Teaching Black Robins!

Before we left I had the opportunity to hold a giant weta! It was very heavy, very cold and very tickly!

North Island Black Robins are clever birds. Their Maori name is Toutouwai.
A close up of their food stick.
The robins now always go straight to the hole with 2 worms in it. Michelle says they have learned to count to 2 as the holes are covered up and they can't see in! They move the cover with their beaks.
The robins watch while she puts 2 mealworms on a hole at one end of the branch and only 1 in the hole at the other end. She puts covers over the holes.
Michelle has taught the robins to come when they hear her call. She bangs 2 sticks together and they appear from the trees.

First Brian, our guide, showed us the predator proof fence that stops animals getting in or out.
Last Friday, Michelle, a RSNZ Primary Teacher Fellow hosted by Zealandia in Karori, invited the Wellington cluster group to visit and see her research project with North Island Black Robins.

Applied Geophysics Field Trip to Tongariro National Park

Reading a gravity meter.

For any geophysical survey it is important to know exactly where you are on the surface of the earth. We use gravity surveying for this.
The hole!
This was a really big bang!
We pushed the explosives down the holes we had bored.
Firing was by remote control,linked to a laptop.
The explosives looked like a roll of salami and were powerful enough to blow up a car! We had to have an explosives expert with us and wear safety vests!
We drilled holes for the explosives!
These are geophones that "read" the waves from the impact of the hammer or an explosion as if there was an earthquake.
The seismic survey was very exciting!
We used a line of geophones as sensors and used explosives and a sledge hammer hitting a metal plate as a seismic source
The students on the field trip.
Mount Ruapehu has a number of earthquake faultlines close by.
During the school holidays I joined 16 students and 4 staff on a field trip to learn how to design and conduct geophysical surveys in order to find out more about 3 earthquake fault lines in the area around the southern side of Mt Ruapehu. As well as this I was "Camp Mother"- responsible for keeping everybody well fed and happy - a big job in itself as the nearest shop was a 20 km trip away and field work makes everyone very hungry! The goal was to "do" scientific research by collecting some simple data sets on faults and compare the following methods-resistivity,seismic,magnetic and gravity.

Field Work

The round ball like object at the top of the solar panel is the GPS unit.
Keeping equipment dry is very important! We use lots of plastic boxes and bags!
Downloading data on a laptop. It looks like lots of numbers.
A reftek seismic recorder - these are put in heavy duty plastic bags or plastic boxes to keep them dry.
A palm pilot records the data about the position of each seismic station
I have spent time over the past few weeks checking and collecting data from seismometer stations around the Wellington area. Some are permanent and record data long term, while others are left in place for a particular length of time for a monitoring project and then shifted to other sites. Site information is read from a palm pilot linked to GPS and recorded so we know which site is which later. Seismic data is stored on cards like the sd card in a digital camera. Data is downloaded onto a laptop and new cards put in to collect new information. Most have a solar panel for power and back up batteries as well.

More Fossils!

While on my fellowship I have become fascinated by fossils. On a recent field trip to the beach at Paekakariki we found evidence of an early cooking pit sandwiched between layers of sand in the eroded sand hills behind the beach. It is called a shell midden and contains discarded fossilised clam shells and carbonised wood (charcoal) from the cooking fires.
It is hundreds of years old and gives us information about what early inhabitants of this area ate and how they cooked their food.