didn't see a single parakeet. And four years after the eradication, there were flocks of them around on the lawns beside the house. They were everywhere. I found a nest six meters off a track that I'd walked 10 times every day for most of the year and not seen a thing. It was an incredible place.

[Nic] It makes it all worth it. I heard a little rumor-- I'm a little bit jealous about this. I heard a rumor that your work-- I mean a lot of your work has been sort of recognized internationally and picked up in various papers. And other people are doing stuff like what you guys do-- but I heard that your work has been discussed in another podcast. You want to tell me a bit about that?

[Stu] Oh, yeah. My favorite podcast is The Infinite Monkey Cage. It's a BBC science podcast.

[Nic] Also my favorite podcast.

[Stu] Yeah. It's great. I was randomly listening to it in the car one day. And I'd actually just come back off Codfish Island. And they started talking about kākāpō. And someone mentioned kākāpō. And we're back to kākāpō.

[Nic] They always end up in the conversation.

[Stu] Yeah. And this woman on the podcast said, oh my god, kākāpō, they're my favorite and started raving about the scales and the snarks and all the equipment. It was, yeah, it was pretty cool to hear yourself talked about on your favorite podcast.

[Nic] That is amazing. So one of the things you guys are renowned for is the Number 8 Wire approach to some of the inventions that you come up with, right? Like you're pretty kind of flexible and agile and creative with the materials you use to build things for DOC staff who might need something really quickly. Can you tell me a little bit about the devices that you created to track endangered grasshoppers in the Mackenzie.

[Stu] Happy to tell you about it. But engineers tend not to like hearing their equipment described as Number 8 Wire.

[Nic] Right.

[LAUGHING]

[Nic] Well, the only reason that I'm, perhaps, being a little bit casual about this one is that I had the privilege of having to take this particular invention on an airplane and make all kinds of explanations about what I was carrying in order to get it down to Christchurch and across to the Mackenzie. So how do you track a robust grasshopper?

[Stu] Shall we shall we call it reusing existing technology in a cunning way, rather than Number 8 Wire? The problem was trying to find these tiny little grasshoppers in this landscape when they're very well hidden, of course.

[Nic] This is the Mackenzie?

[Stu] This is in the Mackenzie. And you know they have evolved to hide themselves from all their avian predators. And so they're hard to find. And so this project required a way of finding them, and detecting them, and tracking them, and understanding the fate of our grasshoppers.

So what we decided to use was the little microchips that people inject into cats and dogs. But we used them in a slightly different way. Instead of using it to identify that this individual was-- this dog was this dog and this cat was this cat, we used it as a detection tool. So the scientists involved glued the tag to the grasshoppers. These are tiny little grains of rice. They're slightly smaller than the ones that are used in dogs. And we build them a thing that looks a lot like a metal detector. But rather than detecting metal, it read the RFID tags.

[Nic] And does it read it-- basically, it reads it like a supermarket scanner, doesn't it? It's the same principle.

[Stu] Sort of.

[Nic] No. You can explain.

[Stu] Well, so the supermarkets scanners use a bar code. Obviously, it's printed onto the device. We didn't go print bar codes onto the grasshoppers. This is exactly the same technology as goes into a cat. So it's a little electronic tag which has an antenna. And the reader powers the tag up. And then it transmits its identity up.

And so the end result of this thing was that you could walk around scanning it over the landscape. And it would be able to tell you to tell you that you'd just passed over a grasshopper that you would probably never have seen. It may even be under a rock. And it just enabled them to catch a large areas of the landscape quickly, not on their hands and knees groveling around looking for grasshoppers, but just getting this little beep and away they go. So it sped up their work quite a lot.

[Nic] And what was it made of, Stu?

[Stu] It was made out of an off-the-shelf RFID reader. And I know you're getting at here--

[LAUGHING]

--and a custom made coil, and a crutch from a hospital.

[LAUGHING]

[Nic] And the reason that I'm getting at this is that I had the privilege of transporting said grasshopper detector on an airplane back to Christchurch in order to get it across to the Mackenzie. And so I had all manner of crazy questions around what was I transporting and why. And when you're trying to explain to airport security that don't worry, it's just a grasshopper detector, people are falling about laughing left, right, and center.

And also the scientists at the time phoned me and said would you mind just picking something up from Stu and the guys in the workshop, because I need to take it across the Mackenzie? I said no problem. And I know that a lot of the stuff you make is really tiny. So I was expecting like maybe a lunchbox. But no, instead I get gifted this hospital crutch with a big kind of loop welded on the end of it.

[Stu] Yeah. Getting questioned at security for airplanes is a big part of my job.

[Nic] Yeah.

[Stu] Yeah.

[Nic] I can imagine. So let's close the loop. Was it successful? Did it work?

[Stu] Yes, yep, yep. No, it's been really successful. So we've built a few more. And they're out being used pretty regularly. We've used them for snails as well. And it's one of those technologies that probably once the word gets around a little more, they'll be utilized more widely.

I think one of the technology that people tend to use for that stuff is to buy tiny, tiny little transmitters that cost a few hundred dollars. And the battery goes flat after a couple of weeks anyway. And so this was kind of an alternative way of doing that.

The chips themselves cost about $0.90, I think. So.

[Nic] Wow.

[Stu] Yeah. And last forever. So it's kind of a nice reuse of technology to do things in a slightly more cunning way.

[Nic] Stu, can you tell us about maybe what your weirdest day at work has been.

[Stu] Yeah. There's been a few. One I thought I might mention, because it was kind of an interesting day as well, was helping out with the Great Spotted Kiwi Project one time on the west coast and the Taramakau Valley. And we were trying to catch this great spotted kiwi. And I made the mistake-- maybe I was led into it-- of going underground into this large burrow to try and catch this great spotted kiwi which turned around and had a go at me so. Yeah. So being underground in a kiwi burrow and then suddenly finding yourself being attacked by this large, capable animal was not your standard engineer's day.

[Nic]: Were you getting pecked in the eyeball? Because I've seen colleagues go down those burrows, and so you're jammed in there, right? Shoulder to shoulder. You can't do much else but wriggle. And all I can picture is your face and an angry kiwi just like going for it.

[Stu] Yeah. This burrow was so big, I wasn't jammed in. I was just underground. And you know, a kiwi will take you a few leagues. They're capable animals. I've worked with great spots or that. People have this idea of kiwis being these little, gentle beasts of the forest. But not at all, they're big, and capable, and fast, and aggressive.

[Nic] And a great spot has got a foot span the size of my hand span.

[Stu] Yeah. They’re sizable animals. Yeah, yeah. My boss at the time said he didn't know people could reverse so quickly.

[LAUGHTER]

[Nic] That's brilliant. And it is true, isn't it? Just to sort of go sideways for a second, I know a ranger on the west coast who was working on maybe the rowi or create a rowi program. And there's a kiwi there they call Bruce Lee.

[Stu] Yeah.

[Nic] Because all kiwi have different personalities. And they would send her in to sort out Bruce Lee, just for fun I think. And it became like a traumatic experience getting attacked by a much smaller kiwi, in this instance.

[Stu] Yeah. I mean I've worked on-- I lived on the West Coast for a few years and helped out with the Okarito program with the rowi program of it. And in those days, there was a bird called Scooter who sounds a lot like Bruce Lee.

[Nic] Yeah.

[Stu] Yeah, yeah. Some of them are quite sneaky little fellows.

[Nic] Which is good, right? That's the whole-- you know, part of my job means I'm often involved in kiwi releases of young chicks that have been raised to a particular size. You want them to be the fighty ones, don't you, so they've got a much better chance of survival.

[Stu] Yeah, yeah. The stuff I've done with kiwi, I've always been amazed what capable animals they are. Another night of memory of great spots, a much more pleasant night, where I heard a great spot call over the other side of this massive beach log. And I climbed up on the beach log just to basically have a look. And it vanished in the dark.

And a few minutes later, I heard it moving way down the river. And this bird had moved off several hundred meters across loose gravel on a riverbed without shifting a stone. They're just so capable. And then they can be loud and aggressive when they want to be as well.

[Nic] Yeah. I've had a couple of lovely nights sitting in the middle of winter on the side of a hill in Arthur's Pass listening for great spots. Always amazed by great spots, because the girl great spots, to me, they kind of sound a bit like Paddy and Selma off The Simpsons, aye? They have a much more gravelly call. They sound like they've just smoked a packet of Holidays or something. And then they just kind of crack off into the night. But it's still a very surreal and exciting experience.

Can you tell me a little bit about your seabird sound systems?

[Stu] Yeah. It's again one of those bits of gear that aren't exactly high tech, but you can't go buy just anyway. So these are sound systems that were developed mostly for bringing seabirds into islands that have had pest eradications done. So these are islands that would have once been teeming with seabirds, been wiped out after years of rats, and cats, and the rest of those nasties. So after some people come through and removed all the pests, which is obviously the hard bit, this piece of equipment gets installed.

And fundamentally, what it is a big speaker that sits on the side of a hill and plays seabird calls. It sounds ridiculous, but they can be incredibly effective. And so they draw seabirds back to the islands that have been eradicated so we can get the populations established sooner.

One of the other things we do with them is there might be birds just starting to come back to the island anyway, and the seabird sound systems get them all into one place. So that makes them a bit easier to manage, and deal with, and establish their sort of colony ecology a bit sooner.

[Nic] The Taiko program would be a good example of that, wouldn't it.

[Stu] And they've been used on Taiko. Yeah. Chatham Island Petrel, I think is another one that they've been used for. I think we had an ad up a while ago. It must be about a hundred of them. And they're in Hawaii, and Australia, and Fiji, and Tonga. And I think we've sent some systems off to the Seychelles many years ago. So they're quite widely spread around the country and around the world.

[Nic] And they obviously have to be specific to the song or the call of that particular species.

[Stu] Yeah. So they use just a memory card that people put the files onto, the sound files, and the thing sits on the side of the hill. Sounds trivial, but making something that can sit on the side of a hill in Cook Strait or you name it for years on end playing calls without getting blown to pieces is a little bit of an engineering challenge.

[Nic] So tell me about that. What does it look like? Because you're right, I would just go, oh, yeah, you made a system and you stuck on the hill. But you're right. You've got to put it in some pretty rough climate kind of areas and habitats. What does it look like to engineer that?

