Meurky Meeting and Mahoe

We couldn't have asked for a better sign that today was going to be wonderful than waking up to a gorgeous double rainbow and "warm" weather.

Today our intrepid little group met one of the leading conservationists in New Zealand, and one of the men responsible for our trip, Dr. Colin Meurk. After meeting us at the gate of the Landcare Research facility, the Florida hoodie clad Dr. Meurk walked us through the basics of different New Zealand biomes, from nival rock and ice to swamp forests and everything in between.

Dr. Meurk lecturing

We also learned about factors in the degradation of New Zealand's biodiversity, such as invasive pest species and human meddling. While talking about New Zealand's varying temperatures in winter (14 ℉ to  68 ℉), Dr. Meurk commented, "[the lower temperatures] are cold from a human perspective, but you have to imagine how a plant would feel."

Photosynthesis

He stressed many times in his lecture that one of the challenges faced by conservationists today is a lack of connection to the environment; that because we don't form those bonds with trees and animals native to our part of the globe, we feel no remorse when species begin to slip away.

After our lecture with Dr. Meurk, we walked around a subdivision done by a local Maori development company where we saw different native birds, like the pukeko and black-backed gull.

Pukeko

Identifying plants

Dr. Hostetler explained to us how to identify the plant species Hebe (if the leaves grow in a perpendicular fashion) while we explored a community that incorporates the natural environment into a human development.

Views from a nature trail inside the community

After lunch we headed to the Mahoe Reserve to do some native planting in what was an old illegal trash dump after being used as a gravel pit and that the local high school took over as their environmental project. This was our first experience getting up close and personal with the native flora as we planted juvenile cabbage trees, flax, and coprosmas. By the end of the day we had planted 208 individual plants, that will hopefully continue to grow and create a lasting native habitat for years to come.

The green plastic marks a new plant

-Corinne