Notices by Jon Sullivan (joncounts@mastodon.nz)

Here’s a house sparrow that we saw in the Canterbury town of Culverden, NZ, on our undergraduate ecology field trip last month. One of the students, William Harland, is a fantastically skilled photographer and got this great photo of it and uploaded it to #iNaturalist. This is long-billed syndrome and happens when the beak doesn’t stop growing. This house sparrow surprisingly seemed to be managing to feed.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/260356186

#birds #HouseSparrow #nz #mutation $#deformity

There’s a project on #iNaturalist specifically to track beak deformities in birds. There’s always some background of mutations in wild populations and it’s important to know that it’s not getting worse.

https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/birds-with-deformed-beaks

@ewen Yes, this exactly. We are winners of a galactic lottery to be part of a civilization of smart animals on a spectacularly alive planet. There may be nothing remotely like Earth, and nothing like humans, anywhere in the galaxy at the moment.

Yet, so many of us are lost in our daily affairs burning it all down.

Somehow we need to translate our individual wonder for the world into thinking at much longer and larger scales and caring a whole lot more.

That we're not is heart breaking.

The US public news show, #PBSNewsHour, had a good piece today on the current government of Aotearoa-NZ's attempts this year to roll back Māori rights, and the massive protests in opposition. It's good to see this story being covered in some depth internationally.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-zealands-rightward-shift-ignites-mass-protests-from-indigenous-maori-people

#NZ #Māori #TeTiriti #ToitūTeTiriti

Today I chatted with Jesse Mulligan on #RNZ Afternoons, because #iNaturalistNZ is just a whisker (or an antenna or a hypha) away for *3 million observations*(!!).

Earlier in the week we were thinking we might pass the 3 million milestone on Christmas Eve, but now it’s looking like we’ll pass it tomorrow. At the moment we’re at 2,999,457 observations, of 23,518 species (about 30% of NZ’s named species), observed by 50,519 (not far off 1% of NZers).
😄

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018969354/3-million-creepy-crawlies

#CitSci #NZ

Yesterday afternoon I found some cool stencil graffiti at St Margaret's College.

That's not a sentence I expected to be writing, since it's a wealthy private girls' school. Respect to the art department.

#graffiti #art #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #NZ

As a botanically trained ecologist in NZ, I get a front-row seat to the slow-motion avalanche of new plants spreading into the wild from gardens.

It will be a massive landscape transformation, just getting started.

On Monday I made the 24th observation of the common lionface on #iNaturalist in greater Christchurch. The first was 2019. It would already take a city-wide effort to stop, and is just one species of hundreds.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/254076984

#weeds #InvasivePlants #PlantNatives #NZ

"We should probably be a bit more worried than we are.”

That's a climate scientist in a story this week about global warming causing a “massive surge in wetlands methane”.

Just "a bit more worried"!? The cautious impartiality that's drummed into scientists is not what the world needs now. Perhaps the journalist didn’t quote the expletives?

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/534034/tropical-wetlands-are-releasing-a-methane-bomb-threatening-climate-plans

#ClimateCrisis #ClimateChange #methane

Never mind

The war was lost

The treaty signed

I was not caught

I crossed the line

#BendBreakBurn
#JukeboxFridayNight
#LeonardCohen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3HbrfV0hJM

Back in 2019 a wealthy Christchurch businessman dug up and drained part of a public wetland and turned it into an extension of the lawn of his house.

He insists that he "tidied it up" for the council.

Five years later, presumably after some internal politics, the city council has now told him to restore the lawn to wetland and take down the fence.

https://www.odt.co.nz/star-news/star-christchurch/couple-told-restore-council-owned-reserve-after-backyard-extension

#wetland #nature #restoration #nz

I happened to be watching an NHK World doco on the Tale of Gengi, a classic story from the 11th century, and the doco featured the Japanese kirikane glass artist Akane Yamamoto. Akane carefully makes intricate layered patterns in threads of gold foil then sets them into glass.

You can check out the works on her website. They're extraordinary!

https://akane-glass.com/english/work02/
#art #GlassArt #Japan

Auckland is the only NZ city on showyourstripes.info so I downloaded the latest climate data from https://cliflo.niwa.co.nz/ for Lincoln. That's the longest running climate station near Ōtautahi-Christchurch city.

By the end of 2023, Lincoln had warmed 1.28ºC in average annual temperature since 1909.

🔥

#ShowYourStripes #NZ #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #ClimateBreakdown

@br00t4c Good article. Thanks for sharing that.

“University presidents and administrators can learn a lot from the student demonstrations that closed out this academic year. Some lessons could be simply expedient. Most acutely: don’t get the chair of your philosophy department (in this case, me) arrested.”

Here's the first leaf-veined slug we've ever seen in our NZ suburban garden. It's the 404th species of invertebrate we've now found in our garden, after over ten years of looking for such things. My wife found it under an old wood heap (over the fence from where our chickens forage).

NZ leaf-veined slugs all eat fungi, and are a welcome addition to gardens, unlike the introduced European slugs and snails that eat NZers vegetables.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/221510055

#inverts #garden #nz #Mollusca #slugs

@gerrymcgovern Hey, humanity. Our “consumption until consequences” method of driving a planet is going to get us all killed. It’s time for more “foresight and restraint”. Let’s be smarter than bacteria.

@RustyBertrand After the pandemic, 2011 does seem like it was 4th Century BC.

@ajsadauskas @australia Yes, let's not imagine that. It would be a very stupid thing to do. (Oh, wait!)

I've been thinking about clothes pegs and the vast superiority of wooden pegs. We dry our clothes on a clothes line and have a box of wooden and plastic clothes pegs.

The plastic pegs degrade in sunlight and eventually break. They'll fill a landfill or break into microplastics. Meanwhile, sunlight keeps rot off the wooden pegs and with regular use they may outlast me. If they break, the wood can be tossed in the garden to rot.

Why are plastic clothes pegs even a thing?

#plastic #pollution

Discoveries are everywhere. I was at a beach with friends on the weekend, and rolled a log (as I do), found and photographed a beetle (as I do), and uploaded to #iNaturalist (as I do).

It's the second #iNaturalistNZ observation of its species, and 7th globally.

This is how knowledge about nature gets built: people sharing interesting things they find. In the old days it was employed/wealthy collectors. Now it can be everyone with a smart phone.

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/150979514

#beetle #Aotearoa #NZ

In today's New York Times a Homeowner Association tried to force a Maryland couple with a native garden to change to a tidy lawn. The complaint was that their garden was "attracting rodents, deer, snakes and bats, and that they were planting shrubs and bushes in no particular order." Yes, in no particular order!

Legal proceedings ensued and there's now a state law forbidding homeowner associations from banning eco-friendly gardens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/climate/native-plants-lawns-homeowners.html

#biodiversity #gardens #urban #nature