Christmas in Paradise

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 56

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

 

Female putangitangi-paradise duck atop 8 youngsters 

Just when you think nature is done and dusted, she pulls a new surprise and here they are - a family of putangitangi – paradise ducks - that have just come out on our local public pond. There’s quite a back story here but first to our Christmas video.

This pond has been emptied for renovation over most of this year. The mallards that usually loiter here, hung around  for a while (for feeding) but had deserted it by spring. They still haven’t returned. A pair of paradise ducks have raised ducklings here over the last three years, though in ever decreasing numbers; four, three, then a solitary one last year.

Two weeks ago the pond was refilled, and then to everyone’s delighted surprise, as if on a christmas cue, three days ago this brood of eight ducklings came out on it. They are attracting a lot of attention, but raise many questions, the first being - are these the same pair that usually nest here?

They aren’t banded so we only have circumstantial evidence to link this pair with previous years. However going by the worn quality of their feathering, they definitely are an ‘older’ couple, while the male has developed a pronounced limp. Another pointer is that the parents are used to being fed by the public and so are more domesticated than their wild cousins who you can’t usually get close to. This feeding isn’t as automatic a response as you might think, but learned. When passersby first attempted to feed the ducklings they had no idea that food was being thrown at them until their parents began picking it up and sharing it round.

She keeps a close eye on proceedings

But then how did Mum get her timing so right, because the pond was dry when she began sitting on her nest? Presuming this is the same pair, they are about six weeks later in the year in bringing out a brood which are usually about to leave this pond by Christmas. So she must have delayed her sitting – though how remains a conundrum. (We didn’t know they were filling the pond until it happened!)

Another intriguing character of putangitangi behaviour lies in their sibling relationships. These ducklings will soon change colour, with their feathers growing into the same shade as their father. They all look the same until three or four weeks later, when over about four or five hours, the daughters assume their female colouring. Three years ago, when we were just getting to know these animals, we began to take umbrage when a runt of the litter seemed to be picked on by older siblings. On further observation it became clear that the opposite was happening – that the runt was being overly protected. This runt turned out to be the sole sister in the family. She was particularly attached to her father and would often go and sit by him. (He usually keeps a watchful distance)

What is also noticeable around a public pond like this is that the ducklings can get overheated. They will try and shelter under their mother, but then dive back into the pool to cool down.

These native birds aren’t ducks at all of course, but a shelduck, closer to a goose,  and one of the reasons they are doing reasonably well, is that they are such impressive parents – especially the mothers. It was always good to see them at the dune lake because they acted as an early warning alarm for all the other birds, some of whom weren’t near as canny. And just as a final point though these birds are very tolerant of public attention they are especially aroused by dogs which are frequent visitors here, and adolescent males. It is intriguing to watch girls approach the brood to photograph them when they hardly move, but any male of tweenage or older, sends them straight into the safety of the pond.

Pohutukawa - a NZ Christmas tree

A very Meri Kirihimete  (Merry Christmas) to all our many visitors from over this year and all the best for 2015… And to those who are also trying to hold their ecological fort against vandalising forces … Salutations! You are not alone!

Track we were listening to while posting this the peerless 

Eartha Kitt Santa Baby...

Come and trim my Christmas tree 

with some decorations 

bought at Tiffany's;

I really do believe in you;

Let's see if you believe in me...

Jill Studd's Blog

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Kotuku - The fallout

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 55

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Finally we have a response from the NZTA to our list of questions regarding the management of kotuku, the red pollution in the Wharemauku, pollution monitoring in the Ratanui Rd wetland and the issue of pollution monitor delapidation.

NZTA (from the Environment Manager)

Thank you for the photograph – it reminds me of the plastic heron in my fish pond back home. I have checked out the NIWA monitors at the location post storm this week and there is some vegetation fouling which needs removed and this will be attended to. I don’t have much more to say on this topic other than the project has consent to construct the expressway and is doing its best to comply with all consent conditions at all times, and there is a real commitment by the construction team to do so. If you wish to meet with the ecologist and myself at any time in the future to discuss the weed removal and landscaping plan for the areas of land you are concerned about please let me know.

In other words - they're continuing not to say (much more) though  just so you aren’t confused, here are two spot-the-difference photographs - the kotuku is on the left.

 
 There are only  100 left of the former still living on this planet; but no shortage of the latter. They start at around $800 (sans postage).