[Stu] Everything's just in a waterproof case, bolted down very well, and waterproof connectors, all those kinds of things.

[Nic] So when it comes to the seabird sound systems, the one that kind of made headlines almost around the world was the story of Nigel the gannet. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your gannet sound system?

[Stu] Yeah so the gannet system on Mana Island was one of the first ones I ever installed. And so this one was a sound system. So it was sitting and playing gannet calls. But it also included some concrete gannets that had been built and painted by schoolkids. I had nothing to do with that part of it.

[Nic] As a visual sort of cue.

[Stu] As a visual cue as well. And poor old Nigel turned up after a few years, the only gannet that even turned up and got quite close to some of the concrete gannets. And I don't think it went very well for Nigel in the end.

[Nic] Stu, if we talk about some of your acoustic recorders, you've been in the news recently for discovering a whole new population of haast tokoeka one of our rarest species of kiwi, right? Tell me about that.

[Stu] Well, I can't really take credit for it. We made some recorders. And we put them in a box. And we sent them to some people who went and found some Haast kiwi.

[Nic] who put them in the bush and found a whole new population of our rarest species of kiwi! That's amazing.

[Stu] Oh, yeah. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, yeah. And the team's chuffed when they hear those stories. These things that they've built and they're developed in this very dry environment in the workshop are going out there and doing amazing things.

[Nic] Saving the things.

[Stu] Yeah, but we have to give some credit to the people who actually did the work.

[Nic] And I suppose that to me that's the interesting part. If we're looking into the future of inventor HQ, whatever you want to call it, what does this big data look like out there? You're, essentially, you guys are creating the eyes and the ears of what's happening on the ground where rangers may not even get to or scientists. So what's it going to look like in the future?

[Stu] Yeah. That's a good question. I mean the some of the technologies that are coming along now are just going to be such huge gains for conservation. So some of the satellites that are being put up are going to provide low-cost data from anywhere. It just means that we can start really thinking about looking everywhere and knowing what's going on all the time. It has to be applied in a scientific way and a careful way that we're not just gathering data for the sake of gathering data, but the potential is huge for us to know so much more about what's going on.

[Nic] And that's the whole thing, right? We're not gathering data for the sake of gathering data, because what you're doing is you're creating-- and like I'm a visual person. So in my mind, I can see a map of New Zealand with little lights going off. You know, like Bing. We just found a yellow-bellied sapsucker over here. And then you can divert your resource to protect the thing. So you're actually making us more and more efficient at saving more of the things more of the time.

[Stu] It's about giving the people who are doing the work the information so that they can choose the right interventions at the right time to make the best effect. And conservation is always resource limited, always will be. There's always going to be more than we can possibly do. And so making ourselves as efficient as possible in what we choose to do is always going to be crucial.

[Nic] Well, I think we're in very good hands. I have a particular bent for saving the little things. And if we can be sticking little transmitters the size of a grain of rice onto a grasshopper to protect where it lives, then the world's our oyster for saving the x thousand others that we need to look after as well.

[Stu] Yeah. One of my focuses at the moment, we have been doing bird conservation for so long. And we've got so many well-evolved tools and things that we need, whereas for the little guys, maybe it's something we haven't thought about so much. And so there's a lot of room for me there in developing tools that we just don't have. Some of the basic tools for managing some of the little species, some of things that have maybe been under the radar for a while, so quite focused on doing those sorts of things at the moment.

[Nic] Brilliant. Thank you so much, Stu. That's just been absolutely fascinating. And we look forward to hearing where you guys take your inventions next. Thank you.

[Stu] OK. No problem. Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[Nic] That's it for this episode. If you like what you heard, show us some love with a five star rating. The DOC Sounds of Science podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts, so subscribe now and never miss an episode.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[Australasian Gannet bird song]

---

Transcript for episode 3

[KAKI/BLACK STILT BIRDSONG]

[BELL]

Nic: Today we have lizard expert Lynn Adams on the show. Lynn, let's talk lizards.

Lynn: Kia ora Nic. Kō Lynn Adams tōku ingoa, Kei Te Papa Atawhai ahau e mahi ana. My name's Lynn Adams, and I work for the Department of Conservation.

Nic: Kia ora Lynn, let's talk a little bit about your role. From my understanding, you're the lizard queen. But can you [LAUGHTER] just tell us a little bit about your role at DOC.

Lynn: I often get princess, but not queen. [LAUGHING] So, I'm a technical advisor here at Department of Conservation which essentially means that I give advice to people around conservation programs and how to recover things. But my specialty is around lizards, New Zealand lizards.

Nic: What got you into that? What did you study? What was your passion that led you here?

Lynn: Well, to be honest, my passion was birds and I shouldn't tell my lizard friends that. [NIC LAUGHS] And it's possibly still true. And so, I went to university for about five years. I did a Masters degree. And I did it on kaki/black stilts, because I really loved birds. [LAUGHS]

And then I got a job in the department and realized that, actually, we've got quite a lot of people who are really good at looking after birds. But we had very few people looking after lizards. So, I got a real insight into some of the problems that we've got with New Zealand lizards and realized that we've got this big gap in our conservation management. And so that lead me down the path around conservation management of lizards, New Zealand lizards.

Nic: I think birds do get a lot of attention so I for one am quite glad that you kind of diverted course off the birds and onto the lizards. How many lizard species have we got in New Zealand? I know this is a very complex, controversial kind of question. But roughly, ballpark, what are we looking at here?

Lynn: So, you're right. You'd think that someone who's an expert on lizards would know that sort of basic question but it's actually really hard. So, we've probably got around 109.

Nic: Species?

Lynn: Species. 109 species. And the reason it's really hard to know exactly how many is we're still finding new ones. So, I'm not quite sure in that 109 whether I've have accounted for the new species that we've found in Kahurangi a year ago. And then there's three new species found in Central Otago and I'm pretty sure that's not on the account too. So, we might have to add four more species to that in the near future.

Nic: How can it be possible though that in this modern world-- you know New Zealand isn't terra incognito, we kind of have mapped out most places in the country. How on Earth could we still be stumbling over new species and not have seen them before?

Lynn: Actually, in the lizard world, we probably are a little bit terra incognito. In that there's lots of places that we don't go and of the few people who do go there, they're possibly doing other things and not looking at their feet where the lizards are.

The other thing about it is that lizards are super sneaky. So, they're really good at hiding in vegetation and they're really good at avoiding detection. And so even when we go out looking for them, we really struggle to find them when we're looking for them. And it's actually one of our big problems, that we can't reliably find them. So, we can't ever say that there's definitely none here.

Nic: Just as a side note, I'm also a lizard nerd. I have quite an affinity to our lizards particularly our geckos. But it fascinates me that New Zealand always gets described as a land of birds. I suppose because they're so visible to us. Do you think in reality we would best be described as a land of lizards?

Lynn: We're just unique in everything so our lizards are super unique. Certainly, pre-European times, there would've been lizards everywhere. For a lot of us who go to the high country on the South Island, there's some really amazing hotspots up in the high country there. And that's a sort of diversity and abundance that we would have seen before predators hit New Zealand.

Nic: What is it about our geckos and skinks that make them different to their cousins in the tropics, for example?

Lynn: So, there’s the obvious things, like they give birth to live young. Most of the lizards oversees lay eggs and then they hatch. Our New Zealand ones don't. They give birth to these beautiful little miniature lizards. And then quite a lot of the species have some quite intensive parental care, we suspect. So, we just don't know that much about most of our species. But I won't be surprised if a lot of our species have quite intense parental care, which is kind of not a thing that we associate with reptiles or with lizards.

We kind of think that they're cold and they don't do much thinking and that they don't do the things that mammals and birds do. But I actually suspect we're a little bit off on that thinking.

Nic: So, you were a bird specialist, actually on one of my favourite species, the black stilt or kaki. How long have you been involved with lizards and what was it that really kind of grabbed your attention and made you realize that somebody needed to care about them?

Lynn: Well, to be honest, I spent most of my childhood roaming around the Canterbury high country. And s,o I was constantly encountering lizards. And so, I admit that I was right into lizards right from an early age. But I think the thing that really grabbed from a conservation perspective was over time seeing some of those populations disappear. But then also, seeing some of the amazing diversity that we've got.

So, on some of our offshore islands that I got to when I started working for DOC, I started seeing some of those massive skinks that were completely different from anything I've ever encountered on the mainland. And they were awesome. Big. Big dinosaurs who look at you as if they might eat you. [NIC LAUGHS] They look over their shoulder and look up at you and I feel a little bit uneasy when they look at me. [LAUGHS]

And to give you a sense of scale, they're not huge though. So, if you think about some of the Australian reptiles, they're nothing like that. My understanding is that the one animal that's kind of the record length, if an average sized person lays out their arm and measures from their elbow to their tips of their fingers, that's how long the animal is. So that's an animal called a robust skink. It's in captivity, which is why we know it so well. And I might have to admit that it's possibly been looked after too well. It might be a wee bit overweight. But it's huge, really big animal.

Nic: There was a bigger one though, wasn't there? A bigger species of gecko.

Lynn: Yes.

Nic: Do you know about that one?

Lynn: So, it's called a Delcourt's gecko. It's extinct. So, it was this huge gecko that roamed around New Zealand. And who knows what it did. But it's gone. And I suspect that there is a lot of species that have gone that we have never recorded and that we will never know about. Because they're so small, relatively. So small we don't get the fossil records. We don't get bone deposits in our limestone caves like we do with a lot of our birds.

Nic: What's the hardest part of your job in terms of looking after these lizards?

Lynn: Oh, the hardest part is that we don't know how to manage them. So, when I say that, it's a little bit of a headline statement. But it feels like we're in the place that bird conservation was in the 1960s. And by that, I mean we actually know a lot about ecology in New Zealand that we didn't know the 1960s. But we don't have management tools to protect lizards from predators.

So, the predator control that we do around the country which is amazing and super effective at protecting our birds is just not good enough for lizards. And so, our lizards are declining, still, in the places that we're doing pest control. And so, in that way, I feel a little bit helpless in that we don't just have an instant solution for management of lizards. So, when people come to me and say, we want to look after our lizards in their backyard, I don't have a silver bullet. I don't have a magic answer.

