Winter 2019 update

Wow! What an eventful summer this last one was! With the help of VUW summer scholar Florence Kelly, MSc student Bjorn Koch from the University of Duisberg-Essen, Conservation Volunteers New Zealand and more keen volunteers from the local community, most of the fieldwork for the ‘lizard garden’ research programme is now complete.

Some members of the local community have been wondering whether I’d finished research at the lizard grids because of a leave of absence between March and May 2019. Truth is, I took a period of three months leave from my thesis to cover parental leave full-time for my former employers at EcoGecko Consultants Ltd, and also tore a couple of ligaments in my ankle during a rather epic tramping trip over Easter. Therefore I just wasn’t able to get out to the grids during those months due to time and physical constraints.

I was very pleased to see this Raukawa gecko climbing in a hebe (Veronica sp.) while doing some spotlighting work for EcoGecko Consultants! This is because Veronica [Hebe] stricta has been planted at some of the lizard habitat enhancement sites. The hypothesis was that lizards might drink nectar from the flowers of plants in this genus. While this plant wasn’t flowering when the gecko was spotted in it (you can see the seed heads though around the gecko), at least geckos will climb into it!

Conservation Volunteers NZ came out in early June to help me do some grid maintenance and touch-ups to the rock piles at the enhancement grids, so everything is ship-shape now!

Many thanks to the June 2019 Conservation Volunteers NZ team for helping tidy up the lizard grids. They are standing in front of one of the habitat enhancement grids behind them, replete with rock piles, native plantings and monitoring equipment. My apologies for the prison-labor like nature of the work, I am very grateful to have had your help!

I’m now going full-throttle at data analysis and write up of the results because I’ve got to hand in my PhD thesis in early January 2020. But, I’ll be back in the field briefly in August to finish the habitat data collection (so I can *finally* figure out what habitat characteristics different lizard species prefer in the presence and absence of exotic mammals) and again in October 2019 to complete the final (*post-enhancement*, woohoo!!!) check of the lizard grids. As always, if you’d like to join me on either of these field trips, flick me an email at sarah.herbert[at]vuw.ac.nz. It would be lovely to continue to have members of the Wellington community involved in this research [1]!

This is my projected working life for the next six months, but there will be a little bit more field work over August-October.

Footnotes:

[1] Company in the field also helps me refrain from having entirely one-sided conversations with the lizards, which I don’t think they appreciate!