Tūpari Reserve

16/08/2026

At this end of winter, the haves and have-nots are rather clearly marked by the reserve’s boundary fences. The draw of longer grass is often just too much for neighbouring stock, so protecting our treasures means keeping boundary fences in good repair.

On Friday M&M and M&D tackled a section of our boundary fence which has been a little ‘leaky’. It’s certainly not the first time this fence has been repaired. It’s an eclectic mix of original tōtara posts and battens alongside more modern pine posts of differing ages. The wire is rusty No. 8, often patched with lengths of shiny high-tensile wire, all knotted together with trusty figure-eight knots.

The fence tells a story: of past owners, fallen trees, slips, rust, repairs and the occasional dead sheep. Wool strands wrapped tightly around the wire reveal where Baa-bara and her mates have squeezed through in search of greener pastures.

We repaired broken wires, added metal waratahs to strengthen weak sections, and replaced missing battens and staples. Baa-bara will not be impressed.

As we hammered staples into the old posts, clusters of spiders emerged from their hiding places. They seemed more subdued than usual, maybe a little indignant and certainly confused by the noise and vibrations of our repairs. It’s hard not to personify their little faces when they’re captured up close through a macro lens. Magnified arachnoids are definitely a delight. How could you not love a face like that?

14/08/2026

Last weekend, the Christchurch Botanical Society came for a plant hunt. They set off to find flora treasures on the drier, north-facing hills of Tūpari Reserve - an area known to mana whenua as Rangihauku.

Our approximately 20 plant lovers had their work cut out for them. It wasn’t so much the 300 metre vertical ascent that was the challenge, but the fact that it happened over a relatively short distance. On some of the steeper sections, two-legged walking simply wasn’t practical, so we abandoned dignity and reverted to all fours!

But there was a silver lining to all that steepness. Cliffs and rocky faces often support their own unique vegetation and can provide refuge from browsing animals. Dry, north-facing country is also often prized as spring grazing land, meaning these habitats are disproportionately under represented in conservation reserves.

Our plant-obsessed visitors love exploring, seeking out and identifying some of Aotearoa’s rare and at-risk plants, treasures that are easy to overlook unless you know where, and what, to look for.

That’s why membership of a botanical society is so valuable. Its members are a wonderfully mixed bunch of expert and amateur botanists, united by a delight in all things planty. They have the memories of elephants, the walking speed of sloths, and can frequently be found with heads down and bums up, peering intently at the ground through hand lenses or cameras. Every now and then, a whoop of botanical joy erupts as someone discovers something exciting.

And exciting things they found!

We are hugely grateful that the group added at least 35 new species to the iNaturalist list of plants recorded on Tūpari Reserve. It was such a treat to spend a whole day exploring, learning and uncovering some of our botanical treasures. There was plenty to whoop about!

The link to their visit can be found in the comments.

12/08/2026

We have just had a fleeting visit to the West Coast. The coastal scenery is stunning, but the forest is magical - a true rainforest, with huge trees perched and growing on even larger trees, tree-like vines jostling for space, and everything draped in mosses and ferns. It gave us some serious forest envy!

The plant that caught my eye, however, isn’t even a flowering plant. In fact, it isn’t a plant at all - it’s an alga. (Algae is the plural; alga is the singular.)

Large swathes of the West Coast appeared to have been spray-painted a dazzling orange. Rocks, fence posts, power poles, roofs and even house walls seemed to have been identified as hazard zones by a very health-and-safety-conscious Mother Nature.

With a colour like this, you could be forgiven for thinking it was rust causing the vivid hue.
But it is actually a filamentous green alga, Orange Rock Hair (Trentepohlia aurea).

Well, there’s a whole lot of juxtaposition right there: green algae and orange rock hair!

Like other green algae, Trentepohlia contains chlorophyll and uses photosynthesis to turn sunlight into chemical energy. But despite being a “green” alga, this one is unapologetically orange. Its green chlorophyll is largely overwhelmed by a truckload of carotenoid pigments, including beta-carotene - the same pigment family responsible for giving carrots their familiar orange colour.

When I think of algae, I think of green slime in a water trough or seaweed clinging to rocks at the beach. So having this bright orange alga growing across dry, exposed rocks is pretty mind-blowing to me.