That's kind of sad. But it's also where I get a lot of the energy for the job as well because that's where we need to go. We need to develop those tools. And we need to develop our techniques. We need to get better at pest control.

Nic: Yeah. And I think when it comes to lizards, the real challenge for people is understanding it's not your normal suite of predators necessarily that are impacting on them. Is it?

Lynn: That's right. And so, we think of predators in New Zealand, commonly the first thing that comes to mind is stoats and rats and maybe we might be thinking about cats in the lizard context. But actually, the information that we've got suggests that mice are the worst predators. And it's because they're super productive. They can produce lots of babies. And they have lots of litters every year. And they feed on stuff that's common, like grass seed. And they just go through these crazy explosions that our pest control tools just can't get on top of.

Nic: How does a mouse eat a lizard?

Lynn: Lizards are cold blooded. They work by sitting in the sun, as we know. We've probably seen them sitting in the sun. And that's the way they warm up. So, on a cold day, they literally can't move. And so, on a cold day, there’s these little bundles of protein that mice can come up and nibble on.

And we occasionally see lizards that we've caught that have been preyed on by mice. And they'll just be chewed away. It's a little wee gnawing chews on the side of the body that ultimately kills them.

Nic: While it's still alive.

Lynn: Terrible. It's terrible.

Nic: That is awful.

Lynn: That's what's happening in New Zealand, just with ordinary sized mice with our lizards. We just don't see it.

Nic: Yeah, that's a major. And I do know that it's something that our scientists in the department are wrestling with right now, isn't it? Is how we're going to get our heads around what we do about the mice. I think another predator that always goes under the radar and always ends up being controversial every time I mention it-- and boy does that Beatrix Potter have a lot to answer for-- is the blimmin hedgehog. Tell us about what hedgehogs do to lizards.

Lynn: So, hedgehogs are pretty cute. But they do exactly the same as the mice. So, when those lizards are cold and they can't move, those hedgehogs will be the opportunistic feeders. And they'll be gnawing away at the lizard.

Nic: I'm always fascinated by people who-- and this will be controversial, so I look forward to your feedback. Often people will talk about leaving out bread and milk for the hedgehogs or cat biscuits or whatever. And my response to that, is would you leave something out for a stoat or a rat?

Lynn: Exactly.

Nic: Because it's the same thing.

Lynn: It's exactly the same thing. And it's just that we're not seeing it. But like they don't attack things in the middle of day when we can see it. They are gnawing away those lizards when they can't move. And so, yeah, we just, yeah--

Nic: Because they shut down at night, don't they? They're basically solar powered. So, they're just like lying there while a hedgehog on its stumpy legs is just-- ugh. So, take home message, get your hedgehog feeding off your--

Lynn: Stop your hedgehog feeding.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: Off your menu. Put a trap in your backyard. I think the most obvious impact that you can see or experience in terms of predators on lizards is when you go to places where there are no predators. And so not to show off, but yesterday I was on Hauturu-o-Toi or little barrier island. And I think there's something like 14 species of reptile on that one island, all happily co-habitating in their various ecological niches right across the island. And all doing really well because there's no predators, right?

Lynn: Exactly. And so there would have been-- there's heaps of species, lots of diversity. And I bet you when you jumped off your boat, you were almost kicking them out of the way as you walked through the grass. And that's the sort of abundance that we just don't see in the mainland. But that's normal. That's how New Zealand should be. We should be flushing them away as we walk through the grass.

Nic: What's something about the work that you do that you wish everybody out there knew?

Lynn: I wish they knew a lot more than they do just about lizards, realize how amazing they are and they're not just the little brown jobs in your backyard. In fact, there's an amazing book out that everyone should have at home. It's a handbook. And you can flick through it. I flicked through it for hours on end and looked at every single lizard. And you'll see the diversity there.

I also really wish people could see some of the habitat destruction that's still happening. So, we're absolutely losing populations through predation. But we've also got habitat loss. And habitat in New Zealand, we generally don't think that we're losing habitat. But actually, in the lizard context, we are. And it's because there's so many species they live in such diverse places.

Nic: I think you've touched on something really important there Lynn. Because I think we're a bit simplistic in New Zealand in terms of what we think the conservation areas are. We tend to think they're at the bush. So, if they're the bush, the forest, that's where the nature is. And it's not everywhere else and of course, the lizards are everywhere else aren’t they. They’re in the bush, but the places that I think of in terms of being perfect homes for particularly some of our green gecko species are generally what farmers would consider scrub. You know? So, the sort of manuka, kanuka, coprosma, matagouri that kind of Muehlenbeckia here, that stuff is a bit messy. It's kind of the stuff you want to tidy up.

Lynn: The good news about that, though, for gardeners is that messy is great. Lizards love messy.

Nic: I think maybe that's why I have such an affinity to lizards then. Because it's that messy is good.

Lynn: You're allowed to be messy. You're allowed.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: Mess is good. Get out there and mess up your gardens. Great. So, what do you think's been your most satisfying experience professionally when it comes to all the lizard work that you've been involved with?

Lynn: So that's a tricky one. Maybe I need to wait a few years. But I think Chesterfield skink's been a pretty amazing project. And we're still a wee way away from saving those species. So, Chesterfield skink lives on this fairly unremarkable piece of beach just north of Hotikika. It's a nationally critical species. And we've done a reasonable amount of research on it over the last three to four years.

Nic: Is it the one with the curly wurly tail?

Lynn: Curly wurly. [LAUGHS]

Nic: I love this one.

Lynn: Yes, curly wurly. So that was a name that we gave to a skink. It curls its tail. Its whole body actually curls up into this-- it's like a curly fry.

Nic: Yes, or like Mr. Whippy ice cream.

Lynn: Or a turd, I've been told.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: Seems we're always going to go there in this podcast.

Lynn: That aside, so the reason it's got a nice curly wurly tail is because we think it's probably arboreal. So, they use that tail just like monkeys do to grip onto forests. And so, the species is now living on the coast, on the beach. It was probably coastal forest back in the day. And it's all been cut down. It's lost most of its habitat. It's probably been preyed upon by all the mice and cats and hedgehogs in the world. And it's now down to a population of 200.

We had a major setback last year with Cyclone Fehi which I'm sure lots people are going to remember that one. It was a really damaging cyclone. And what happened at our Chesterfield skink site was that on the we thought was safe beach site, there were these massive waves, massive tides which overwashed them. The whole entire population was overwashed over a couple of tides.

And so, I got that news when I was sitting in Invercargill doing some other work. And I actually thought that we'd lost the whole species. So that was my worst day.

Nic: Wow

Lynn: There were a few tears. [LAUGHS]

Nic: I'm not surprised.

Lynn: There were a few tears. But when we realized the damage that had happened, I jumped on the phone to Auckland Zoo. Auckland Zoo said, hmm I think we could probably help you there. Give me a day to figure out whether we can take some animals into captivity for you as a safeguard.

And a day later, we had a plan to get some animals up into the zoo into captivity where they'd be safe. So, we ended up doing that over a couple of months. And it turned out that the-- I don't know what those skinks were doing during that storm. But it turned out that most of them have probably survived.

Nic: What?

Lynn: Yeah. I just don't know what they would have done. Like, that was--

Nic: Under saltwater?

Lynn: Under saltwater.

Nic: Twice.

Lynn: Pounding seas, like anyone on the coast at the time told me the stories of what the sea was like at the time. My best guess is that they live in burrows and they just hang on. And maybe there was some air pockets down there. But I don't even really know how they breathed during that time. [LAUGHS]

So, we've got a secure population up at Auckland Zoo. And they're doing a great job of looking after those. And our next job-- so this is why the story isn't over yet. The next job is for us to build a fence, to find a place that we could put them that's safe from storms and to get those animals in Auckland Zoo back into the wild in a safe place, away from predators.

Nic: So, you've got basically an entire species sitting in the zoo.

Lynn: Not quite. So, we did one of our research trips just down there recently. And we've got-- and there'll be more-- but we found 52 animals down there. So, we've at least got 100 animals. There's probably more. So, between 100 and 200 animals remaining.

Nic: Still, that's getting right down there.

Lynn: It's pretty dire.

Nic: We hear a lot about kakapo. And there are 147 adults. And you know, everybody's pretty freaked out about a number that low. And yet, here are these populations of skinks that probably no one's ever heard of that are down to the same level.

Lynn: And to be honest, because we've been talking about Chesterfield skinks for a wee while, and Chesterfield skinks is probably relatively well known, compared to some of the other species which some of them are in worse situations.

Nic: I think that's the challenge, though, isn't it Lynn, for you guys? When you're working as an ecologist, when you get populations or species down to such low numbers or in such sort of fragmented places, any impact in addition to that becomes essentially a threat to their very survival right?

Lynn: Yeah, and a storm, a cyclone, was the last thing we were thinking of with Chesterfield skinks. So, we were focused from day one. We really knew nothing about those species. We didn't even know how to identify them. So, every animal that we took, we had to have confirmed genetically.

Luckily, we have figured out how to identify them. And we didn't know the breeding. We didn't know the extent of where they were. We didn't know what their threats were. We had some best guesses about mice. So, there were a whole heap of questions that we were trying to answer in those first three years. And storm damage was the last question on our mind. [LAUGHS] And then suddenly, the storm hit. And so, we had to completely change tact and change everything that we were planning for for that species.

Nic: Yeah and I guess another kind of growing risk through climate change impacts on weather is something to keep an eye out.

Lynn: And I just look at all the storms, like I am looking out for storms now. They are getting more frequent.

Nic: You have to get pretty good at lizard identification. And I know that one of the problems with trying to discern what the different species are is they all look the same, particularly some of those skinks. I've talked to you guys before and you've said things to me like, oh, no, you've got that wrong. You count the scales behind the eyeball. [LYNN LAUGHS]

So, your lizard ID has to be pretty switched on, doesn't it? Tell us a little bit about what's involved in visually identifying some of those lizards.

Lynn: It's hard because it's hard. So even our experts who do count the scales, one of the tools we use to figure out who is different and who's not, but even those guys who do that are often stumped. So, they are kind of all the same.

