I OWE A DEBT OF GRATITUDE...
To the Author that inspired this all.
In 2005, I was twelve and had just started high school. I was a shy teenager struggling to fit in, unable to find friends. Alone, I found myself in the school library reading.
Quite by chance, I picked up ‘The Quest for the Kakapo’ by David Butler. I had never even heard of the Kakapo before, but they seemed so regal and majestic. Yet, at the same time, so fragile. In 2005, only eighty-six were known to exist, and their survival as a species was far from certain. The book captivated me, and I finished it in a single day—an impressive feat for a twelve-year-old!
TO AN UNKOWN RANGER...
The following day, I came into school determined to learn everything I could about the Kakapo. Via the school computers, I learned, quite by chance, that a breeding season had just started. Every day, the Kakapo recovery team would update their website with the successes and failures of the breeding season.
I may never know who the lone scientist was who wrote those updates. This was all before the days of social media. With a poor internet connection on a remote offshore island, someone must have devoted considerable effort to updating that website. However, in doing so, they captivated a lonely boy who found a world opening up before him that he never knew had existed. My lifelong passion for conservation can be traced back to those critical days, hunched over a computer, trying to finish reading before I got back to class.
Caption
AND TO A LOCKDOWN!
Years later, during lockdown, I found myself again, alone and bored. Without much to do, I decided to write about something that I was passionate about. Each day, I would post online about a conservation topic I was passionate about. It gave me a chance to learn and research something I was interested in. Furthermore, it provided an outlet at a time when I had little else to do.
The response was frankly tepid. Few people read what I wrote, my outlet was instagram and in the early days, it seemed that at best I was focusing on the wrong platform. My first viral post, was on the importance of introduced animals being culled, needless to say the feedback was not positive and I seriously considered giving up.
However, I prided myself on focusing on writing well researched articles. I wanted to produce the best information online about Conservation in New Zealand.
In time things began to snowball.