They don’t call it the wild West Coast for nothing!

07/08/2026

When you think of the Common Garden Katydid (Caedicia simplex), you probably don't imagine anything flashy or attention-seeking. Their fashion sense is quite the opposite. They spend much of their lives impersonating leaves, dressed in an exoskeleton of ubiquitous, non-jarring green, with leaf-shaped wings complete with convincing vein-like patterns.

Imagine my delight when I spotted this vibrant juvenile Common Garden Katydid sporting a "pretty in pink" exoskeleton. My human-centric brain immediately imagined this youngster going through a rebellious, hair-dyeing, punk-like teenage phase, rejecting everything about its sensible dull green parents. Alas, its striking colour is almost certainly the result of erythrism - a rare genetic condition that causes an unusually high expression of red or pink pigments.

Caedicia simplex in pink are occasionally recorded in New Zealand. I did a rough count on iNaturalist and found around 30 pink or reddish nymphs/juveniles photographed in Canterbury over the past five years. Some were a vivid crimson, others a soft pastel pink, and many of the youngest nymphs seemed especially fond of a coordinated pink-and-green ensemble.

Common Garden Katydids spend their nights quietly feeding on leaves and flowers, while by day they rely on camouflage to avoid becoming a bird's lunch. A katydid's life is one long game of hide-and-seek, so dressing as a leaf is a sensible strategy. Common Garden Katydids don't usually roam far, often remaining on the same shrub or patch of vegetation for days while feeding and sheltering. Normally that's a winning strategy because they're almost impossible to spot. A bright pink katydid, however, is relying a little more on luck than camouflage. My peachy garden youngster still has several moults ahead of it. Unlike butterflies, Common Garden Katydids don't undergo a dramatic metamorphosis. Instead, they grow through a series of moults, each one bringing them a little closer to adulthood. With every moult their wing buds become larger and more leaf-like until, after the final moult, the familiar fully winged adult emerges.

The Common Garden Katydid is native to both New Zealand and Australia. Its te reo Māori name is kikipounamu, which somehow feels more fitting than "katydid". The common English name comes from North America, where some species were thought to call "Katy did, Katy didn't." Our kikipounamu are rather more discreet. On warm evenings the males produce a soft tzzet... tzzet... to attract females. They are far more often heard than seen, unless you're lucky enough to stumble across nature's version of a young fashion designer who forgot the camouflage brief.

03/08/2026

As New Zealanders, we often get mixed up with Australians. If it irks us, imagine how the Large Brown Vagrant Spider (Uliodon albopunctatus) must feel – the genus Uliodon has spent more than 130 years being labelled as Australian.

The dastardly story began when the original type specimen (the specimen to which a scientific name is permanently attached) was collected by the Austrian geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter during his rock and mineral hunting travels through the North Island and the Nelson region. One can imagine that beneath one of those rocks he discovered an impressive 5 cm vagrant spider, which he carefully dropped into preservative before shipping it, along with his other New Zealand treasures, back to Europe.

Von Hochstetter only collected specimens in Aotearoa New Zealand, or Neuseeland as he recorded it. After returning to Europe, he gifted his spiders to Ludwig Koch, a fellow German naturalist affectionately known as "Spider Koch" for his obsession with all things arachnid.

Somewhere along the way, something went badly wrong. Alcohol, tiredness, skulduggery – no one knows. But somehow the locality recorded on the type specimen of Uliodon albopunctatus ended up reading Neu-Holland (Australia) instead of Neuseeland. As my Nana would say, "It beggars belief." How could anyone mix up the labels so badly? Koch trusted the label, and from that point on the Large Brown Vagrant Spider was considered Australian, despite being a vagrant spider that had never wandered across the Ditch.

Thankfully, in 2003, two Australian spidermen carefully unravelled the mystery. By tracing the history of the specimens and re-examining the entire Uliodon family tree, they showed that the type locality had been mislabelled. Uliodon was restored to its rightful home in Aotearoa, and every Australian species was removed from the genus.

But old habits die hard. Even today, Wikipedia hedges its bets, describing Uliodon as "a genus of spiders endemic to New Zealand and possibly Australia."

Struth. What does a Kiwi spider have to do to be recognised as 100% Kiwi and not Australian?

