Te Papa turned 150 years old on 8 December 2015. To celebrate 150 years since the opening of the Colonial Museum in Wellington, the exhibition ‘You Called Me What?! 150 years of scientific discovery at Te Papa’ will be open on Level 3 from late November 2015 until the end of 2016. The exhibition, and… Read more »
Posts written by Colin Miskelly
New Zealand Birds Online – 1 million hits
The website New Zealand Birds Online is a collaborative project between Te Papa, Birds New Zealand and the Department of Conservation. It was launched in June 2013, and use of the site has continued to grow since, with just over 1,900 visits to the site per day at present. The milestone of 1,000,000 visits to… Read more »
Speargrass weevils thriving on Mana Island
Weevils get a lot of bad press. A few species are serious crop pests or despoilers of cereal products, and they give the rest of the family a bad name. In New Zealand, a dozen or so weevil species and populations are recognised as being threatened with extinction, and Wellington speargrass weevils (Lyperobius huttoni) are… Read more »
Extinct birds of New Zealand, Part 5 – Moa
In common usage, the term ‘moa’ is often used as if it refers to a single species. This is a long way from the truth. Not only are nine different species recognised, but they are classified in three separate families. They were the best example of adaptive radiation among vertebrates in New Zealand (at least… Read more »
Extinct birds of New Zealand, Part 4 – Rails
Rails are a group of birds that include the familiar pukeko and weka, and also takahe, coots, and the small, secretive crakes that inhabit densely vegetated wetlands. At least 14 species of rails were living in New Zealand before human contact, eight of which have since been lost. As with all New Zealand’s extinct birds,… Read more »
Extinct birds of New Zealand, Part 3 – Waterfowl
‘Waterfowl’ is a collective term usually applied to swans, geese and ducks. They all belong to a single family (Anatidae). No other family of birds has suffered so many species extinctions in New Zealand. Seven named species of ducks and two geese have become extinct in the last 800 years, and a tenth extinct species… Read more »
Extinct birds of New Zealand, Part 2 – Songbirds
Songbirds are perhaps our most familiar birds, including most of the species that visit our gardens. They also include our best-known extinct bird – the huia, which has been extinct for about a century. Many people blame hunting by humans (for specimens to sell to collectors, or for the much-prized tail feathers) for the huia’s… Read more »
Life through a burrowscope lens (Part 6) – subterranean Paparoa National Park
Te Papa vertebrate curator Dr Colin Miskelly recently spent 10 days at Punakaiki (on the West Coast of the South Island) as part of a Te Papa seabird research team. This blog reports on what the team found underground within a specially protected area of Paparoa National Park. As described in previous blogs in this… Read more »
Extinct birds of New Zealand, Part 1 – A diverse menagerie, sadly departed
Few New Zealanders are aware how many bird species have been lost since people first reached New Zealand less than 800 years ago. The number of named extinct species continues to increase, largely due to careful examination of bones from Chatham Island dunes and caves, but is currently 53 species – an appalling indictment of… Read more »
A new bird for New Zealand – magpie-lark
New bird species are added to the New Zealand list on average once every two years. Many of these are vagrants that have been blown (or flown) across the Tasman Sea, with recent examples including Australian reed warbler (2004), straw-necked ibis (2009), Pacific gull (2010) and dusky woodswallow (2014). However, few new arrivals have a… Read more »