Meanwhile we remain none the wiser as to whether the NZTA has a plan to manage  encounters with this critically endangered bird.

Despite the assurance in this email, the monitor hadn’t been checked, because we found two staff doing just that, the next morning. They had a cursory look and were goodnaturedly heckled by strollers on the walkway for being unwilling to get their feet wet by crossing the creek for a closer inspection. A week later  the monitor still hasn’t been cleared of debris. Though as we have previously mentioned it isn’t sited far enough down the Wharemauku anyway, to pick up the red pollution that is pouring into its lower reaches.

NIWA pollution monitor Dec 10

This is the monitor submerged at the height of Wednesday’s flood, which was one of the most dramatic of the past ten years. And here it is again a week later.

NIWA pollution monitor Dec 16

Snarled detached pipe Dec 16

Just downstream from here the local juvenile delinquents had detached a section of the Fortress fence, designed to keep the Public off the expressway site,  and laid it across the Wharemauku. It enabled us to get across and have a closer inspection.

The detached arm going into the body of the monitor, which we have been publicising for six weeks now, will have allowed the water inside.  Curiously a makeshift  pallet bridge has been thrown across the creek though we don’t know by whom, or whether they had  permit to do so.

Fortress Bridge over Wharemauku

In lieu of their assistance we have decided to bestow upon these delinquents the Midnight Collective Fortress Award which includes free membership to the Midnight Collective. (Well ok, membership is free anyway.)

Raumati Beach Dune Lake Dec 16

The storm has given us our dune lake back, though, ominously  all the  wetland birds have now abandoned this area and there is no sign of the heron and spoonbills of previous years. 

Yet the air  is filled with new generations of welcome swallows as our nests at either end of the Wharemauku have fostered second broods. Here a mother and fledgling are resting on a section of the expressway security fence that our new juvenile delinquent members missed. 

Welcome Swallow and fledgling NZTA security fence Dec 16 

The mothers continually tease the youngsters into the air by looping down to feed them and then not going through with it. This trips them into the air where they start to get the idea themselves. A light seems to go on and then they’re away on their own. There is still plenty of insect life around for these birds despite the premature drying up of the lake.

Track we were listening to   John Mayall  Let's Work Together This is from A Sense of Place 1990. He mines a narrow range of Blues but its all pure gold.

People, when things go wrong

As they sometimes will

And the road you travel

It stays all uphill

Let's work together

Come on, come on

Let's work together

Jill Studd's Blog

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Kotuku & the Goebbelisation of the Media

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 54

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Kotuku at Ratanui Rd wetland - adjoining expressway excavations

This is a photograph of one of New Zealand’s iconic birds, the very rare and endangered kotuku. It is thought to have established here from Australia a few hundred years ago, and was nearly hunted to extinction by both Pakeha and Maori when their breeding ground was discovered in Okarito Lagoon, South Westland (south-west coast of the South Island). Their plumage, like the extinct huia’s had become a fashion accessory.  They have recovered to around a hundred birds and a stray is sometimes encountered along this Kapiti coast. It is the breeding season so this one may be an immature juvenile. There is only one colony of these birds in New Zealand and it remains a mystery as to why they haven’t established further colonies in the manner of the Royal Spoonbill. 

Kotuku beside Expressway excavations Dec 5 2014

It is the location of this bird however, that has set alarm bells ringing, for this impressively large animal was found resting after feeding at the Ratanui Rd wetland about 30 metres from where excavation work was being carried out on the expressway.

So what are our concerns?

Juvenile dabchick - Ratanui Rd wetland 2013

They centre on two areas: the first on conservation issues,  the second on the way the NZTA has set out to propagandise itself. We recently contacted the organisation (like the Hydra it now consists of about four different entities – perhaps more) – to ask how it manages encounters like this and whether adequate pollution controls exist to prevent run off into this wetland, which is one of our most important outside the Waikanae estuary. There were two broods of NZ scaup raised here last year and a juvenile dabchick was also seen feeding here. 

We couldn’t find pollution monitors and are waiting to be reassured. And we are still waiting for our concerns over the NZTA monitor and the pollutant in the Wharemauku to be addressed in writing, though they seem happy enough to talk on the phone and in private meetings; which raises the second issue and that is the slick management of our media by the NZTA.