31/07/2026

It's been cold out there, and the snow has been lingering on the hilltops. Our go-to dinner has become soup cooked over the fire, with our homegrown pumpkin harvest slowly being siphoned into our bellies.

Our rats will also be feeling winter's pinch. The abundance of flowers and seeds produced in autumn has dwindled, and insect numbers have dropped as many species overwinter as eggs, larvae, or pupae. The food that remains is often less nutritious, so they need to eat more just to meet their energy needs. At the same time, they have to burn even more energy simply to keep warm.

These pressures can create the perfect storm. After a long, cold winter, rat populations can decline dramatically because some simply don't have enough food or body reserves to survive until spring.

This emerging velvet foot mushroom has just become a very welcome meal for a hungry rat. While we don't usually think of fungi as rat food, they'll happily eat almost anything when resources are scarce.

In a mild winter, more rats survive through to spring. That's not good news for our native nesting birds, as each female rat that survives is a prodigious, precocious and prolific breeder.

Perhaps the saying should be "breed like rats" rather than "breed like rabbits."

Out of curiosity, I compared the two. A female rat is pregnant for just 21 to 23 days, gives birth to 6 to 14 pups per litter, and can have up to six or seven litters each year. That means a single female can produce around 42 to 98 pups in a year.

Rabbits are no slouches either. A doe is pregnant for 28 to 32 days, gives birth to 6 to 12 kits, and usually has four to six litters a year. That's around 24 to 72 kits annually. The real difference is that young rats can start breeding themselves just five to eight weeks after they're born. So by the end of the year, many of a lady rat's daughters are already producing litters of their own. That's when population growth becomes truly explosive (and dangerous for the bird and invertebrate population).

So, while it's tempting to wish winter away, perhaps we should be a little careful what we wish for. A proper cold winter is one of nature's ways of keeping rat numbers in check, giving our native birds a better chance when spring arrives.

So let's protect and celebrate winter. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Somewhat macabrely, that thought warms the cockles of my heart almost as much as a bowl of pumpkin soup.

27/07/2026

Dedicated Tūpari Reserve supporters might remember a post almost a year ago celebrating Mark's personal best of 600 wilding pines felled in a single day.

Last week he finally, in the words of Sir Edmund Hillary, "knocked the bu**er off" and finished removing all the visible wilding pine seedlings from the upper part of the old pine plantation.

For those of you who enjoy statistics as much as Mark, here are the numbers:
• 2.4 hectares cleared
• Around 0.5 pines per square metre
• 711 days from start to finish
• 44 wilding pine sessions

One dogged person versus:
• 12,445 wilding pines
• 93 gums
• 2 silver birch
• 1 tree lucerne
• 1 willow

On average, each session cleared 283 pines across about 550 square metres. Uncharacteristically, he failed to count how many gorse and blackberry prickles he brought home embedded in his skin after each session.

If killing wilding pines were a Commonwealth Games sport, I reckon he'd have a fair chance of making the New Zealand team for Glasgow. Sadly, like many worthy pursuits, it didn't make the games programme.

There are still a few pines to tackle on the lower slopes, but the native seedlings are now enjoying the sunshine. Instead of trying to outrun fast-growing pines, the young native trees now only have to compete with gorse, which is a much easier race to win.

18/07/2026

All good things must come to an end, and when a tree dies, nature sends in an army of undertakers.

One of my favourites is Stereum illudens, a native fungus that quietly gets to work recycling dead wood. Hidden within the timber is its mycelium, a network of microscopic fungal threads that slowly digests the wood from the inside out. Wood is made up of around half cellulose, which forms the structural framework of the tree, and about a quarter to a third lignin, an incredibly tough polymer that acts like a natural cement, binding the cellulose fibres together and giving wood its strength and rigidity.

Stereum illudens is a white rot fungus, one of the few organisms capable of breaking down both cellulose and lignin. As its mycelium digests these two components, the wood becomes pale, fibrous and often almost bleached white. By comparison, brown rot fungi mainly consume the cellulose, leaving behind the brown, lignin-rich wood that eventually shrinks and cracks into dry, cube-like blocks.

