There's gold in them there hills

Here's a nice example of NatureWatch NZ at work. In hills of the northern South Island lives an elegant beetle, the most colourful and easily identified of New Zealand's stag beetles. Its scientific name is Mitophyllus foveolatus. Very little is known about its biology, and according to entomologist Stephen Thorpe, "very few individuals of this species have even been seen alive in the wild in recent decades". And I accidentally found one.

The elegant adult male of Mitophyllus foveolatus, from WikiSpecies
Photo by Stephen Thorpe

I inadvertently found one of these black and gold beetles late last month. Regrettably, I didn't realise it at the time. I casually snapped a photograph of a wasp on a honeydew scale infested black beech tree while in Hanmer. I wanted to know which Vespula wasps were in the area. I only realised after I got home that there was a amazing beetle on the same trunk. I posted my observation to NatureWatch NZ as Coleoptera, "ID Please", as I had no idea what it was. Stephen recognised it and identified it less than a day after I posted my observation.

The one photo I inadvertently took of my first Mitophyllus foveolatus. It's to the left of the wasp.
Photo by Jon Sullivan

Famous New Zealand entomologist (and inventor of daylight savings) George Vernon Hudson, wrote in 1934 that Mitophyllus foveolatus was common on Mount Arthur in northwest Nelson "and thought it was probably attached to alpine beeches" (Holloway 2007). Stephen speculates that they may feed on the honeydew on the beech trees. This raises the ominous possibility that few people have seen these beetles in recent decades because of competition with the exotic Vespula wasps that now plague New Zealand beech forests and monopolise the beech honeydew.

Or, perhaps, hopefully, it's just that not enough people are out looking in the right places and the right times to see these beetles. This is where you come in. If you are out and about in the South Island high country, keep an eye out on the black sooty honeydew covered beech trunks for these distinctive little flecks of beetle gold.

New Zealand's got a new poo moss!

Hold your nose with excitement! Colin Meurk just added an observation to NatureWatch NZ of a new poo moss for New Zealand! It's a moss called Tayloria tasmanica and was previously known from Tasmania and Macquarie Island[see comment below about Macquarie Island]. Colin discovered the distinctive moss on his trip late last month to Stewart Island. Landcare Research moss expert, Allan Fife, identified the specimen.

Poo mosses (family Splachnaceae) are world famous (among moss enthusiasts) for often growing on dung and rotting animals and enticing flies to disperse their spores. Poo mosses one of the few examples of a "lower plant" using insects for dispersal. Many flies are big fans of poo and rotting carcasses, just like poo mosses, and fly just where poo mosses want their spores to go.

Have a close look at Colin's photo. It's a distinctive and attractive moss. If you're from down south, it would be fantastic to get more observations added to NatureWatch NZ. It would also be great to know more about it, including where it grows, whether it is associated with poo or carcasses in New Zealand, and whether flies are dispersing its spores. We also don't know yet whether this is a rare vagrant blown from Tasmania or a permanent member of the Stewart Island flora.

New Zealand's first record of Tayloria tasmanica
NatureWatch NZ observation and photo by Colin Meurk

New Zealand has an expert on these mosses at the University of Auckland, Anne Gaskett. You can hear Anne talking about her research on Tayloria mosses on Radio New Zealand's Our Changing World programme. Te Papa botanist Leon Perrie also has a nice blog post with more about poo mosses in New Zealand.

Tips for nature watching with a camera

There are some amazing photos on NatureWatch NZ, taken by some talented photographers (for example, be amazed by the observations of grahame and steveattwood). Still, NatureWatch NZ is a site for nature watching, and you don't need to be a pro-photographer to capture really useful images. Many of you will already have an adequate camera on your mobile phone or in your bag. Here are some tips for nature watching with a regular camera.

With this nice photo, NatureWatch NZ user Stephen Thorpe was able to ID it as a green soldier fly in the genus Odontomyia.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Grahame.

Why photos? Photos are helpful for several reasons. Photos confirm for other people that you saw what you say you saw. That gives NatureWatch NZ reliable data for understanding NZ ecology. Photos can record interesting behaviours and interactions (like Nicola Baines' incredible observation this month of a bellbird feeding a young silvereye). And, photos allow other people to identify the things you don't know.

