Extramural Contact Course

This week has been the 'contact course' for the extramural paper I am studying this year through Massey- Flora of New Zealand. 'Full on' and intense, but ahhhhhh it has been such a worthwhile week. Suddenly, seeing things in the lab/field, all those 'words' that you read about in the texts just 'come alive'.

And I felt like a little kid again, seeing some 'simple' things that I just never really knew about before, and being surprised by them. Joyful, joyful happy days!

I was a bit anxious when the week started with two microscopes in front of me that I never knew how to use: I worked out it was 35 years since I had last set foot in a biology lab with a microscope! But the lecturers and demonstrators were all very helpful through the whole week, so that hurdle was soon crossed....

So, what exactly did I get excited over, looking down a microscope? First day, it was seeing the little green Chlamydomonas alga swimming around at lightning speed- and even better, the colonies of Pandorina and Scenedesmus algae going slowly enough for me to watch them dancing on the slide! (I found it hard to sleep that night- I had dancing algae swimming in front of my eyes!) We also got to see Chara, and 'seeing is understanding' rang true here: all the things we had been reading about Chara and the transition from certain green algae to land plants suddenly made perfect sense.

Seeing the details on bryophytes was another highlight. By now I was getting the hang of the microscopes..... And on the liverwort Marchantia I could see the gemma cups, the air pores, the ventral scales. Looking at the 'jelly-like' substance that was Porella liverwort it became obvious what is meant by 'no true leaves'. And I could have watched the beauty of the capsule and operculum and peristome teeth on the Funaria moss all morning if I had the time!

When we started looking at ferns, I discovered that I had a 'trilete' spore on my slide. I had read about these often, and now suddenly, there right in front of my eyes was one I had scraped off a fern sorus....

Next came floral formulae. Ever since I began this course, my walks have been 'ruined' as I keep stopping to examine things that I pass. But now, we were being equipped to examine the flower parts in a structured way, that was soon going to help us quickly see some differences between some families of flowering plants. (The young demonstrator for this lab was amazing by the way: how he managed to find so many relevant flowering plants in winter was a real tribute to his dedication.)

Two days in the lab peering down microscopes can tire even the most enthusiastic soul though, and Wednesday we took off for a field trip to look at some forest remnants. And just to give my loyal readers some of the photographs they have come to expect, here are a few...... First photo is taken from one of the terraces as we travel 'downhill' to the Rangitikei River.

And here we are at river level, where we parked to go and explore the Pryce's Rahui Reserve.

In this reserve, we all learned how to use a 'key' to identify various plants. Then we divided up and went into different parts of the forest to examine the type of growth. One of our esteemed class members memorably described his section of the forest as the 'crap forest'. I was glad to find I was in the 'swampy' forest- any excuse to get muddy is fine by me!! There were some large kahikatea and many pukatea with their wet feet buttressed in the swampy ground, and the plot was quite fascinating.

And now another quite irrelevant photographic stop: there were some beautiful fungi in this damp forest.

The 'sad' part about this trip was that all three forest remnants we visited showed evidence of disturbance. After a lunch/discussion stop, we were off to Sutherland Mangahoe Reserve, where we climbed up to find a flat section on a ridge top that had a younger stand of nearly all podocarps- and the question was raised, had a land-slip brought this about? Then we visited McPherson's Reserve where we were faced with the huge destruction to tawa wrought by the 2004 floods. Within a year of the floods, the tawa, young and old, were dying. Some research is showing that the sediment load left behind by the floods is what has caused this- with the trees being suffocated by lack of oxygen. We have a lot of questions to address in Manawatu/ Rangitikei hill country areas about slippage and land use....

Thursday was back to the lab. We did some intense looking at flower types in different families. It was a busy time- but by the end of it- a few pennies had dropped in this brain about what it all meant. Again I was fascinated by some 'simple' things that I had never seen before, eg the globules spilling out of and down the stamen I had on the dissecting scope were pollen grains.... Then in the afternoon we were exposed to divarication - a trait special to some New Zealand plants- and we had to explore what that was and how you might measure it. Lots to think about.

But all too soon, the week of the contact course was coming to an end, and a practical test loomed on Friday morning. There were 60 plants we had to learn with common and Latin names, but specimens of them all had been laid out in the lab all week, which had been so helpful for learning them- so much easier than from photographs. Plus we had to able to draw and label and work out various things related to the week's lab/field activity. It seemed like it might be a tough two hours. But in the event, the test was much easier than I had feared. Seeing something loom down the microscope didn't elicit too many 'oh my gosh what is that' panics: mostly the details came back fairly quickly to mind...