Like us, though, Stereum illudens prefers the right working conditions. For fungi, rain is an aphrodisiac. When the wood becomes moist enough, the hidden mycelium sends up fruiting bodies. These leathery shelves have just one purpose: to produce and spread billions of spores. The smooth underside of the shelf is called the hymenium - the fungus's spore factory. Every extra millimetre of new shelf growth creates more hymenium and consequently more spores.

The common supermarket mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) produces a fruiting body that lasts only a few days, while Stereum illudens fruiting bodies can persist for months or even years. They dry out during periods of drought but spring back into spore production when the rain returns. This stop-start growth creates subtle concentric bands across the upper surface of each shelf. Rather than annual rings, these bands are a diary of the fungus's life, recording bursts of growth during wet conditions separated by dormant spells in dry weather.
It's not unlike our work at Tūpari Reserve. We make serious inroads during warm, dry weather, but when the cold and rain set in, the loppers and herbicide is put away, and we wait patiently for better conditions before heading back outside.

12/07/2026

I'm really looking forward to this! It should be a fascinating talk hosted by our local Ātaahua Community Trust at the Kaituna Hall. Good company, a warm bowl of soup, and the chance to learn more about wasps sounds like a pretty good way to spend a winter Saturday evening.

Join us for a warm bowl of homemade soup and an evening discovering the fascinating world of wasps.

Our guest speaker, Mateus Detoni, is an ecologist with a special interest in wasps, lecturer in Lincoln University's Department of Pest Management and Conservation, and a researcher with Manaaki Whenua/Landcare Research.

Mateus will explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of wasps, including:

🐝 Why introduced German and common wasps have become such successful invaders
🐝 What drives the aggression of introduced wasps

🐝 The important role of native wasps in our ecosystems
🐝 An update on hornets in New Zealand

Mateus is an engaging and passionate speaker, so whether you're curious, cautious, or simply want to know why wasps behave the way they do, this promises to be an entertaining and informative evening.

📍 Where: Kaituna Hall, 2531 Christchurch Akaroa Road, Ātaahua, Christchurch 7672
🕕 When: 6.00 pm, Saturday 18 July 2026
🥣 Cost: Koha for soup and bread (all proceeds will support the Kaituna Red Cross).

Come along, enjoy some great company, have a night off cooking, and discover there's much more to wasps than just a painful sting!

Everyone is welcome.

07/07/2026

This week's weather has left us feeling a little like we're under house arrest. Instead of working outdoors, we've been tackling admin, emptying the inbox and scribbling jobs on the backs of weet-bix boxes. We can't wait to get back outside - but compared with a female trapdoor spider, we've got it easy.

Female Cantuaria spiders spend about 20 years living in a 10–20 cm long silk-lined tunnel and rarely venture completely outside their front door. They are, quite literally, on home detention. They're big, scary-looking spiders that, in a police line-up, would probably be wrongly convicted purely on appearance. In reality, they are incredibly reclusive and live an astonishingly long, sedentary life.

Technically, saying they "wouldn't hurt a fly" is stretching the analogy a little. They would happily hurt flies, beetles, and just about any other unlucky insect that wanders near their perfectly camouflaged trapdoor, which is left ever so slightly ajar whenever they're feeling peckish. As dinner passes, they lunge out, grab dinner, deliver a fatal nip, and retreat underground to enjoy their meal. Importantly, they keep one leg inside the burrow while making the hit-and-run, preventing the door from swinging shut behind them.

The smaller males lead a very different life. They reach maturity after two to five years before setting off on a quest for love in the cooler months. Fasting as they wander, they follow the alluring pheromones of receptive females. Perhaps that makes female trapdoor spiders the original cougars. Fortunately for the young suitors, they usually die of hunger and exhaustion rather than being eaten by their older lovers.

Most spiders are pretty rubbish parents. Trapdoor spiders, however, are exceptional stay-at-home mums. They provide protection, shelter and food for their spiderlings until they're around 18 months old and ready to head off and dig burrows of their own.

So, while we're hoping for a break in the weather and a chance to get back out into the reserve, spare a thought for the female trapdoor spider. Twenty years of home detention with only the occasional takeaway grabbed from the front door isn't everyone's idea of a good life, but it's a lifestyle that's served trapdoor spiders remarkably well for around 85 million years.