Archived News

New Zealand Birds Online gives detailed information on the birds that occur within New Zealand and its surrounding waters.  New Zealand is a “hot spot” for ACAP-listed albatrosses and petrels.  Indeed, no less than 17 albatrosses and seven petrels out of 30 ACAP species are covered in the recently-launched web site: over half of them.

The on-line accounts have been produced under the editorship of Colin Miskelly of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (and who was also the project’s manager).  New Zealand Birds Online was launched earlier this month in Dunedin, South Island, close to the mainland colony of Northern Royal Albatrosses Diomedea sanfordi at Taiaroa Head.

A Northern Royal Albatross family at Taiaroa Head

Photograph by Junichi Sugushita

For each species account information is given on Identification; Distribution & Habitat, Population, Threats & Conservation, Breeding (including temporal information), Behaviour & Ecology, and Food.  Links are given (including to ACAP for the listed species) along with a reference list.  Sound recordings and a suite of photos are also available and links are given to distribution maps, as well as to the texts of several books on New Zealand birds.  Buttons allow quick access to various features (photos, audio clips, etc.), as well as to print out texts.  The web site can also be used as an identification guide.

The following quote gives an idea of the scale of the exercise: “[a]ll 457 draft texts were received by early March 2013; by this date over 1100 sound files of 368 species had been loaded.  Image loading and selection was completed in late April, with over 6500 images from 254 photographers.”

Authors are given for each species account.  For example, Te Papa staffer Susan Waugh wrote the text for the Wandering Albatross D. exulans.  Listen to its “Calls from pair at nest, with bill clapping”.

Other authors of ACAP-listed species texts include a number of well-known New Zealand marine ornithologists: Graeme Elliott, M.J. Fraser, Peter Moore, Chris Robertson, Phil Sagar, Jean-Claude Stahl, Junichi Sugushita, Michael Szabo, Kath Walker for the albatross texts and J.A. ‘Sandy’ Bartle, Elizabeth ‘Biz’ Bell, Michael Szabo and Sue Waugh for the petrel species.

Reference:

Miskelly, C.M. (Ed.). 2013.  New Zealand Birds Online.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 8 June 2013