And then it was all over, and a few of us moved across to the Massey cafe for lunch and coffee etc. It was great to meet the others studying this paper, quite literally from all over the country- as we had someone from Haast and someone from the Bay of Islands... It was a productive and enjoyable week: full marks go to the Massey staff involved.

But the sun was shining and it was a glorious winter's day. Now it was time to put the camera in the backpack, the iPod in the ears, and head out for a bit of a relaxing walk......

Poster heading

Not much time for blogging these two months. Work for my Massey paper is keeping me well occupied, and paperwork for school keeps piling up too! But I will share the title I made for my Massey poster about our Ahuriri Estuary field trip. I like it myself!

Boundary Stream "Mainland Island"

Sunday morning was an early start. 6.30am breakfast! All packed up and ready to go by 7.30am. We were to travel north of Napier, then inland to the Boundary Stream "Mainland Island", a remnant of native bush surrounded by farmland. One of the unusual features about the reserve is that it has a large altitude variation, and we headed to the top end, which has sometimes been covered with snow on previous field trips. There have been active measures taken to get rid of predators, though the island is not 'fenced'. The reduction in predators has had an amazing effect on the bird life. I saw species I have never seen before, and some of them were quite abundant.

On arrival we were greeted with the song of numerous tuis and bellbirds. For many of us, there was a 'long drop' stop before we started work. Some of the young ones were clearly not trampers and thought the 'long drop' was 'disgusting', but I thought it was a really pristine one! Waiting in the queue to use it was a wonderful bird experience. We had been told the night before that they had released North Island robins in this reserve, and that their numbers had really risen. A little robin was flitting around in the trees near the queue, and seeing it was a 'first' for me. (Thanks to the 'bird recognition' we had had to do prior to the field trip, we were actually able to recognise it as a robin.)

Our first field trip task was not as bad as it sounds...... we had to look in a 10m x 20m area for 'poo' left by various predators. The hope was that we wouldn't find any. We didn't find much, but a rabbit had clearly been active in our area. The pellets were quite dry and not like you would imagine. I need to get used to the fact that my eyes are older now, and take my glasses with me: it was really hard for me to distinguish the dry faecal pellets against the background dry leaf litter. However, I did the recording for this task, so I didn't then need to worry about missing things.

Next task involved looking for invertebrates, firstly on the surface of a 10m x 1m rectangle, and then in three deeper samples. What surprised me was that in this beech forest, we didn't find many. (And it wasn't just my eyesight: the others in the group also found hardly any.) It has certainly been dry lately, but I began to wonder what the birds ate.

Doing a five minute bird count here brought another 'first': I saw a rifleman on a tree trunk. (This was another bird we had learned to recognise.) There was also a harrier flying overhead. Apparently there are kokako in this forest as well, with chicks having recently fledged, but today was not to be our day for seeing one.

We repeated most of our tasks in a piece of kamahi forest, and again we found few invertebrates. But our sampling the whole morning was accompanied by the sound of numerous tuis and bellbirds.

By 1pm we needed to start heading homewards. (They usually do this further away task on Saturday, but this year it was the 10th anniversary of the place, with 100 visitors and no room for the buses. So it had to be Sunday.) We called in to see a predator fence that the local community is in the midst of building to make a safe nursery area for kiwi. Then we did some more electro fishing. With hardly any time for this, Ian found quite a variety of animals.

Back in Palmie around 6pm, my brain was full of all the varied things I had seen on the weekend. It was a wonderful field trip, that opened my eyes to a lot I had never seen or thought about.

NZ fauna field trip Pt2

Next on the field trip agenda was a drive up to Napier. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed relaxing on the beach eating our lunches. We extramurals had already formed quite a bond and I enjoyed some quiet convo with a group as we ate. It was a real highlight of the whole weekend for me, meeting all the other extramurals. We all have this passionate interest that has led us to enrol in this paper, and it was wonderful to meet some of the others who are also studying in isolation at home.