But when you get to know them, they're really different. So, it's like anything, if you know something really well, you can start to see the differences. And sometimes when we're first starting out, we find something new, we think it's new. It of kind of feels different.

And it doesn't look quite the same. And it's doing different stuff. And it's got a slightly-- it's got two more scales than it should have, we often have to conform with genetic techniques. And we've got some really sophisticated genetic techniques now that can tell us definitively the different species.

Once we know that, we can then split them into those two groups or whatever. And we can start seeing the differences by eye. So, we can count the scales. And we can confirm that it should have two extra scales behind its eyeball.

And we can start seeing some of the colour differences. We start seeing differences in the proportions of the body shape. It's really subtle. And it sounds tediously boring. But it's actually really exciting [NIC LAUGHS] when you can tell a lizard apart from another one.

[LAUGHTER]

Nic: So, we have had a question come to us from Twitter. And somebody has asked us, what's the biggest threat to tropical lizard species?

Lynn: I suspect habitat loss, to be honest. I think in a lot of countries, habitat loss is still a massive, massive problem.

Nic: And maybe climate change.

Lynn: Climate change. Yes, so interestingly, some lizards can change their sex depending on the temperature that the eggs are incubated at. That still blows my mind. I've known that for a little while. But it still blows my mind. So, climate change will have a massive impact on those sorts of species where warming will create more boys than girls.

Nic: Yeah and we've seen that in tuatara, which is not a lizard, by the way, which is a reptile. I know that in some populations, tuatara are already skewing towards more males hatching as a result of that warming of the soil where the eggs are.

Lynn: Yeah. In that particular case, it's probably because the vegetation has been degraded through various activities through the decades. It's not looking great for tuatara in New Zealand.

Nic: What should people do if they find a lizard?

Lynn: The most common way is that their cat brings in a lizard. So, the best thing to do is obviously to take it off the cat and then release it into a safe area. So, don't release it to a place where the cat can catch it again. But if you've got some of those divaricating shrubs or spiky shrubs that your cat doesn't like going into, that's the place to release it.

The other really good thing to do, if you can, is if you are sneaky, if your cat hasn't got hold of it, is to try and sneak up and take a good photo of it, especially if you're not an urban area. Like urban areas, we pretty much know what species we've got. It's still useful to get information from urban areas.

But if you're in a remote place, you're out tramping in the back blocks of nowhere and you see a lizard, that is actually a really good thing, gives us our first clues about where to look for lizard populations. So, if you could take a photo, please try and make it clear. I know it's really hard. But so many times we get blurry photos of this stick-like thing. It's not helpful. [LAUGHS]

And if you can't get a good photo, because I do understand it's really difficult, they're moving and it's hard to get close to them, definitely send in the report. Send in whatever. Send in an email to your local DOC office and tell them as much as you can about at the location, what sort of habitat it was in, what sort of weather conditions it was, who you are so we can go back to you and talk to you about it if it's something really interesting.

All of that information gives us our best clues. And it's that sort of record that leads us to new species. Like we've had rock climbers who have said, oh, we saw these lizards while we were rock climbing but we never got any photos.

Nic: Sunbathed skinks.

Lynn: New species, sunbathed skinks.

Nic: Yeah. That's awesome. And I think that's really cool to think out there that the public could be contributing to some new scientific discovery and that you guys are really keen to hear from them about what they're seeing out there.

Lynn: Yeah, back country like the South Island in particular, but not exclusively South Island high country and the mountains and the really remote places. We've got no record-- literally no records-- of lizards from Southern Fiordland. So, anyone who's in there and sees anything is going to be hugely significant.

Nic: It's been really amazing talking to you, Lynn. Because you are describing a new generation of conservation pioneers. You know, you were describing things that I read about when the Wildlife Service were out doing the same surveying for birds, trying to work out how to solve the problems of predation, all that kind of stuff. You're quite right. We're kind of poised on the precipice of exactly the same story now, but for lizards.

And I feel like we're in good hands. I feel like the passion that you guys have for these lizards is sitting us in a pretty good stead, given those massive challenges-- the mice, the hedgehogs, the impacts of climate change. I feel like we probably are going to crack this right?

Lynn: Yeah. And you know, the thing that I'm really looking forward to is all of the people after me who are going to stand on my shoulders and look down at me and go, why didn't you guys know this. [LAUGHING] That'll be great. I'd love to have everyone, in a few generation's time, saying, Lynn, why didn't you do this with our lizards and have all those tools available and lizards running all over the lands, us flushing them away as we walk through the grass. Wouldn't that be awesome?

Nic: That would be amazing. I look forward to that, too. And I can't think of a more perfect way to wrap up. So, Lynn, thank you so much for your time and for your passion and energy and expertise. I look forward to hearing about your next discovery. Thank you.

---

Transcript for episode 2

[TUI DAWN CHORUS BIRDSONG]

[BELL]

Nic: Kia ora koutou I’m Nic Toki, New Zealand’s Threatened Species Ambassador, and this is the DOC Sounds of Science podcast!

[MUSIC]

Kia ora! Ko Nic Toki tēnei. He kōnae ipurangi tēnei, e pā ana ki nga Sounds of Science.

[MUSIC]

Every episode, we talk about work being done behind the scenes by DOC’s technical experts, scientists, rangers and the experts in between.

[MUSIC]

Today, I am very excited. We have our Department of Conservation vet on the show, Kate McInnes!

Kate: Tēnā koe Nic. Kō Kate McInnes tōku ingoa, Kei Te Papa Atawhai ahau e mahi ana.

Nic: Tino pai! I want to talk to you desperately, because I've always been a big fan of you and your work, and especially because you've got such a unique role in the Department. So, can you tell us a bit about what your role is and what it entails?

Kate: Yeah, Nic. I mean, I have the most amazing job. It's incredibly varied. There's no typical day. So one day, I might be writing a document with bureaucratic language. Next day, I'm out in the field collecting swabs from a lizard.

And then the day after that, I'm teaching some people how to bandage a bird's wing. So really, my job is massively varied and it just covers anything to do with wildlife disease, health, preventative medicine, that kind of stuff.

Nic: That is such a huge array of work and there's only one of you, so how on earth do you make that work?

Kate: Yeah, really good question, Nic. So there's actually 1.2 of me now. I have another vet one day a week, and she takes care of all the wildlife rehabilitation stuff. So that is her portfolio, and I deal with everything else.

But I like to see myself as a cog in a wheel. So it's not actually just me. I have this fantastic network across DOC, MPI, conservation workers, universities, vets who do wildlife work. So really, I'm just there making it all happen and giving a central focus to it, but then like farming the work out to all the fantastic people who are interested.

Nic: How did you start your kind of career in this field?

Kate: When I was a kid growing up outside of Brisbane, Australia, I loved Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. And I wanted to be a park ranger, like Ranger Hammond and have my own helicopter and fly around. And then I got into vet school because I had lots of pets and loved animals.

So I did that for five years-- did dogs, and cats, and whatever wildlife came in the clinic. And then I came to New Zealand because I wanted to be a park ranger. I wanted to get back to what I wanted as a kid.

And so I did that for a couple of years, working for DOC. And then the Kākāpō Team came along and said, would you like to be a ranger and a vet? And I was like, dream come true.

So they put me in a helicopter, flew me out to Whenua Hou and my career began.

Nic: Oh. And you would've just been imagining old Skippy the Bush Kangaroo--

Kate: Absolutely.

Nic: --that whole trip.

Kate: Yeah.

Nic: As a little aside, someone told me that-- because I used to watch Skippy the Bush Kangaroo …  I imagine, some of our listeners probably never heard of it. But it was a great show, for those of us in the slightly older, Gen X …

Kate: Oh no, I've given my age away.

Nic: --kind of bracket.

[LAUGHING]

All you millennials out there might be struggling. Someone told me that you know those scenes where you see Skippy, like flying the helicopter, that it was one of those bottle openers that had kangaroo paws as the handle.

Kate: Yeah, it wasn't the whole kangaroo flying that helicopter. No.

Nic: Childhood dreams crushed in an instant.

Kate: Crushed.

Nic: So what's the difference, I suppose, from being a wildlife vet, particularly for New Zealand native species-- you're probably the only person in the world, really, with those kinds of skills-- to domestic animal vet? 

Kate: Yeah, completely different. And I guess, it's a big mind switch, especially-- so you've got vets in clinic who do dogs and cats, and it's all about you and the pet and the owner. So it's a fairly small group of people making decisions.

Then you get vets who work in a clinic who do wildlife. And they then have to consider what DOC wants for the wildlife. And then you have me, and I'm dealing with populations. So I'm not dealing with just one lizard or one kākāpō.

I'm dealing with the whole group of them, either on the island or on the mainland. And so, I've got to be a bit of an ecologist as well as a vet. And it's quite a mind switch to come around to that. But it's something that I'm really comfortable with, and I really enjoy doing.

Nic: Actually I want to pick up on that point about populations versus individuals, because it's something that we strike often in conservation that's quite hard for the general public, I think, sometimes to understand. That we are focusing on net benefits to populations. 

So what is the greater good for the whole of the population? And I think that can be really challenging when you've got an individual animal that can't be fixed, for people to understand how that fits into that broader picture.

Kate: Yeah. It's, I guess-- for me, it's quite helpful to have Janelle Ward, my .2 vet taking on the wildlife rehabilitation, because that's the one-on-one stuff. And it is still really important.

I think we need somewhere for injured wildlife or sick wildlife to go to be helped. And sometimes, it can make a difference. So like for a Kererū, they spread seeds. And so if we can keep them going in urban populations, we will have revegetation going on.

So my backyard is actually half an acre and it's all revegetated, because there's been seeds in the soil or seeds brought in by other birds. So that's just a little local bit of conservation.

But then, the population side is quite a different approach, and it is that big picture thing. And so you need to be able to switch your thinking from ‘I have to save every individual’ to, ‘if I spend $10,000 fixing the leg of this takahe, will that actually fix the population?’

Or should I spend that $10,000 on 100 new traps and someone to run them, and we have 10,000 hectares of land for them to be breeding on. So it's all a bit of a balance really. And I don't think there's one perfect way.

I think we need to respect both and have a bit of both.

Nic: Use all the tools.

