Black Swan... Very strange.
The greatest volunteer team of all timeI have spent the past week hacking at non natives with a saw. Plants that is. Obviously. I know there was a few of you there thinking "Wow its finally happened, he's lost the plot entirely"
You'd be surprised at how much death is involved with conservation work. Yeah I know you'd think seeing as it is called conservation work there'd be more actual conserving involved really. I'm starting to get the impression that CVNZ may be some kind extremist plant killing group cunningly disguised as a volunteer organisation. Since I started with CVNZ I have spent most of my time killing plants. When not killing plants we kill small mammals(well set up the traps to do so anyway). You see the New Zealanders are very upset that all these non-native plants and animals(all land mammals here are non-native) are here stealing all the resources from the natives and they believe that the only way their native flora and fauna will survive is by a mass genocide of all plant and wildlife that is non kiwi. Isn't this sounding a bit familiar? Think circa 1940's...
But yeah, you'd be amazed at what they actually consider weeds here. Back home it is a term reserved for little plants that grow between the cracks in the footpath. Here everything is a weed. I had to kill a couple of great big trees the other day. By "ring barking" this is botanical equivalent of cutting somethings throat, the tree dies slowly over a number of years afterwards. They had us chopping down weeds on a little forest track there the other day, when we were done it was a clearing. It looked the scene of some kind of tree massacre. Nearly all their plants are in fact weeds. In the New Zealand dictionary the definition of weed is actually "Plant from somewhere else.
More plant killing lined up for next. At a peat lake this time. Terribly exciting stuff eh?
Right, don't really have much else to say. I'm off to the zoo. I'll keep ye posted on my plant murdering antics.
