Here's some good news about local birds here in NZ.

Today I've been editing the final draft of a MSc thesis by Stacey Lewthwaite. Stacey has been applying her data skills to my 20+ year dataset of species counts between Christchurch and Lincoln. The bulk of her thesis has focused on looking at the phenology shifts (in abundance, flowering, singing) associated with climate change.

I don't want to steal much of Stacey's thunder just yet but I wanted to share these two good news graphs. These are the numbers of korimako (NZ bellbirds) and ducks (mallards/greylard hybrids) that I've counted per bike ride over the past two decades.

Both species have got *considerably* more abundant over this time period.

For korimako, we think it's because of the forest regeneration and mammalian predator control in their breeding grounds in the nearby Port Hills, done by City Council rangers and Summit Road Society volunteers. For the ducks, we think it's the planting of flood retention wetlands around the fringes of the city plus the increase in farm irrigation.

So, while we hear a lot of scary doom and gloom about nature in the media, some species are thriving because of our actions. Let's do more of that.

#EcologicalMonitoring #nz #nature #birds #LincolnUniversityNZ

I spent Thursday morning this week at Ōruapaeroa-Travis Wetland, the largest freshwater wetland in Ōtautahi-Christchurch city, NZ. Once destined for more housing, the local community's protests led to the city buying up the land and restoring it for nature.

I'm helping PhD student Tommy Copeland to monitor the invertebrates of the wetland. Tommy's both repeating traditional survey methods used in a survey in the mid-1990s, and trying out new methods.

Enter Victor Anton from Wildlife.AI, a NZ-based non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence tech to improve conservation. On Thursday Victor gave Tommy one of their first field-ready prototypes of a new camera system with app control and built in machine learning image recognition. Tommy's going to be trialling it to see how he, with the Travis community group, can monitor invertebrates with this camera system.

Stay tuned.

https://wildlife.ai/

#EcologicalMonitoring #Conservation #invertebrates #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #nz #TravisWetland #WildlifeAI

I've been counting birds on my bike work commute between Christchurch and Lincoln, NZ, since 2003. On Friday, I counted my *first ever* Kōtuku Ngutupapa, Royal Spoonbill, on the route.

It was feeding in a paddock that had been recently scraped clear preparing it for a housing subdivision, but in the meantime had filled with water after a heavy rain. There are also restored wetlands nearby that I hope was what attracted it in. Perhaps there will be more.

#birds #nz #spoonbill #EcologicalMonitoring #wildcounts #UrbanEcology

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/340743507

I spent part of my summer on Banks Peninsula with a team from #LincolnUniversityNZ monitoring lizards, invertebrates, and birds. We also, optimistically, put out a set of bat recorders.

Native bats haven't been reliably sighted on Banks Peninsula in many decades but there's always hope that there's a colony or two out there somewhere. If you know the Peninsula, we put our recorders out at Tutakakahikura, Ellangowan, Panama Rock, Mount Pearce, Hay Reserve, and Montgomery Reserve. All have areas of old growth forest with some gnarly old trees where bats could roost.

Sadly, the results are in and we detected no bats.

#ecology #EcologicalMonitoring #nz #bats #BanksPeninsula

Each season I do four nights of moth lighting in my garden in suburban Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. My summer moth lighting this year started on Saturday. I photograph every moth that settles at my light and today I've been uploading my photos to #iNaturalist.

I've been doing this consistently each autumn since 2015 and every season each year since (at least) 2021. You might think I would have found all the moth species that visit my garden, but no.

So far I've finished uploading Saturday's moth photos and have found six new species to our garden. Here are four of them.

There's the endemic moth *Gymnobathra hamatella*:
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/337290749

There's the "nationally vulnerable" endemic species *Gadira leucophthalma*:
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/337263605

There's the endemic Clematis triangle *Deana hybreasalis*:
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/337285888

Also, less ideal, there's the introduced Case-bearing Clothes Moth *Tinea pellionella*:
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/337285916

#mothodon #moths #Lepidoptera #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #NZ #insects #EcologicalMonitoring

For the past week four of us from #LincolnUniversityNZ were based at Hinewai Reserve on Banks Peninsula, NZ. We visited a set of monitoring sites in and out of the predator control area of the Predator Free Banks Peninsula project. Predator Free Banks Peninsula is primarily targetting brush-tailed possums at the moment and we're interested in how that is affecting birds, lizards, and invertebrates.

We've been doing this for several years so we're also interested in what the general trends are in these animals in this amazing landscape.

We counted, weighed, and photographed all the lizards in our lizard shelters (mostly geckos). Jennifer Gillette is using the unique patterns on geckos' backs and irises to track individuals over the years.

We also brought in our audio recorders, which monitored birds and, optimistically, bats. Bats haven't officially been detected on Banks Peninsula in decades. There's still hope so we put out bat recorders in several of the areas of oldest forest.

We also brought in our invertebrate pitfall traps.

We've got three more days on the Peninsula this coming week, then we can get stuck into identifying the specimens, processing the data, and finding our what the patterns and trends are.

#ecology #fieldwork #EcologicalMonitoring #BanksPeninsula #NZ

I've learned the hard way that there is an enormous difference between microSD cards in the amount of power they need. When it comes to putting audio recorders out in nature, that matters a lot.

As an example, I was just comparing my latest AudioMoth results with SanDisk Extreme 64GB cards compared with Samsung Pro Plus 128 GB cards last year.

In the same device, with the same dawn-dusk daytime recording settings, on the same three fully-charged Powerex rechargeable batteries, the Samsung card recorded for four days (11 GB) before flattening the batteries, while the SanDisk cards recorded for 12 days (44 GB) before the flattening the batteries.

Given that it takes a lot of time for me to get to these remote sites to deploy these recorders, this makes a big difference to how much data I get.

#AudioMoth #AudioRecorder #birds #BirdMonitoring #EcologicalMonitoring #SDcards #EcologyMethods

We live in an age of unprecedented, rapid environmental change. One of my personal responses to this, as a trained ecologist, has been to consistently count as many of the changes in nature around my city as I can. I've got a series of regular routes around the city where I map and count all birds, butterflies, assorted other insects, plants and fungi, and vertebrates. Hence "JonCounts".

I just tallied up my biodiversity surveys and observations from 2025:

52 weekly and 12x2 monthly run routes: total distance 1,095 km
240 daily and 12x3 monthly bike routes: total distance 6,898 km
225,516 species observations, including transcriptions from 466 hours of field audio notes
~60,000 photos
1,225 audio recordings of species vocalising

that's plus my automated AudioMoth recordings and monthly timelapse phototransects

This creates an enormous amount of data curation work, which I typically chip away at over my summer holidays, like now (at the moment I'm correcting errors in the automated transcriptions).

#wildcounts #nz #EcologicalMonitoring