Ruud Kleinpaste: Covid positives and negatives for environment and education

Lockdowns were great for Biodiversity – you’ll remember the stories about the return of dolphins in the canals of Venice etc. People went walking outside in parks; less use of cars – less pollution, birds coming into town.
It was not so good for the Environment Business:
Zealandia: Wellington’s most impressive restoration centre; 225 hectares of pure gold with endangered species returning to the city: Falcons smacking homing pigeons out of the air, Kaka all over the place – tui in huge numbers
Zealandia relies on visitors – THEY ARE LAUNCHING AN APPEAL – go and see the place, absorb the Nature that’s there, experience what Aotearoa used to look and sound like… and DONATE
Zealandia is INSPIRATIONAL and such a good tool for EDUCATION!!!
Schools that do a lot of environmental education outside the classroom are also struggling with reduced contributions from parents in the pandemic years; my latest job-area is in teacher PLD (Professional Learning Development), especially trying to get us all to work with the Natural Resources we find in school grounds, related to the whole curriculum…
There are hugely successful players (Look them up!!) in this area: BLAKE (Sir Peter Blake Trust), Enviroschools, Treemendous (Mazda Foundation), Garden-to-Table, Field Based STEM, Toimata Foundation etc.
These organisations and initiatives are often sponsored by companies that “get it” and supported by Ministries (Education, Environment and DoC)
But for your local school it might be useful to contact the principal or the Science team to see if you can contribute your skills to the “efficience of learning”
Of course: learning outside is especially useful in Covid times due to reduced chances of transmission.
One of my favourite examples of Nature-Nerdness are the raptors at the Bird of Prey Trust Wingspan in Rotorua. https://www.wingspan.co.nz/
There you can see Falcons flying and hunting; they train kahu and rehabilitate injured birds that rely on flying skills to survive in the New Zealand Landscape; They even support one of our newest New Zealand Native birds: the Barn Owl, which is now firmly established in Northland.
Wingspan also suffered huge losses of income during Covid, especially since they started to plan building an education centre.
One of the way they fund-raise is by selling “raptor pellets”, usually to teachers that want to do something different in the biological classroom: Birds of prey (raptors) eat meat with bones, fur, feathers as well as the meat; they then regurgitate the roughage and indigestible materials as a “pellet”. These pellets can be teased apart and bones and other materials can be identified in the classroom, to identify the types of food that were eaten by the birds.
Wingspan sent me a nice packet of barn owl pellets for my education work and I am going to give away a packet to five teachers in NZ that contact me with the best reason why they would like a packet;
Address: [e-mail] don’t forget your name, your school name and address
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