One of the game changing things about NatureWatch NZ is its "ID please" feature. You post the photos and other members of the NatureWatch NZ community will do their best to figure out what it is. It's a miraculous thing for those of us used to crawling through dusty scientific identification keys. What you might need a few hours, or a few years doing a science degree, to identify, someone else might happily identify with a glance. Usually, all you need are those good photos. Keep reading for some handy tips, like holding your camera up to your binoculars.
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Get close, stay focused
If you're photographing a skittish creature, take a photo or two as soon as you see it before it might fly off. In this age of digital photography, there's no harm in taking a few photos and keeping the good ones. Still, once you've got a usable photo from where you're standing, try to get as close as you can. Fill the frame of the image as much as you can with the species. This is especially important with lower-resolution cameras. Fit as much information in your photos as you can.

A nice photo of a hebe flower but not of the native bee pollinating it. Get as close as you can.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Colin Meurk.

Make sure your camera is focusing on the species. Yes, it's obvious, but a camera's autofocus can often decide to focus on something in the distance rather than the small critter you're photographing. When I'm photographing small flowers or insects with a regular camera or mobile phone, I often need to hold my hand flat in the photo at the distance I want it to focus, then remove my hand before finishing the photo. Most cameras these days also have a macro button or function that you have to turn on so the camera will focus close up. Otherwise, everything close up will be blurry.

Add a scale
Exactly how big something is, whether it be an insect or a leaf, can be important for figuring out what species it is. It's therefore very helpful to include a scale in at least one of your photos. That can be something formal like a ruler, or a coin. Regular Bic ball-point pens are also a handy scale if nothing else is at hand. Like a hand. I usually just use my hand or a finger. You don't need a scale in every picture (they can ruin pretty pictures). Just one or two so we know how big something is.

A ballpoint pen used as a scale for a photo of a fruiting holly.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Jon Sullivan.

You may already have a high-powered telephoto or macro lens in your pocket
Regular cameras and mobile photo cameras often have lens openings about the size of your eye. That means they can take quite acceptable photos looking through anything your eye looks through, like binoculars, a hand lens, or a microscope. Inexpensive binoculars can work just fine. That means that you don't need to be a pro-photographer with a lens the size of a vacuum cleaner to get identifiable photos of birds. You also don't need a fancy macro lens and flash kit to get identifiable photos of small insects. Is your flash too bright when photographing through a hand lens? Cover it with a paper towel or white handkerchief. Got no flash on your phone? Use a torch. Don't expect to win photography awards, but you can get your species identified, and the photos often look pretty good.

Juvenile black stilts photographed through binoculars.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Jon Sullivan.

A striped mosquito photographed with an iPhone held up to a microscope at 20X magnification.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Jon Sullivan.

Photograph all the bits
If you're photographing a species you don't know, it's important to photograph all the parts that might be important for an identification. For plants, that usually means both sides of the leaf, the stem, and flowers and fruit if there are any, as well as the whole plant. Even a couple of old dried up flowers or fruit can be really handy if they're on a plant.

The stem and stipule of a taupata photographed with an iPhone through a 10X botanical hand lens.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Jon Sullivan.

Some species are just plain tricky and a little knowledge goes a long way. For Coprosma species, a big group of NZ native plants, it's important to know the shape of a little strap of tissue called a stipule that wraps around the stem between each pair of leaves. It can also be important to photograph the domatia, the little holes in some Coprosma leaves that leaf-cleaning mites live in. For insects, things like wing venation and the patterns of hairs can be important so its important to get your focus right. For some flies, there's a little fold called the scutellum between the top of the thorax and the abdomen that's important. For mushrooms, the pattern of the gills can be important to know, so make sure you don't just photograph to the top of the mushroom.

The more you get to know NZ nature, the more familiar you'll get with the right things you'll need to photograph to ensure an ID. It's all part of the journey. But don't panic. Most of the big common things around you can be identified just fine with normal photos.

When photos aren't enough
I should note that some species cannot be identified to species with regular photos. You might only be able to get an insect identified to a genus or family using a photo. That can still be useful. However, if you find something odd that you think is important, like a new pest insect in your neighbourhood, it's also useful to take a specimen. Insects can be preserved long-term in ethanol, or just stuck in the freezer for a few months. Plants can be pressed and dried in newspaper squashed under a few books.