We had a visit to the Napier Aquarium, and our huge group divided into 3. We had a talk with question time about how the place is run; we got a 'behind the scenes' tour where we got to see the suction and water squirts from the lovely wee creature below! and we also had a quick viewing of the exhibits. The kiwi were having an active day. The fish etc were really well displayed with useful information panels, and I hope to get back sometime to see it all at a more leisurely pace.

Our main 'work' for the day was sampling in the Ahuriri Estuary, and we couldn't start this until 3pm, as we needed to wait for low tide. It was great fun working with a wonderful tutor and a very cooperative bunch of extramurals on this. Our sampling represents the fifth year this has been done, so there is now quite a large dataset built up. It will be interesting looking at the data soon to see whether there have been any changes over time.

Here our tutor has gone out with a student to set up our line for sampling. We then had to split the distance to take five sample points.

On our surface sample, the easier kind, we had to count everything living over the size of 5mm, using this square grid.

We also had to do a sub-surface sample, with two wire meshes so we extracted all the bigger stuff first. Despite our best 'gold-mining' technique, the lower mesh had shells etc covered in sticky estuary mud, so the count of the animals there took a lot longer. I guess what surprised me the most was the huge number of cockles present, and the relatively low numbers of the other species.

Back at camp, there was a rush for the showers before dinner as people wanted to get rid of the mud they had acquired at the estuary! We had a wonderful roast meal, with a yummy coleslaw as well.

After dinner Murray showed us a powerpoint display about the concept of a Mainland Island, as we were to visit the Boundary Stream Mainland Island in the morning. I had never heard of such a thing before. Basically, NZ's conservation efforts have in the past been largely addressed at offshore islands. With a "Mainland Island" efforts are made to stop predators getting into a reserve area, so that the bush and wildlife can become re-established. The Boundary Stream Reserve covers quite a huge altitude range, and we were to be climbing to the top end by bus. (Snow was experienced a few years ago on the field trip, and one year snow stopped the buses even getting there.)

Next instalment will be about Sunday's exploits at Boundary Stream. (Sorry, no more photos though: we were too busy on Sunday!) Our bird recognition task was about to be put to some practical use.

NZ fauna field trip

The Massey field trip I went on for New Zealand fauna was just wonderful!

We extramurals, about 17 of us, met at Massey at 2pm Friday, and met Murray the paper coordinator who made us all feel welcome, before we had to sit our bird recognition test at 3pm. (The wisdom of learning these birds became really apparent on Sunday when it was a great feeling to see a few native birds for the first time, and be able to confidently identify them.)

Friday evening, in two buses (for 80 students plus eight tutors and two lecturers), we drove up to Riverbend Christian Camp, in the rural Hastings area, which was our base for the weekend. Breakfast was to be at 7am, so it wasn't a late night! I bedded down with a few of the other extramurals in the 'villa' out the back, marae style on a mattress on the floor, which appealed to me much more than the top tier of three tiered bunks!

Saturday morning we headed out towards Cape Kidnappers. We crossed a farm station to reach this predator fence. A US billionaire controversially was able to buy a huge tract of land at Cape Kidnappers, and has established a top flight golf course there for the wealthy. He is also engaged on a (less well known) major ecological project, and we had come to see the predator-exclusion fence that is in the process of being erected.

This fence truly is amazing. It is designed to keep out most introduced predators (except mice), plus there is intensive trapping and poisoning as well. The fence is not all 'closed' as people retain the right to walk along the beach, hence the trapping etc. They are already having success with native species returning to the dune area. There have been blue penguins nesting on nearby offshore islands: they have put out nesting boxes on these dunes and some are already being used by blue penguin.
Here is a small portion of our group giving some idea of the size of the fence.

And here you can see how the fence winds its way over the hills. There are some forest remnants nestled in the hills that they hope will be restored somewhat as well. It reminded me a little of the "Great Wall."

It was an idyllic sunny day, so the occupier of this farm cottage seemed to have his own little piece of heaven, despite the isolation!

We headed back inland again and stopped at a stream to try bird counts and electrofishing. The waterfall on the stream was beautiful.

The stream itself was beautiful too, but there wasn't a lot of fishing success, apart from this elver. Apparently the calcium carbonate ions in the stream made the electro-fishing not a suitable technique here. It was exciting to see the elver though, having just read in the Study Guide all about their migrations back from the spawning grounds at sea.

OK lots more to tell you but it will have to wait for another day. I am somewhat tired after my weekend of adventuring, plus "Desperate Housewive starts in five minutes time!