Blog

Yesterday at the 155th Canterbury A&P Show we meet the new Minister for Agriculture, Biosecurity and Rural Communities, Damien O’Connor (pictured right) as well as the Director General of the Ministry for Primary Industries, Martyn Dunn (pictured left). As the 2017 Community Biosecurity Award winner Marie had been invited to meet with the Minister to discuss the Wildside Project. This was a rare opportunity to tell the inspiring story of the Wildside, where rural farming families have driven conservation efforts on their own land to protect and restore nature for it’s own sake. After 30 years of conservation work, including predator proof fencing, fencing forest habitat and predator control the economic rewards are starting to match the ecological rewards as people... Continue Reading

The Banks Peninsula Sea Bird Survey 2017 got off to a spectacular start yesterday with perfect sea and weather conditions. Marie Haley and a team from the Department of Conservation and Christchurch City Council surveyed the whole Wildside coastline from Le Bons Bay to Akaroa for the beautiful spotted shag, white fronted tern, red-bill gull and more. Marie even landed on a predator free island to check out the fairy prion and little blue penguin colonies. The fairy prion are unable to nest where there are any mammalian predators such as rats or stoats as they are so small and delicate, but on these valuable islands they nest alongside other sea birds. In pictures shown here the different species are neighbours amongst the rocky rubble. Banks Peninsula is a sea bird hotspot with 70% of... Continue Reading

Titi or sooty shearwater were once common across Banks Peninsula along with many other species of burrowing petrel, by 1995 only one pair remained in mainland Canterbury (that is from Waitaki River just north of Oamaru to the Clarence River north of Kaikoura). Being on the edge of a 200m cliff for safeties sake landowner Mark Armstrong put a post in the ground and secured a rope to it and around his middle before lowering himself onto the slip prone and where the titi nest on the top of this sheer cliff. There he built a chicken wire fence round the last pair. He also established a dense defence of predator traps. This was enough to ensure that the last pair were never truly the last and six years later the first chick fledged. In 2009 the joint decision of BPCT, DOC, ECan and CCC was... Continue Reading

I started Seventh Generation Tours to allow me to share with the world my passion for this place, my enchantment with nature and the history and people who bring this beautiful place to life. I grew up walking these hills observing nature and was blessed with one of the greatest riches in the world, time. Living far away from the many distractions of the modern world I had many hours as a child where I would go out with the aim to get lost in the bush, sadly for me I never achieved this aim and always found where I was. It was through these many hours that I developed the skills of a adventurer, nature observer, philosopher and dreamer. Now I find my life as an adult is hardly different from the life I led as a child, my most enjoyable hobby is to daydream in nature whether that is... Continue Reading

The Wildside is an area on the outer edge of Banks Peninsula recognised for its high biodiversity value and a community of landowners who have become conservation leaders for their protection of endangered species some of whom are found nowhere else in the world. Recognised in 2017 with a national Green Ribbon Award from the Ministry for the Environment(MfE) and Department of Conservation (DOC) for Conservation Leadership.  The Wildside started off more than 25 years ago when a farmer Mark Armstrong, who grew up with little blue penguins all over his farm, was showing a visitor a penguin nest under his woolshed. He lifted the floor board to find a ferret in the nest eating the two chicks. Local farmers had wondered why penguin numbers were dropping but this was the first definitive... Continue Reading

  Across the mainland hōiho or yellow-eyed penguins (YEP) are having a tough time of it. This year the number of breeding pairs on Otago Peninsula was only about 200 compared to 600 in the 1990’s. Otago University researcher Thomas Mattern reports the outlook for populations around the South Island is bleak “the situation is all but lost, but we need to act and we don’t have much time’. With an estimated breeding population of 1700 pair, the YEP is one of the rarest species of penguins in the world, around 60% of the population is thought to breed on New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands with the rest on the south-eastern coast of the South Island. However, little is known about the sub-Antarctic population and in the southern South Island mass mortality events from unknown... Continue Reading