Kate: yep, all the tools.

Nic: I imagine-- so, a bit like you, I had a very similar childhood-- lots and lots of pets, loving all the animals, bringing home all manner of things that my mom refused to accept as pets. Very sorry about the rat, mom.

Kate: Oops.

Nic: But one of the reasons that I chose to go on to do zoology and not follow a vet career was I knew that I couldn't deal with some of the aspects of being a vet, that it would break my heart. What is the hardest part of your job, do you think?

Kate: So I guess, it's the ones you can't fix, and the problems that you get to too late. So I think that the, possibly, most satisfying but also worst experience of my kākāpō career was when we had some birds die.

And it was a very, very difficult time. But because we were prepared for it and we had systems in place, we were able to respond very, very quickly. We had external people like Massey University doing necropsies for us so we could diagnose what was wrong.

We had community people donating stuff, whether we needed it or not. They just wanted to be part of fixing the problem. And we had this random company contact us and say, hey, we've got a vaccine that will work for that bacteria. Do you want it? We'll fly it to you tomorrow.

So it was just like everyone got behind that. So it was a massive response. But it meant-- well, it was a great test of our system, and the system worked really well. But it was also just tragic, tragic time.

Nic: What is something about your work that you wish everybody out there in the general public knew or understood?

Kate: The thing I always say to the people and I want them to understand is no one works in a vacuum, and it takes a village to do everything. And so the thing I really enjoy and I want to promote the most is these connections between the researchers and the vets and the conservationists, because the more people you have doing that, the more work we get done.

So for example, when we're investigating a disease, we often don't have a test that will detect it. And so you then go out to these networks and you find oh, someone's doing a PhD on gut bacteria, and they can run a next gen sequencing system, which is just like the gold standard for testing.

And they'll do it for free. And suddenly you've got these amazing technological advances that you can't always know about because you can't know everything. But someone else comes along and shows you a new way to do it, and then you get a diagnosis that you never could have got by yourself.

So yeah, that's one of the best parts of my job really.

Nic: Yeah, I mean, you're kind of lucky because you're right at the cutting edge with those connections of some of the real game changers I suppose in wildlife vet science.

Kate: Yeah. Well, and I think for that-- using the Hoiho example in Dunedin, they're a huge part of the local economy and the local identity. And they are actually in quite a bit of trouble at the moment.

So we've got three different diseases that are affecting them. We've got a corynebacterium, which is a bacteria that they get in the mouth and it causes these big ulcers in the chicks’ mouths. And a lot of them will die. 

We haven't got a cure for that yet. And then we've also got avian malaria, which probably came over with exotic species, and it's been spread all around the country because it's in blackbirds and sparrows and thrushes. So it's everywhere.

And last year and this year, we've had a big problem because of the big rains. We've got lots of mosquitoes and malaria has gotten into penguins. And then we also have what we're calling an unexplained mortality, but we think it's a marine biotoxin.

And every now and then, we'll get a few penguins die of it. Or one year, we had many-- like, we had dozens of penguins die. And so the pressures of those diseases-- one of those could be enough to push a rare or endangered species to extinction.

But all three at once hammering these poor little Hoiho in one area, I'm actually really concerned about what the future is for those birds in that area. And so those 24 starving penguins that Lisa Argilla is looking after at the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital, that might be vital to keeping this population in Otago and actually turning around the problem.

So we really rely on people to be doing that work.

Nic: Yeah, in that instance, they matter, don't they?

Kate: Yes.

Nic: They seriously matter. And you just touched on something that I think is really key to your work, my work. So I'm always on the lookout for what's happening to our threatened species. And it's that cumulative impact of things like disease or increased predation or whatever.

A species or a population can track along and it can deal with those kind of stochastic events. It can deal with random things coming and taking out a couple-- because that's part of how population kind of treks.

But what it can't deal with is when those numbers get squished down to really low levels and then they get a disease and then they get another disease, that's almost a fast track towards the extinction cliff, isn't it?

Kate: Yep.

Nic: So therefore, your work and the work of the wildlife vets around the country, becomes priority.

Kate: Yeah. And I mean, I think that's a really good point, because I've talked to ecologists who go oh, no, diseases are natural, so they should be in the population. And therefore, we shouldn't worry about them.

And that's fine if you've got a massive population and they've got all the food and habitat and no predators or natural predators. But as soon as you start tweaking all those factors, you're just putting more and more pressure on. And that's when disease can turn around and become the problem.

Nic: Apart from the unfortunate circumstances of not just one, but three diseases for the Hoiho, what are some of the other diseases that are working on or looking into?

Kate: So we get quite a few undiagnosed things. So we'll have some gulls die off somewhere. And often, it comes back to nutrition. So it'll be a El Nino year and that's just not enough food out there.

We have salmonella cropping up, not usually as a disease, just as an incidental finding when we're translocating animals and we're testing them to make sure they're not going to be Typhoid Mary and spread a new disease where we let them go.

But we did have, actually, salmonella twice in the hihi population on Tiritiri Matangi Island. And so that was really interesting. The first time we'd never detected that before in hihi. And then suddenly we had a mum and her three chicks die.

And we knew that because there is people there monitoring every single bird and every single nest box. So it was a site where we actually knew what was going on.

Nic: How does a hihi get salmonella? Do they eat a bad sushi or something?

Kate: Such a good question.

[LAUGHING]

Kate: That's right.

Nic: Because I remember salmonella from my student flatting days.

Kate: Uh-oh.

Nic: But how does it get into our wildlife?

Kate: That one was really, really interesting, because the, I guess, the health department is really interested in what salmonella we have when it turns up. So if you send a swab to a lab and they grow salmonella, it will go to ESR and they will type it and tell you exactly which salmonella it is, because there are hundreds of different strains.

And this was a strain that had only once been seen in New Zealand, in Tauranga. And all we could surmise was that it had come in through-- and this is horribly blaming the tourists-- but we were trying to come up with a logical explanation.  

You get lots of tourists on Tiritiri Matangi. It had only been seen once. It was probably in someone who had been visiting the country. And so we think somehow they hadn't used the toilet properly on the island, and it had gotten into the water supply, or something like that, and gotten into these hihi.

And then once it got into the hihi, because we have feeders for them, that was a site where they could spread it to others. So once again, it's difficult to know exactly how many it affected, because you don't always find all the bodies, because they're out in a forest.

But there was an ecologist working on them at the time and he calculated that up to 25% of the population would have died in that outbreak, which is an outrageous number when you've got such a small number on an island.

Nic: Well, and again, a population or a species that had actually gone extinct on the mainland and been extinct for 100 years.

Kate: exactly. 

Nic: Just touching on weird equipment-- you mentioned equipment, and I have a favourite exhibit at Te Papa. And every time I go to Te Papa, I go and see it. It is by far the most bizarre conservation tool. You couldn't make that stuff up.

And my favourite thing about it is there is a photo of a person wearing this particular piece of equipment, and in that photo is you.

Kate: [LAUGHING] Hmmm …

Nic: So can you please tell us a little bit about the-- what is it called-- the kākāpō ejaculation helmet?

Kate: Yes …

Nic: That you were wearing and that now resides in our national museum.

[LAUGHING]

Kate: I think this is my greatest claim to fame. And whenever my family or friends come to visit, I take them to see it. And they think I'm extremely strange. So this was a genuine and serious conservation tool, okay? So let's just put that out on the table first.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: Don't believe you.

Kate: We wanted to find out if kākāpō  were duds or studs. So we had a bunch of boys who had never managed to father a baby, and we didn't know if they were fertile or not. And so we wanted to get sperm and have a look at it.

And one of the ways they do that in other endangered species programs -- so it's not something I made up -- is if they have an imprinted boy who thinks he's actually a human, he will come down and try and mate  with people.

And they've done this with kestrels. I think it was the Mauritius Kestrel, where they would wear a hat and the boy would bonk the head and they could collect the sperm.

[LAUGHTER]

It was like-- it sounded very simple.

So we thought well, the Mauritius Kestrel, I think, is about 250-300 grams. It's really light. A kākāpō is four kilos. And we had one in our sights-- Sirocco, the spokesbird of New Zealand conservation.

Nic: Me old mate.

Kate: We've seen him on lots of media where he's done his bonk the head thing.

Nic: He's done it to me.

Kate: Yeah. Well, me too.

Nic: Wasn't pleasant.

Kate: I wasn't prepared to have a four kilo kākāpō sitting on a little hat on my head. And I thought the hat might fall off. So I decided that a rugby helmet would be the way to go. And this is New Zealand rugby-- I'm going to embrace it.

So I went down to the shop, bought a rugby helmet, and I thought it's not very attractive. And if he does produce the goods, it's just going to fall off. So I got a big tube of silicon sealant and I covered the hat with silicone and then I made little rings of silicon.

So there were little wells where the business could be done and I could collect it afterwards.

Nic: You made the helmet.

Kate: I made the helmet in the backyard of my Berhampore house, one sunny afternoon.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: That is amazing.

Kate: So then we took it down to the island and we went and visited Sirocco, and he got very excited by the whole business. And so for about three nights in a row, I was out there in the evening with him bonking my head. He's quite heavy.

He goes on for a very long time. He grunts the whole time he's doing it. And he didn't produce a thing!

[LAUGHING]

So I'm not sure if that concept was a failure, or he just didn't like how we'd done it, or if he just was never actually going to do it. But yeah. So then, we ended up with a photograph of it, and Te Papa heard about it, and were doing a big exhibit on New Zealand, and we gave them the helmet.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: That is the best work story I've ever heard. It is amazing. And you made the helmet. That's now my-- that's a piece of information I did not have. Well, I feel like you should have some kind of award for that. I mean, I feel like that's a New Year's honour.

Kate: I felt there was like a bit of number eight wire going on there. We did it ourselves. We didn't pay someone $10,000. We just got a tube of silicon and went for it.

Nic: I imagine you're in that position that lots of tradies are. Everybody wants advice on how to build their new deck or how to plumb in their new taps, if they've got mates who are specialists in that field. Do you get lots of requests for random diagnosis from people? 

Kate: Oh, all the time. All the time. And actually, you could go, oh, this is just too much or you could go, this is fantastic. This is like an unpaid network of people doing surveillance.

