Recovering forest reveals its history like chapters in a book if you take the time to read the pages of the story.  Kereru, the world's largest pigeon, seek out puriri trees to feed on their berries. Our eastern trapline sidles across the slopes of a steep stream valley as it heads up to the watershed ridge line. Once cleared farmland, these slopes are now reforested with mature canopy kanuka forest. Along the floor of the valley, remnants of the original forest are still present with these trees marked out by their size and height.
Station 15 on the trapline is at the confluence of two headwater streams and is a great place for a break from setting traps before the steep climb out of the valley. On the cool, moist stream bank stands a very large puriri tree that not only provides a massive structural canopy it tells the story of this forest. This puriri predates the clearance of the valley and it would have been a large tree when the axes arrived. It clearly became a mature tree inside a forest as its branches are erect and it does not have the spreading canopy of puriri that grow in the open. It has grown up into a light well that was created when an even older tree fell and tore a gaping hole in the original forest canopy. This tree is the first chapter of the forest’s story and it proves that mature broadleaf forest has persisted continuously on this site for at least centuries.
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Recollections of a visit to Whenua Hou / Codfish Island to remove an avian predator during the winter of 1981. Off the west coast of Rakiura / Stewart Island, Codfish Island / Whenua Hou is a small piece of primal New Zealand. In the winter of 1981, I was privileged to spend two weeks there as a NZ Wildlife Service volunteer helping remove a native avian predator. Forty years on, the recollections of the visit are as fresh and memorable as the day I left the island.
Away from the sports field Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister, "an orchestrated litany of lies" entered the New Zealand lexicon when Justice Peter Mahon released his controversial report into the 1979 Air New Zealand Erebus disaster and the kiwi classic "Smash Palace" starring Bruno Lawrence and Greer Robson was released to launch the directing career of Roger Donaldson.
Protecting intellectual property is a key challenge that is tricky, but specialist skills and knowledge help avoid the pitfalls that could destroy valuable innovations. Callaghan Innovation is New Zealand’s innovation agency who run a wide range of programmes, funded by central government, to support and help startup technology businesses. One of these is Innovation IP, now renamed Beyond IP. Intangible assets, including intellectual property (IP), can make up to 80% of the value of knowledge based businesses that develop and commercialise technology so it makes sense to protect this, not just in New Zealand, but also overseas. IP protection ranges from familiar methods, such as copyright, through trade secrets and trademarks to patents and registered designs. It also stretches to plant variety rights to protect plant breeding and geographical indications to protect regionally specific products such as wine and other foodstuffs. In our online world even the humble domain name is potentially a valuable piece of intellectual property.  Understanding the carbon footprint of any business is a first step to reducing environmental impacts to increase sustainability in a finite world. To be a sustainable business at the end of the second decade of the 21st Century requires meaningful focus on the triple bottom lines of economic, social and environmental sustainability,
Whereas environmental sustainability must include a consideration of many factors including waste minimisation, resource management and pollution avoidance, in the age of climate change, understanding your carbon footprint is an important piece of the puzzle. Visiting island predator eradication projects provides insight into the challenges they face and the technologies and methods that underpin successful predator control. During August we began an extensive research trip to visit and gain a better understanding of international predator control and eradication projects, especially the range of factors that act to both enable and disenable these initiatives.
There is a spectrum of projects, all on islands, that target a range of mammalian pests and predators using both trapping and toxins for control. We want our name and logo to be more than just words and pictures, we want them to tell the story of who we are, what we do, why we do it and what we hope to achieve. After significant consideration, considerable feedback, much discussion and many drafts we have settled our brand identity and are beginning to bring this to life.
Our business name is now "Synovus Technology" as a replacement for the previous "Wildlife Control Technologies", and our product branding is around "WILDKEEPAR" to reflect the care and management of wildlife vulnerable to predation by invasive species. While pests and predators must be controlled to prevent the damage they cause this must be done humanely to be ethical and regulations shouldn't cause double standards. Pests and predators are unwanted organisms that cause damage to resources that we value. This damage can be highly variable and can be expensive to fix.
This damage can range from the soiling of stored products such as weevils in the pantry at home to mice invading raw materials. It may be damage to assets such as rats chewing on electrical cables to birds’ nests being a fire hazard in the roofs of buildings. It may also be the transmission of diseases to livestock, such as bovine TB in cattle or toxoplasmosis in sheep. It may even be damage to wildlife through predation of adults and young or competition for food and space in natural habitats. |
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We are capturing the future to empower
Earth's Wildkeepars to restore living nature Synovus Technology is a division of Aranovus Limited
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