In a recent post on snowjobbing, we discussed the Government’s plans to muzzle the scientific community by feeding its commentary’s through media managers, the leverage for which comes through the government funding that most of these scientists rely on. This system is in place in the management of the expressway by the NZTA. The environment manager’s emails for example appear to be vetted by their media managers, while incoming emails also appear to be routed through a media central CONTROL, before being passed on. We also have a steady stream of partisan stories appearing in the local press.  Three puff pieces appearing in the week before the election however, has effectively compromised the NZTA’s professional independence along with that of its environmental managers.

The NZTA media strategy is laid out in a manager’s job description

Role & Key Responsibilities:

• Develop communications and community engagement strategy, channels & budget. • Develop tender docs and negotiate for best communications services & solutions including film, graphic design, conceptual design & advertising. • Establish regular communications channels for locals, national road users and media. Including radio, press, web, social media, digital newsletter and others.  • Create local event events series and seed positive engagement projects with local schools, iwi, artists, community groups etc. • Manage external project brand in line with NZTA Alliance guidelines. • Develop internal brand to support Alliance culture of high performance. Launch brand, assets and channels across an organisation that has grown from 60 to 300 people in just over six months.  • Manage all channels (internal & external) and a team of contractors.  • Seed positive media stories and support NZTA media manager with media issues.

Here lies revealed the Goebbelisation of the media.     

So what does this mean for a local conservation community intent on trying to protect and enhance the lives and habitat of the native species that still remain here? Simply that it is impossible to work openly and share information freely with such organisations without being sucked into their propaganda apparatus. In effect you’ll be damned if you collaborate; then damned again when you don’t –better by far to treasure your integrity.

Track we were listening to while posting this – John Rowles heartsickness for home Cheryl Moana Marie which more than matches our own for what’s going on down here at the moment. 

In the sleepy little town

Where soft breezes blow

There's a lovely little Maori miss

I used to know

Someday I will find my way

And I'll return from over the sea

To where my island sweetheart

Waits for me

Jill Studd's Blog

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The Garden and the Dune Lake - The Midnight Collective Essay

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 53

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Frances Jill Studd's  artist garden 

This is the artist, Frances Jill Studd’s flower garden, pictured at the end of Spring. It has affinities to an English cottage garden (Jill was born and spent her childhood in England), but significant differences and these are worth ferreting out. And while this may seem to have little to do with the life of a dune lake swamp, a little reflection will reveal the connection, for it involves how we see ourselves in relation to the world in which we live.

 

The original garden was established on a sand dune and it dates back to the late 1970’s. A retired farming couple from North Canterbury formed and then tended it for thirty years. They placed this area (pictured) as a female centre to the garden, but Jill  transformed this from its original formal ambitions as a garden to be gazed at from afar. The vegetable garden next to it, is its opposite –burly and voluble, it is typically male and utilitarian, a garden ordered into rows - then worked in to harvest crops  from. The small size of this veggie plot means that this is primarily for pleasure and not profit –though it retains the sly allusion, that it could be paying its way.  

 

The female centre to this garden originally featured shrubs fashionable in their  time, miniature conifers, azaleas and native hebe. There are also three mature camelia on the property, one sited at the back left of the photo. The salt breeze burns their leaves; but nevertheless they flourish in this sand dune country bringing a soft glow of pink and red into winter as they flower through June to August. They also provide nesting sites for blackbird families in spring and summer which indicates how a garden will integrate itself into a wider ecology despite its owners separatist intentions. The shrubs are purchased at a local nursery and while they indicate the gardeners personal taste and pleasure, they don’t have any deeper connection with them.

 

Another survivor from that original garden is the broom to the left of it. This lights the garden yellow in early spring but like citrus, it is vulnerable to local stem borer which will finally kill it off. This insect is a native and Jill won’t use sprays, so adopts a policy of strategic pruning and then replacement as the infestation kills the plant.

 

The native plants that she fosters also indicate how the world has changed in 50 years when natives were viewed as colourless inferiors  to exotics. These include, 6 kowhai trees (to attract tui, and other honey easters), ringaringa, 2 cabbage trees, 4 manuka, a native fuchsia, hoheria (lacebark), and a native hibiscus.