So there's the individual need. They want to know what's wrong with that bird. But I get masses of information through the process of getting sent all these photos or videos of you know things that are going wrong.

And so I'll get one, one year, and two years later, I'll get one exactly the same. I can go, hey, you've got the same thing as these people had. This is great.

But it can be a bit dodgy, because they'll send it to me and I'll be out of the office. So I'll download it on my phone and have a look and have a chat to them and we'll work out what to do. And that photo has gone into my gallery.

And then I'll be showing some of my holiday photos and I'll be flicking through, and then this disgusting lump on the leg of a bird will appear as like a massive closeup photograph, which is kind of a little bit off-putting.

And in fact, it went to the extreme once where I had been making dinner, and I was making nachos. And I opened up the bag of corn chips, and there was something wrong with them. So I took a photo, being a good citizen, and I sent it to the company.

And I said oh, just letting you know, there was something wrong with this batch. [I] wrote down the batch number off the bag, and this is what I found in the bag. I've attached a photo. Except I didn't attach the photo of the corn chips. I attached a photo of a dead bird and I didn't realise.

And I only found out after they'd sent me a big box of corn chips-- no note. No nothing. Just these corn chips arrived by courier. And I mentioned it to my wife. And she went, yeah, I wondered why you sent them a photo of a dead bird. And I was like, what dead bi-- why didn't you tell me!?

So some poor customer service person at the corn chip factory got sent this horrible, horrible email from me. And I never knew who it was. And I hope it didn't ruin their day.

Nic: Well, you could have shut the factory down. Imagine that.  

Kate: Exactly.

Nic: Them going, holy … we found a dead bird in a bag of nachos. This is a national incident.

Kate: I think I'm on their list of complete nutters.

[LAUGHING]

Kate: Just send them the chips and they'll go away.

Nic: That is brilliant.

Kate: So I'm much more careful now.

Nic: As well you should be. And you should probably always feel a wee bit guilty for that.

Kate: Absolutely!

Nic: It's not all a glorious job. It's not all wrapping bandages around blue ducks, and nice things happening, is it? You work with a lot of stuff that's kind of disgusting.

Kate: Well, I think it all comes from your perspective, hey? So one person's disgusting is another person's ‘oh my god, this is the best lesion I've ever seen. I'm sending it to all my vet friends’. They're going to be jealous.

And so I think perhaps, that's why I ended up a vet and not a park ranger, because I know gory is sad for the animal, might be really hard to fix, could be a massive problem, but there's also this morbid fascination with how big can an avian pox lesion on a leg get.

And so when you get a really big one, you do actually share it with other people. And part of that is like, oh my god, look at this. But part of it is, wow, it can get this big. Have you seen one this big?

And so something got sent to me like three days ago. And I looked and I went, and they said, oh, it can't be avian pox, because look at the size. And I could go back and go actually, we've seen bigger.

Nic: So one thing that I've always liked about you, is you're prepared to talk to anyone about anything, pretty much all the time. But that's been to your advantage, hasn't it? Because you've been able to gather more knowledge than you probably would have if you were a sort of in-a-box scientist just looking at your samples.

Kate: Yeah. It's an interesting thing, because I mean, I would class myself more as an introvert than an extrovert. But when it comes to my job, I'm a massive extrovert, because I love it. And so I think when you're doing something you really love, it can make you a much more outgoing, want to connect, let's all get together and do this stuff.

Nic: Couldn't agree more. I'm actually a shrinking violet most of the time.

Kate: [Laughs] That's what I thought.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: if you’re worried that there might be an outbreak of some heinous disease. How many bird samples does it take to--

Kate: To know what's going on?

Nic: To hand on heart be able to say, actually, we've got a problem here.

Kate: Yeah. So I think there's no fixed and fast rule. But the way we do it, and I think it's a really sensible way, and I've heard other countries doing it similarly, is one or two could just be a coincidence. When you hit three, you've got a pattern.

Something's happened. It's not random. Have a look. And then even if you have a look, and you find it was three different things, at least you know what that was. But if you find all three had the same thing, like those kākāpō chicks, then you know this is a serious outbreak in that population and you need to do something about it.

Nic: Just to change tack for a second, we're here in Wellington today, and one of the growing privileges of living in Wellington now is this kind of plethora of wildlife leaping over the fence at Zealandia and making itself at home in people's backyards. 

Kaka are an obvious one. Tui we've been used to for a long time now. But people obviously get very excited. I had a mate ring me about 10 years ago, and she works for some massive company here in Wellington. She's not a conservationist.

But she likes the nature, kind of like most people. And she phoned me, and she was just screaming down the phone. Kea! Kea! I was like, ‘what is going on?’

And she said there's kea in my backyard. And she was so excited. It was about 7:00 o'clock in the morning. And she said, there's five kea in my backyard. And I was like, OK, first of all, that's amazing. Second of all, they're not kea. They're kaka-- also cool though!

And that was really the start for me of seeing that starting to happen around here. She was so excited and wanted to know what she could do. People want them to hang around, and they often want to feed them.

Let's talk a little bit about that and particularly with regard to kaka, because I got involved a bit on this one when we heard the Kaka Cam with Wellington City Council. So what is the issue with people feeding wild birds like kaka?

Kate: Yeah, so there's quite a few things. So we do, do feeding as a conservation tool. We'll use it to anchor birds to a new location, we'll use it to boost productivity by feeding them something that's nutritionally balanced and promotes breeding.

And we'll use it if we're having a really bad drought or something and they need to be supplemented to carry them through. So there are good reasons for feeding them.

People do it because they like having them in the backyard. Sometimes, it gets a bit more extreme than that, and they feel that the birds rely on them, and they have to feed them. So I know of a person who can't go on holidays because they're worried that the birds will die because they rely on the food.

So that's extreme. These are wild birds, and they should be able to survive in the wild, and they shouldn't need the food. So a few problems occur with feeding them. We get poor nutrition. So particularly with that Kaka Cam example, kaka will feed their chicks on stuff that's not nutritionally balanced.

So if I put out lots of cobs of corn, they love corn. It's sweet. It's yummy. It's juicy. But it's full of phosphorus and doesn't have calcium. And so as soon as they feed that to the chicks, they get a calcium-phosphorus imbalance. Their bones won't grow properly.

They'll get bent beaks. They'll get weak bones. And they'll actually get broken bones. And they're called folding fractures where the bones are so weak they just kind of fold. It's awful.

So these chicks are going to die. And so that's from-- it doesn't have to be corn. It can be a whole lot of other things.

Nic: Nuts?

Kate: Yes, nuts-- some have a bit more calcium than others, but it's not a balanced diet. And they're more like chippys and ice cream. It's like yay-- big, fatty, nutty food. Mmmm. But if that's what you ate all day, you're not going to have a good diet, and you're going to get fat.

You're going to get obesity problems. But you also probably don't get enough vitamin A and vitamin E. So it's a really complex thing trying to come up with actually a good food for wildlife, in whatever circumstance you're working in.

One of the other problems, dear to my heart, is the disease side of things. So if you put out a feeder, birds are going to congregate in a way that doesn't happen in the wild. And you need to keep that feed absolutely spotlessly clean, or it becomes a source of disease.

So they'll be pooping on it. They'll be leaving feathers there. They'll be fighting with each other. And so, you just get this whole change in the disease exposure, and also the social behaviour.

You're changing their social behaviour. And you might have more stress in the less dominant birds. And actually, more stress in the dominant birds, because they're trying to fight to keep the feeder. And they're not going out and doing their natural thing, which is eating a little bit, preening, sitting around, eat a bit more, preen, and sit around.

And then the other problem we get is because they've got all this fantastically nutrient-- well, not nutrient-- energy-rich food … it's like if you give your kids, red cordial before dinner?

Nic: Raspberry fizz!

Kate: Raspberry cordial before dinner! They're not going to go to sleep that night. So these kaka end up with so much energy and nothing to use it on. They don't have to spend it going looking for food, so then they start chewing on things. And then they chew on lead head nails, which are on lots and lots of roofs around the country, because we still have old roofs, and then they get lead poisoning.

And they may even pass that lead poisoning onto their chicks. So it's this whole, I guess, snowball effect of you've changed their behaviour. You're giving them the wrong food. And then they start doing stupid things.

Nic: They also end up annoying neighbours.

Kate: Yeah, that's right.

They'll turn up at 3 o'clock in the morning waiting for their 5:00 AM feed. And they're noisy birds. And they can do a lot of damage.

Nic: And they're ripping into people's trees. And then we get loud out at them for doing something that we have essentially encouraged. I think about the raspberry cordial is just a great example, isn't it?

Because if you've got wild neighbours in Wellington, and you love having your kaka and stuff around, it's like you wouldn't give the neighbour’s kids raspberry fizz, unless you really didn't like them.

[LAUGHING]

And so it's that feeling of-- that feeling of responsibility, of looking after that maybe might make people think a little bit more.

Kate: So you can do it in a more natural way. I've got a rewarewa tree in the backyard. And I regularly get kaka in that when it's flowering. And so I'll only see them for a few weeks or a month every year in that tree, but that's fantastic.

And that's my little dose of ‘I've got kaka in my backyard’. So on the DOC website, there is a link to what plants you can grow in your garden to attract birds.

Nic: Year round, aye?

Kate: Yeah. So you can make a bird garden. You don't have to then be spending a fortune on nuts or other things. You don't have to look after a feeder. You don't have to clean it or anything. You just let the birds be birds.

Nic: That is a really great piece of advice. Well, I used to live here in Wellington. I lived in Naenae, and I had a beautiful kōwhai tree in my back yard. And at particular times of year, it was just full of kererū and tui. 

I had a tui that mimicked my landline though, and I think he did it on purpose. So he would-- he would ring, and I'd be outside. And I'd run inside to get the phone. It would stop. I'd come back outside again. And then I'd hear this-- [RINGING]

I'd be like, what? What? And I swear, he was sitting up there laughing.

Kate: That's brilliant.

Nic: Yeah.

[LAUGHING]

Thank you, Kate. And look, thank you for this really fascinating discussion. I could talk to you all day and probably all week-- not so much about the gross stuff, even though that seems to be your favourite topic.