With a specimen, you can photograph other more esoteric parts of it later if someone on NatureWatch NZ asks about it, or you can send the specimen to an expert for identification (e.g., at Biosecurity NZ) should the users on NatureWatch NZ suggest it. Most of the time, a few photos are fine, but if the ID really matters to you and you're not familiar enough with the group to know what features to photograph, consider collecting a specimen. (Note that you need a permit from DOC to collect on conservation land.)


So, there you have it. I hope you found some helpful hints. Have I missed something? Do you have favourite tip you'd like to add? You can add a comment below.

Some photos take a lot of skill and luck, like this amazing photo of the fast moving little forest bird, the brown creeper.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Steve Attwood.

Nature Watching in 2013

What does the new year have in store for NZBRN and NatureWatch NZ? Quite a lot. I'm glad you asked. I think you'll be excited by some of the new things on the way.

Back to school
We're keen to make NatureWatch NZ a useful resource for schools. Imagine if New Zealand's school grounds became a network of nature watching hotspots! This year, we will be trialling NatureWatch NZ in a selection of Canterbury and Westland schools, thanks to funding from the Brian Mason Trust. We are considering a few tweaks to the way NatureWatch NZ works to make it easier to use in the classroom. We especially want to allow teachers to create and administer their pupil's classroom user accounts on the website.

Shiny new features
Our developers are currently running to catch up with the fast-paced development of iNaturalist, the amazing open source project on which we base NatureWatch NZ. Look forward to a major NatureWatch NZ upgrade in the next couple of months. It will bring shiny new features like custom fields (so you can enter just what you need for your project) and more advanced ways to search for observations by location, among many other refinements.

Go on, count that kereru
NatureWatch NZ is partnering with Forest and Bird and WWF NZ this year for their nationwide kereru count. We'll be releasing more information about that soon.

This year, we'll also complete the migration of all the legacy NZBRN data and users, which will add another hundred thousand or so observations to NatureWatch NZ. And we've got a few more surprises up our sleeves.

Thanks for your support through 2012. You got NatureWatch NZ off to a great start! And welcome to everyone who discovers NatureWatch NZ for the first time in 2013.

The remarkable observation this month of a bellbird feeding a young silvereye.
NatureWatch NZ observation by Nicola Baines.

ID if you please

Here's another taste of some of the amazing plants, animals, and fungi that NatureWatch NZ users have posted as "ID Please" and then been identified by other NatureWatch NZ users. If you've got your own photos of strange New Zealand critters and creepers, you can post them on NatureWatch NZ and learn more about them. If you're a whiz at these things, you can help people identify the outstanding observations waiting for identifications on the ID Please list.

NatureWatch NZ Intro on YouTube

The fine media people over at Landcare Research were so impressed with NatureWatch NZ that they put together a nice video introduction to what we do. The piece stars Landcare Research ecologist and natural historian, Colin Meurk, who is one of the founders and current chair of the NZBRN Trust which produces NatureWatch NZ.

Add a little NatureWatch NZ action to your website

One of the neat new features of NatureWatch NZ is its widgets. These are little snippets of website code (HTML) that you can add to any other website to display live content from NatureWatch NZ. You can see it in action down the right side of this blog (if you're viewing the big computer format and not the teeny mobile screen format).

There's a widget for your Observations. You can use this to display your latest observations on your own website. It includes links back to NatureWatch NZ that your website visitors can follow to see more.

There's a widget for any Taxon. In other words, you can get a widget for any species or higher level taxa, e.g., Animals. This lets you highlight the new observations being made of your favourite living things.

There's also a widget for Projects (e.g., NZ Butterflies). This lets your organisation or institution make a project and display all the latest observations on your website.

There's not much to it. Just select what you want from the NatureWatch NZ settings, copy the provided HTML code, and paste it into the code running your website.

If you know about such HTML-type things, you can further customise the formatting to your liking (just don't mess with the line beginning with <script). We've done a little tinkering like this on the right column of our blog to make a widget that jointly displays the latest observations of animals, plants, and fungi.

Here's how to make a widget for a project, using the NZ Butterflies project as an example.

The widget creation page for the NZ Butterflies project.

Here's the resulting widget, displaying live from the NZ Butterflies project:

View more observations from NZ Butterflies and their caterpillars on NatureWatch NZ »