These hibiscus aren’t originally native, but were brought to New Zealand from the South Pacific islands by Maori around the 13^th Century. I well remember being chastised by a botanist friend, when I suggested that perhaps the seed arrived accidentally with the soil around the kumara (sweet potato). -Why would you assume that? was his phlegmatic response. In fact Maori were as keen on their gardens as the rest of humanity and this explains why pohutukawa (the NZ Christmas tree) were flourishing in Te Arawa country on the shores of Lake Rotorua in the central North Island when Cook first arrived in 1769.

 

Jill progressively remade this central garden in an English cottage style, but it has none of the formal structure of such gardens. Here different plant species were planted in beds beside each other -the stocks separate from the marigolds which were separated  from the roses which usually had beds of their own (indicating status), all of which was part and parcel of the way a post-war NZ ordered its suburban garden décor (and its suburban lives). To a large degree it still is. Her annuals coexist however, in the manner of a pasture of wild flowers. She brings an artist’s mettle to this planting, so nothing is either simple or unsurprising or sequenced, and yet  everything is  meticulously placed to grow into itself. As such it is a design that evolves from year to year.

Tararua Foxglove

And these plants include those with a significant personal history. Her mother’s daffodils –her mother-in-law’s wintersweet - an elderly friend’s yellow daisy -her school chum’s Canterbury Bells -the lavender from her first flat in Devonport Auckland.  And much else has been ‘requisitioned’ from public gardens and elsewhere (Garden theft is an honest art practiced by all). This includes a rose from the Cook’s Beach memorial (where Capt Cook observed the Transit of Mercury in Feb 1770), and wild foxglove seed harvested from the Tararua Park.

Cook's rose, Cooks Beach - Coromandel

There are heritage plants here too, the seeds tracked down on the internet - granny bonnet, and anchusa - honeywart to bring the bees, then a big, rangy, uncontrollable buddleia for butterflies; along with tobacco plant first seeded from an artist’s  residency in Ranfurly, up on the Maniototo plateau, in central Otago.

So this is a garden not to be viewed from a distance but to be lived in, puzzled over, fostered and moved through. It is constantly evolving and it is a moveable feast - a living garden, that she carries with her when she moves her residential address. It also reappears massaged into her artwork...

Frances Jill Studd -Mantle 6 - u8Digital photograph 2013

Such a garden provides an example of the kind of sophisticated  sensibility we need to bring to our understanding and rehabilitation of rare and delicate ecosystems. The Raumati Beach dune lake sits in the middle of town and has attracted a rich variety of birdlife to its fecund waters. It is now doomed, as the juggernaut of the expressway creeps ever closer but it’s complex, integrated and vulnerable life cycle appears already to have been irreversibly damaged by it.

Emptied - Raumati Beach dune lake -Nov 2014

Yet even where rehabilitation of our wetlands is being promoted they are compromised by walking and cycle tracks built for human pleasure and recreation and not the ecosystems wellbeing. This is not the way to introduce a human presence back into these vulnerable areas, but an extension of the history of human domination and disfigurement.  This has involved the gradual  reduction or local extinction of all our native species. The wetland forest and the delicate native orchids and gentians were the first to go. They have been followed now by even the hardiest of survivalists, like the raupo. The same goes for our threatened bird life.

 

With the premature drying up of this wetland this year we have seen that human predatory influence in action. We have seen none of the rich variety of birdlife that we usually see down here. We are unlikely to see it again. 

 

Track we were listening to while posting this San Francisco (Wear some flowers in your hair)  Ok- (chosen by the guest artist!) 

For those who come to San Francisco

Summertime will be a love-in there

In the streets of San Francisco

Gentle people with flowers in their hair

Scott McKenzie of course - but oh! how San Francisco has changed since then. 

Jill Studd's blog

vantoohey@gmail.com

Celebrity Interview - Zoe Studd on giant kokopu, long finned eels -tuna, and looking after our marine coast

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 52

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Zoe Studd represents a new generation of conservationist committed to working for the environment. Well educated and travelled, she brings a wide range of experience to her work. She is Kiwi born, educated in Wellington – and spent time in Brazil as an exchange student. She has a New Zealander’s love of the outdoors and is a skilled snorkeler, paddle boarder and scuba diver, as is her partner Jazz. She attained her science degree in Australia, majoring in coastal and marine management. She subsequently worked on oceans policy for the NZ Environment Ministry, and then began mapping sea floor habitat  in Melbourne for the Victorian Dept of Sustainability. She’s back home now, with an education degree and running outreach programmes for the Island Bay Marine Education Centre.