But in particular, I think a lot of the things that you've talked about, even though I know a lot of the stuff you do is really technical and really scientific, I think the value that you bring is you're talking about things that people can do themselves, whether it's in relation to planting trees around their backyard to encourage those birds, and how to avoid disease, and why we must keep our wildlife safe from disease.

I just really want to thank you and acknowledge you for your hard yaka! Your mahi.

Kate: My pleasure.

Nic: I look forward to seeing where you go next. Thanks, Kate.

Kate: Excellent. Thank you, Nic.

[MUSIC]

Nic: That’s it for this episode. If you liked what you heard, show us some love with a 5 star rating. The DOC Sounds of Science podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts; so subscribe now and never miss an episode.

[MUSIC]

[TUI CHORUS BIRDSONG]

---

Transcript for episode 1

[ROBIN BIRDSONG]

[BELL]

Nic: Kia ora everybody, I'm Nic Toki. I'm the Department of Conservation's Threatened Species Ambassador. And I'm very proud to bring you this Sound of Science podcast.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nic: The purpose of this podcast is that we want to tell you all the stories of our amazing scientists and technical experts out there looking after ‘the nature’, working with us to make sure that we know everything there is to know about our threatened species. Today I have the privilege of having my colleague, Hannah Hendriks, who's a Marine Species Support Officer from our Marine Team in the Department of Conservation. G’day, Hannah, how are you?

Hannah: I’m great thanks, Nic. How are you?

Nic: I'm very well. I thought it was a really good idea to talk to you now, at this time of year, because the topic of your work really is starting to bubble up again. So maybe if you could start by telling us a little bit about what you do and what's involved.

Hannah: Sure. So I provide national support for marine mammal incidents around the country, supporting our Rangers on the ground who are responding to strandings and things like that. I provide a link between DOC and researchers, coordinate our protocols and procedures that we follow, and manage the data that comes out of these events.

Nic: Strandings are always a hot topic, particularly in New Zealand, aren't they?

Hannah: They are.

Nic: We seem to get a lot of them. Do we get more in New Zealand than perhaps other countries get?

Hannah: We are a hotspot for marine mammal strandings. That's mostly because we just have so many species that come past our shores, whether they live around here or they migrate past us. We get about half the world's marine mammal species coming by New Zealand at some point.

Nic: What is it, do you think, about-- there's something about whales and dolphins, isn't there, that just makes people kind of ‘feel all the feels’. So, do you get caught up in people's emotional connection to what's going on, particularly with regard to strandings?

Hannah: Definitely. It can be hard for people to separate their emotions from the event. Obviously, whales might be making sounds on a beach or might look like they're crying. And yeah, people find it hard to detach themselves from reality in some of those situations.

Nic: Do we know much about why whales do strand?

Hannah: Short answer is, no, not really. It's really complicated. There are lots of different reasons why whales might strand. And it sort of depends on the species and where you are.

So dolphin species, like pilot whales, common dolphins, they might strand when they're looking for food. Say, there's orcas going by, and they're trying to get away from them. Or if there's places like Farewell Spit, that act like a natural whale trap.

And these gently shelving beaches like in Golden Bay, their echolocation might not work very well. And so they might not know that the water is getting shallower. And then they can be caught out when the tide disappears from underneath them, basically.

Nic: You've mentioned echolocation. Do you want to just explain a little bit more about what that is and why that becomes a problem?

Hannah: Yeah, so basically, they send these sound waves out from their heads. And they bounce off soft substrates. And they are received back by the whales or the dolphins. And they tell them basically what's in front of them.

Nic: So it's like sonar.

Hannah: Yeah.

Nic: Same as what ships use.

Hannah: Yeah, just like sonar. So they can use those to tell where the shore is, or where food is, things like that. But when these really gently sloping beaches come along, they aren't going to be providing such a strong signal, especially when it's muddy or silty. And that can get them confused.

Nic: How big of a deal are strandings things from a conservation perspective for a species? And I suppose it varies species to species.

Hannah: It will definitely vary species to species. So with pilot whales in New Zealand, they're classified as not threatened. And these things have been happening for millennia. You know, these whales have been stranding on Farewell Spit for as long as we know. And so it's unlikely that they're going to have a big impact on the overall population size. And we haven't seen that as time has gone on.

Nic: And what are some of the other species that strand?

Hannah: Common dolphins, once again-- that's more mistakes being made or being forced up onto the beach from predators. So they can often be re-floated, which is great. Pygmy sperm whale is another really common one, which most people might not even know about. It's this small-toothed whale. They are often washed up in Mahia Peninsula.

And also beaked whales is another one that often washes up on our shores. We've got 13 species of beaked whales in New Zealand. And Gray's beaked whales are the most common ones to wash up around the country.

Nic: Whale standings are huge, right? They're a huge logistical--

Hannah: Definitely. Yeah, especially when you've got like 1,000 volunteers on hand, as well, that you've got to manage. There's a lot going on.

Nic: And so do you get involved in that?

Hannah: No,, not really. That's the lucky job of the Rangers on the ground. But I do just support the Rangers, so they know what protocols they need to follow, if there's any species-specific things. And as I said before, I might get them in touch with the researchers that might be interested in those species.

Nic: When whales do strand, and it becomes apparent that we can't get them back out to the water, and we've dealt with our grief about that, what kinds of scientific information do we want to collect to try and understand what's going on?

Hannah: Standard DOC protocol was to take a tissue sample. So that's basically just a small section of skin from each animal. And that goes into what's called the New Zealand Cetacean Tissues Archive, which is managed by Auckland University on behalf of the Department.

And so that's got samples of basically all the different species they have stranded on New Zealand's shores. There's like over 3,000 samples in there or something like that. It's pretty amazing.

And from that, we can get, obviously, genetics. So you can determine what species they are if it's not clear on the shore-- especially important for our beaked whale species, where there's 13 different ones. And to the untrained eye, you wouldn't know which one it is.

You can get gender. And you can get family relations. And then there's some people doing some work on trying to age them from DNA, as well, which would be pretty interesting.

So that's the standard sample we take. But in some cases with some species-- or depending on what researchers are focusing on-- we might get further samples or get the whole animal to Massey University or another research institute, for necropsy to examine what the cause of death is. So this happens with our Hector's and Māui dolphins, in particular.

DOC's got a contract with Massey University to get all of those animals examined, so we can learn more about why they might have died. Unfortunately, it is actually very hard to determine why things have died. And we may or may not actually get any useful information out of those.

Nic: Given that we've had this database for a long time, particularly for species like Hector's and Maui, do we have any kind of ideas that have come out from the data?

Hannah: Nic: Yeah, definitely so. With the genetics work in particular, we get things like the Māui dolphin abundance estimates. So we know how many there are. That's during mark-recapture work. And then with the necropsy stuff, we can find out if they're dying from certain diseases like toxoplasmosis and work on how we can potentially mitigate those sort of threats.

Nic: So it's a bit, kind of like CSI?

Hannah: [LAUGHING] A little bit. Not so glamorous. Not so fast, either.

Nic: [LAUGHING] Not so fast.

So given that it is summer and that people-- just to stray off the topic of strandings briefly, though-- let's talk about the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Hannah: Sure.

Nic: So people are out and about. We've all crawled out from behind our computers and are hanging out at the beach-- for those of us that drive a desk like me. And so there's a lot more seeing dolphins and whales around and interacting with them.

Just generally, what are the rules so that people know how to behave? Because we know people get a bit like “wahh, Justin Bieber, whales, dolphins!” How could people behave that makes them legal?

Hannah: Yeah, so the Marine Mammal Protection regulations, which is under the Marine Mammals Protection Act, basically lays out some regulations that people should follow when they are around marine mammals. Particularly if you're on a boat, you need to give them space. 50 meters to whales is how far you need to stay away, no more than three boats in the vicinity, and you can't swim with whales.

Also, you're not supposed to drive drones 150 meters near a whale, which people often don't know about. And these are quite important to follow. Because it gives these dolphins or whales space to rest, feed, and socialize with each other.

Nic: And particularly if they're got babies with them, as well.

Hannah: Exactly. There are actually specific rules when they have babies with them.

Nic: OK. So it's essentially, just give them space.

Hannah: Give them lots of space, yeah. Don't disturb them. Don't stress them out. And you can cause them harm, and they can cause you harm.

Nic: So back to the beach back, back to the stranding, can whales-- or maybe dolphins-- but can whales cause people harm? If they come across a stranded whale, what are the things people need to do to keep themselves safe? Because you know, I've seen flippers, and tail flukes, and things sort of thrashing around. You wouldn't want to get sconed with one of them.

Hannah:Yeah. So the tail of a whale or a dolphin is very powerful. There's lots of muscles in there. And that can definitely cause you harm. so definitely, keeping a meter away from their tail is really important.

Also, obviously, all of these dolphins have teeth. And some of the whales have teeth. So keeping fingers away from mouths is really important, too.

Nic: Right. You don't want to accidentally get-- it'd be like getting your hand caught in a car door-- wouldn't it? -- with teeth. So people have a lot of theories. I've heard people talk about impacts of plastic, maybe climate change, maybe seismic stuff going on in the water. Can you talk us through what we know or don't know, what the evidence is on that stuff?

Hannah: Sure. So with regards to plastics, we actually have only had about one or two instances of finding macroplastics inside whales and dolphins.

Nic: What's macroplastic?

Hannah: Stuff that you can see with the naked eye, basically. So that's different to your microplastics, which is plastics that are broken down into really tiny pieces. And there is some work going on where people are looking into the blubber and stuff of whales and dolphins to see if they can figure out if that's affecting our whale and dolphin species in New Zealand.

Climate change is a big one-- quite hard to comment on. It's so hard to investigate these matters. But it's definitely possible that changes in the ocean temperatures will affect the food sources and all the sorts of things like that will have flow-on effects to these species.

Seismic surveying, definitely a big cause a concern for lots of people. So we do have a code of conduct for seismic survey companies that they need to follow to minimize those impacts on our species.

Nic: And so I presume we're collecting data as we go about what else is going on in the environment when we come across a stranding?

Hannah: Yeah, so each time there's a stranding, the Rangers will collect a range of data about the animal and the conditions. And they'll fill out a form. And it will go into our national database of strandings.

Nic: Sometimes when there's a stranding, even though there might be lots of people there to help, it doesn't go well. And we can't put them back out in the water for whatever reason. And at that point, a decision has to be made in terms of euthanising the whales.

I have talked to a couple of Rangers that have had to do this. And I suspect it might be the worst job in the world. Can you tell us what that's about, and how we make those decisions, and what's involved, just so the public understand? Because I think sometimes it's really hard to read that a bunch of whales turned up, but there were 1,000 people there, but then we had kill them anyway. So talk us through that so that people understand how we come to that.

Hannah: This is, again, going to depend on the species that turns up. Because some, like beaked whales and pygmy sperm whales, if they're washing up, it's probably because they're sick anyway. But for pilot whales and stuff, which we know can be re-floated, our staff are going to be monitoring their condition as the day or days go on. And when they've been re-floated several times over several days, it's quite often that their condition will be deteriorating. And that will be quite obvious.

And so if they decide that their condition means that they aren't going to be able to survive even if they are put back in the water, and if they've come back in several times, they might make the unfortunate decision to euthanise the animal. And that's just so that they don't suffer a long, drawn out death. That's a humane choice. But it's not taken lightly.

Nic: No, it's difficult for the staff involved, isn't it?

Hannah: Very emotional for the staff, very emotional for people who have been helping out on the beach.

Nic: So for the people that do turn up-- and again, it's summer. We're all roaring around, hanging out at the beach. What's the best way that people can help? Let's say that there is a pilot whale stranding. And people arrive en masse to help. What is the best thing they can do to be helpful and not a hindrance?

Hannah: Well, something you can do in advance is take a Project Jonah Marine Mammal Medic Course.

Nic: Oh, I've done one of those!

Hannah: You have? That’s great!

So they will basically teach you all you need to know about how to help in a marine mammal stranding, which includes providing first aid to the dolphins and how to actually re-float them.

Nic: [With] Wally the Whale-- ?

Hannah: I don't know if that's its name. But –

Nic: they have like –

Hannah: There are life-size whales and dolphins there to practice on.

So if you've done that, that's great. You'll be able to be a big assistance. But even if you haven't done that, if DOC's requesting volunteers-- which they'll often do through social media or on the radio-- you can come down. And even if you aren't necessarily helping directly with the whales, we always need people to help with, say, traffic control, food even.

We really need to keep all our volunteers safe and healthy. So assistance with that sort of stuff is great. And we might be making chains to the sea to get water back and forth. All the things like that are really helpful.

Nic: And what kinds of things can they bring down? Is it still the thing they used to say-- you bring sheets down...

Hannah: Yeah, we have a list of everything that you might need to bring on our website. But if you want to be in the water, helping is great if you bring a wetsuit. You need to be self-sufficient.

So your car should have plenty of petrol in it. You need to bring your own water, your food, everything like that. If you're planning to stay the night, you need to be prepared with the tent, sleeping bag, et cetera … and maybe some first aid stuff, as well.

Nic: Right. But the overarching message here is go get through Project Jonah.

Hannah: Yeah, definitely.

Nic: And do a Mammal Medic course.

Hannah: It's the best way to be prepared to help with a whale stranding. And then you'll be called out when there's one happening in your area.

Nic: The other thing I wanted to talk about-- because I've been talking a lot lately with Iwi groups who are involved with whales strandings and what it means to them. And you often hear about the whale bone, particularly jaw bones, that kind of thing. Can you tell us a bit about that process and what's happened for our work with local iwi?

Hannah: Yeah, so iwi treat these species as taonga species. And they see them as their ancestors. And they have a lot of traditional knowledge about recovering the bones and carving them into jewellery and other various things. So we work closely with iwi in each area on establishing protocols that we’ll work with them when the strandings happen.

And we consult them with every step of the stranding, as well. So whether we want to euthanise [the whales], take a sample, bury them, or see them off for a necropsy, iwi is always consulted. Because they are such important taonga species for them.

Nic: Yeah. And as you say, they're their ancestors. You wouldn't want someone making decisions about your grandfather without you having some kind of say.

So you've got a really neat job in DOC. There will be a lot of people out there that would say this would be their dream job, right?

Hannah: [LAUGHS] Yes.

Nic: What sort of journey did you go on with your education and perhaps some of your work experience that got you here? What is it that motivates you to want to help out in this particular marine mammal stranding space?

Hannah: So I studied at Victoria University of Wellington. I did an Undergrad in marine biology, and ecology, and biodiversity. And then I did a Master's in marine conservation at Victoria, as well.

And as I was finishing up that degree, I started volunteering for DOC, cleaning up some marine mammal data. I guess what motivates me is thinking about what the marine life around New Zealand used to look like, Southern right whales breeding in Wellington Harbour, and things like that. And the fact that we might be able to see that again in the future is definitely really motivating. And I hope that we get to see that, or at least future generations will get to see that.

Nic: Yeah, Southern right whales is a nice story of just slowly but surely coming back, isn't it?

Hannah: Definitely. And we had our own Southern right whale encounter in Wellington this year with so-called Matariki the Whale spending over a week now in our Harbour, which was really exciting experience for everyone on our team. And that's probably my favourite thing of the year, actually. [LAUGHS]

Because so often, we're dealing with strandings and stuff, and it's quite sad. But this was actually really sort of happy, exciting thing to be dealing with. And all the public was really excited. People were breaking the law, stopping on motorways, and going out in thunderstorms just to look at this thing, like get a glimpse of it.

[NIC LAUGHS]

So that was a great experience. And we got to work with the harbourmaster, the police, and the Council on this. We obviously had to provide advice to the Council about the fireworks, which was a brand-new experience that none of us expected to have to do.

Nic: Did they cancel them in the end?

Hannah: They postponed them to the following weekend.

Nic: Because they didn't want to upset the whale.

Hannah: We didn't know how the whale would react. And with all the extra vessels on the water, we thought it would be safer to postpone.

Nic: Bless. I love that story. That is a real story of Wellington, the wildlife capital, isn't it?

Hannah: Yeah.

Nic: It puts off its fireworks display, because it doesn't want to disturb the whale. What is the most unusual thing that you have ever experienced washing up around the country?

Hannah: Well, I haven't personally seen it. But this year, there was this thing called a spoon worm that washed up. Did you hear about this? [LAUGHS]

Nic: Somebody sent me a picture of it. [LAUGHING] Because people think that I know what all the things are.

Hannah: What was it described as?

Nic: It was described as looking like a half-cooked sausage with teeth, or a certain male appendage.

[LAUGHING]

Take caution when you're Google Imaging Search this.

[LAUGHING]

Nic: So my grossest marine mammal story-- because they are gross, right? You come across a festering, dead corpse of a marine mammal. It's never Flipper. It smells. It's yuck. The eyeballs hang out. It's not fun.

Hannah: I'm lucky enough not to have smelt a decomposing dolphin yet.

Nic: In this particular instance -- which was a many years ago now, I just want to qualify-- so many years ago; but it was while we were collecting biopsy samples for stranded Hector's dolphins. And the Ranger in question-- I won't even geographically locate it. Somewhere in New Zealand -- the ranger in question who shall not be named, went to a report of a stranded Hector's dolphin. And you know, Hector's dolphins, they're only little aren't they, they're only--

Hannah: 1.5.

Nic: Thank you! And that's why you're the expert. And so it had been there for some days. So it was sort of blown up. The description I got was it was like a big purple grape.

And so he put on the white suit. And he thought, I'm not going to let this get me. I know what's going to happen here.

So he took his knife to get the biopsy sample, because we really needed them for the database. And he leaned over the dolphin and just gave it a little nick on the other side. Because he didn't want it to burst open. Like, you know [MAKES RUPTURE SOUND]

But it was so distended and so blown up in the hot sun that, as soon as he nicked it, it just split open and exploded into his face! And he had his mouth open. And it went down his throat.

[LAUGHING]

And I said--

Hannah: Is that in Risk Manager?

Nic: Yeah, well, that's right. And so, in hindsight—you know, these days, that wouldn't occur. However, I said to him, ‘what did you do?’ Like, what do you do when it dead dolphin explodes into your mouth? And he said he just waded into the sea, and chundered, and threw up until it was all gone.

[LAUGHING]

That is the worst dolphin work story ever. Anyway, health and safety regulations would dictate that would never happen today. However, it's still one of the grossest stories. That and an exploding septic tank are my two favourite stories. But they both occurred about 30 years ago now.

I’ll save that for another podcast. OK, Hannah, I just really want to thank you for sharing stories about your work and, particularly, for sharing your experience and your knowledge around trying to understand strandings, which, it seems to me-- we don't yet, do we?

Hannah: Unfortunately not. Yes, we are trying to. But we're not quite there yet.

Nic: Yeah. And to help support people, whether they're DOC Rangers, or members of the public, or visitors who want to help-- and knowing kind of what to expect, and how to prepare, how to train, that's been really useful, too. But your message around giving wildlife their space is such an important one. And it is so hard for people when it comes to dolphins and whales. Sometimes I feel like penguins is a subcategory of this.

Hannah: Seals, as well.

Nic: Seals! People go bananas for some reason when they see dolphins or whales. And it almost goes against every kind of fibre of our being to not get up in their grill. But I think that's our message, isn't it?

Just keep your space. Don't be a close talker. Go over there. And watch them enjoying their life from over there, whether that's in your boat, on the beach, with a drone, in any of those.

Hannah: Correct. Yep. Give them their space. We all know we to get close to our marine species. But it's important to keep your distance to avoid stress and harm to the animals.

Nic: And I think the other thing you've done is been a wee bit of a source of inspiration for all those up-and-coming marine specialists and scientists that are out there to show them that there is, in fact, really important work to be done. And I'm sure we might expect to see people like that on our team. So it's nice to have a bit of career inspiration.

Hannah: Yeah, you're welcome. It may not always be glamorous. You might not be out counting dolphins. But it is important and interesting work that can be done behind a desk, too. [LAUGHING]

Nic: Well done. Thank you so much, Hannah.

Hannah: It’s been a pleasure.

Nic: And I look forward to hearing more about your work. Thanks.

Hannah: Thanks, Nic.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[ROBIN BIRDSONG]

---