Midnight Collective - You’re based in Wellington at Island Bay yet work right along this western coast.

Zoe Studd - That’s right. In winter we run a fresh water programme with the Whitebait Connection, exploring our streams. Then in summer a programme called -Experiencing Marine Reserves. There’s a reserve here at Island Bay, and then Kapiti Island. We explore the way these reserves are enhancing our marine ecology. A third area is the Porirua estuary. Here the programme is called Healthy Harbours.

Spoonbill colony at Porirua Nov 2014

MC - You work with a wide range of people?

Whitebaiting on the Waikanae River November 2014

Zoe - Schools during the day then we run a number of public events –night or weekends. When we go out to a creek or estuary we look at everything. At the living and non-living things and how they effect a stream. The insects that start their life there; then native fish. - the five species of native fish you’ll find in your whitebait patty including our endangered giant kokopu. Then there are short and long finned eels and Black Flounder along with the bird life that live in our estuary’s and wetlands. We talk about water quality, of how it can be improved;  at the effect of riparian plantings…  

MC - What kind of response are you getting?

Zoe taking a night party into the Paekakairiri stream estuary. 

Zoe - We try and get everyone as close to the environment as possible. We take them out spotlighting at night when our rare fish are most active. They’ve usually never seen kokopu or know we have native fish even, or how threatened they are. So it’s a revelation and very dramatic at night. Then we go snorkling and they can inspect the seabed for themselves. We connect kids to what’s happening out there. Then what they can do to help. They go away with a light in their eye, wanting to do projects of their own. It’s very rewarding.

MC - Do you have Iwi (Maori) involvement. 

Zoe - In Porirua I work with the Ngati Toa runanga. They have a number of restoration programmes on the go. Improving the harbour. We’d like to do more. The harbour is very important. There’s the rig shark you’ll find in your fish and chips, yellow eyed mullet, sting ray…It supports a lot of bird life.

MC -You work nights. You give up your weekends. The salary can’t compete with a day job in the City. Why do you love this work?

Zoe –I love being outdoors. It’s fascinating because we’re always going into new areas. Then you’re bringing kids into it. They absolutely love it.

Kapiti-  a wind  surfers coast.  Zoe's partner Jazz heads out in a stiff northerly breeze 

MC - Is there a downside?

Zoe - Extreme paperwork (laughs) – say no more – but it’s got to be done! 

If you would like to learn more, or get your school involved  you can contact Zoe at zoe.studd@gmail.com 

Track we were listening to while posting this - Peter Cape's Taumaranui (1959) - Pat Rogers classic interpretation. 

There's this sheila in Refreshments and she's pouring cups of tea  

And me heart jumps like a rabbit when she pours a cup for me.

  She's got hair of flamin' yeller, and lips of flamin' red,

  And I'll love that flamin' sheila till I'm up and gone and dead,

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Trouble at the Lake

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 51

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

It is time we had a good news story and here it is – the rapidly growing dabchick down at the Waikanae Lagoon. This is the closest we’ve managed to get to these little grebes so far – and as seems to be typical – the chick was being fostered by the father, while mum was out in the centre of the lagoon feeding. 

Dabchick male with adolescent chick

This teenager is proving a handful. While it was difficult filming the two of them through the reeds, still we managed to get new footage. Where two weeks ago the father would not have left the youngster and ‘she’ was most often perched on his back, now he is occasionally diving and bringing back breakfast (or brunch – it was around 10am). The chick hasn’t yet started to dive, but seems nearly ready to try... She dipped her head underwater but then latched onto her father’s coat tails. This seems a real pain to him as he can’t readily shake her off. Then perhaps also, its an attempt to hoist herself back on top. She’s getting rather too large for that so finally he loses patience and heads back out to join his mate.

Dabchicks are listed as nationally threatened, and this is the third chick we have seen raised here in the past 12 months. They tend to live in isolated pairs, though we haven’t seen dabchicks at other wetlands in the area since one turned up at the dune lake at this time last year.

Finally we’d like to note the bizarre weather we’ve been getting here. This is the view from Raumati Beach out into the Tararua’s. 

Tararua snow - Nov 14 2014 

As you can see we’ve had a thick fall of snow in this back country with only two weeks to go to summer. It is rare to get this much snow in winter so this is unprecedented. Yet we are still not getting enough rain. Here is a shot of the dune lake onto which a new squadron of ducklings has just emerged.

Mallard with ducklings

Yet the lake is nearly dry on 14 November which is also unprecedented. Last year it dried up in early February. We have had rain, but not the drenching we usually get through spring. We suspect there are further nests under the blackberry. This mother will probably take her offspring down into the Wharemauku if we don't get a good drenching soon. 

Track we were listening to while posting this the 15 year old (well he looks it)- Rick Nelson - Hello Marylou. 

I saw your lips I heard your voice

Believe me I just had no choice

Wild horses couldn't make me stay away

I thought about a moonlit night

My arms about you good an' tight

That's all I had to see for me to stay

Jill Studd's blog

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Snowjobbing -Science and the Whale

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 50

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

This country leads the world in the highest number of whale beachings every year. It is primarily a geographical problem related to the prevalence of sand spits and rapidly changing tide systems which these large mammals, skilled as they are in manoeuvring around these islands, are apt to misjudge. Then a youngster might get into trouble and the pod, moving in to help can get entrapped in turn. This appears to have led to the tragic loss of an entire Orca family down at Blue Cliffs Beach Southland near the western border of the Fiordland National Park in February. 

Orca stranding - Blue Cliffs Beach (Courtesy DoC)

The public response to these beachings cannot be faulted – it’s all hands to the pumps as entire communities turn out to assist in the refloat. 

 

The Kapiti Coast attracts occasional beachings though not usually of entire schools. A youngish sperm whale in January 2013 seemed to have either died close to the shore or deliberately beached itself, and then died. This very large animal attracted a large, dismayed crowd. 

Sperm whale beached near Kapiti Boat Club. 

Our latest beaching (Oct 29) is an endangered humpback. This animal had been dead for some time but a controversy has arisen over the explanation for its demise given by the  marine scientists who examined it. Bianca Begovich, who is a scientist and one of our most effective  environmental advocates, lives close to where the beaching occurred. She conducted her own scene examination and disputed the scientist’s professed puzzlement over the cause of death. 

Humpback whale Kapiti Oct 29  -courtesy TVNZ - Christie Osbourne

Here is what she had to say in a letter to a local paper (Kapiti Observer November 6) “…I was interested to read (KO Oct 30) “that the cause of the whale’s death was unknown.”…while I respect scientists (I trained as one myself) and I am sure she knows what she is doing, I had a good look at the animal on the seaward side and I am wondering if the huge propeller-shaped gash just under the whale’s right hand flipper had anything to do with it."

 

Marine mammal scientist Nadine Bott gave a spirited  account of the plight of the humpback whale and its precarious return to these waters after the catastrophe of  19^th and 20^th Century whaling. She surely must have been aware however, of the injury and its likely cause, for ship’s propeller injuries appear to be reasonably easily spotted, even in one that survives such an encounter. (See The New Yorker Sept 29 2014 - This article on whale watching contains the wonderful sentence that sits just the right side of pantomime  -Everybody cried out with a transported, almost religious sound.)  

A darker reason for Ms Bott’s coyness may have been identified by the NZ Herald columnist Dita De Boni, the very next week. She wrote a story on the Government’s proposal  to massage ‘unhelpful’ detail from scientific commentary. The Government has proposed a code of conduct which would prohibit scientists from ‘straying into advocacy’, gag them from commenting in the run up to an election, and have a PR team rewrite their opinions  for them.

 

Has the threat of such gagging, been enough to encourage scientists to begin greenwashing their own commentaries? They are very aware of where their research funding comes from, especially if they are DoC employees; and the threat to their spokesperson status, should they speak out of turn.

 

These fears are not without cause, as the fate of the Problem Gambling Foundation shows. They had their funding revoked for speaking out against the Government’s proposal to change the law limiting pokie machines at Sky City Casino in exchange for the casino building a conference centre in downtown Auckland (A project managed by Prime Minister John Key). PGF's  cash was turned over to the Salvation Army and accepted without qualms. They immediately began advertising for staff with appropriate religious convictions. This has placed the Army as front runners in receiving a third of the New Zealand state housing estate, as the Government moves to turn the provision of social housing back into the hands of charity organisations (as it had been prior to the 20th Century).

 

Track we were listening to while posting this - let's turn it over to the whales themselves Whale Songs

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