Watching Birds in New Zealand with Brent Stephenson

New Zealand is famous for its epic landscapes. It’s become a favorite place for filmmakers who want dramatic scenery. But New Zealand is also known for having unique and unusual wildlife, particularly its birds. There are more than 370 species of birds that can be found in New Zealand, about a quarter of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Brent Stephenson knows New Zealand’s birds better than just about anybody. He’s an ornithologist with a Ph.D. in Zoology from Massey University who has led birding expeditions in New Zealand and around the world. At one point he held the record for the most birds seen in New Zealand by a person in a single year! One species, the New Zealand storm petrel, was thought to be extinct until Brent spotted one in 2003. Brent is also a photographer and author of the book, Birds of New Zealand: A Photographic Guide.

Join Wild World host Scott Solomon on a trip to New Zealand with the Rice Alumni Traveling Owls! The Traveling Owls program offers exciting intellectual itineraries to destinations across the globe. You don’t have to be a Rice alum to participate in Traveling Owls programs. Scott will be hosting a Traveling Owls trip to New Zealand in December 2025 on a custom itinerary by International Seminar Design, Inc. Visit https://alumni.rice.edu/travelingowls/new-zealand-wonders for details or call ISDI at 202-244-1448 to sign up!

More info about New Zealand birds:

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/

https://www.expeditions.com/expedition-stories/stories/slideshow-the-birds-of-new-zealand

More info about New Zealand

https://www.britannica.com/place/New-Zealand

This episode of Wild World was produced by 3WireCreative with support from the Rice Alumni Traveling Owls.

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio, the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it.

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Traveling Owls New Zealand v2

Discovering the Natural...

There are more than 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth. But rather than being spread evenly across the planet, they tend to be clustered in particular locations. A cluster of active volcanoes occurs in east Africa, in what’s known as the Great Rift Valley, which runs through the continent of Africa from Ethiopia in the north to Mozambique in the south.

Like other places where volcanoes are clustered, such as the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Great Rift Valley is a place where the boundaries between Earth’s tectonic plates meet. In some places, like the Andes of South America, the plates are moving toward one another, causing one plate to be forced below the other, which leads to the formation of tall mountains as the plates buckle and fold. But in East Africa, the plates are moving away from one another. In the gap between them, depressions are created that form large valleys, or lakes as water accumulates. But in a few spots, the separation of these massive plates creates an opening where magma from deeper in the Earth can make its way up to the surface. Where that happens, you get a volcano.

Dr. Kayla Iacovino is a geoscientist who has studied volcanoes all over the world. She has a Bachelor’s degree in geology from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge and her current position is Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. She has also done fieldwork in Antarctica, Costa Rica, Chile, Italy, North Korea, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her work has been featured on numerous documentaries, including a BBC documentary about her work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The DR Congo, or DRC, is the second largest country in Africa and is located in the center of the continent. The Congo river flows through it, surrounded by the world’s second largest rainforest. The eastern edge of the country, near the border with Uganda and Rwanda, has rugged mountains. This is where the country’s two active volcanoes are located, Nyiragongo and Nyamulagira. In 2002, an eruption of Nyiragongo devastated the nearby city of Goma. Kayla Iocovino was part of the research team that visited these mountains along with the BBC film crew. I watched the documentary and my jaw was on the floor when I saw how Kayla and her team literally rappelled down into the crater of Nyiragongo, at the bottom of which was a massive lava lake– the largest in the world.

To learn more about Kayla Iacovino’s research on volcanoes, visit her website: https://www.kaylaiacovino.com.

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The Andes are the longest mountain chain in the world and the second highest mountain range in the world after the Himalayas. There are over a hundred peaks in the Andes with summits that exceed 6,000 meters (19,685 feet)-- and many of the mountains are covered in glaciers.

Glaciers cover 10% of the land area on Earth. They store about ⅔ of the world’s fresh water– an incredibly important and valuable resource. But as global temperatures rise, those glaciers are disappearing. Not only are we losing precious fresh water as glaciers melt into water that flows into the sea and gets salty and harder to use, but all that water is also causing sea levels to rise. If all of the glaciers on Earth melted, the sea level would rise about 230 feet, flooding every coastal city on the planet and displacing about one-third of the world’s population.

One person who is working to help understand and raise awareness of the problem of shrinking glaciers is Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña. She’s a glaciologist– a type of geologist that specializes in studying glaciers. She has a Bachelor's degree in Earth Science from Rice University, a Masters from Brown University, and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was also a Fulbright Fellow in Nepal where she lived for 10 months. Her current job is Communications Lead at North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center at the University of Colorado, one of nine Climate Adaptation Science Centers across the country.

Ulyana’s Persistent Pollutants Project: https://scienceinthewild.com/persistent-pollutants-project/

To follow Ulyana and Ricardo’s mountain climbing expeditions, visit http://summitssongsandscience.com/index.html

To learn more about glaciers, visit the world glacier monitoring service website wgms.ch/

Watch Ulyana’s TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE54K0sF-1g

This podcast is produced by 3Wire Creative.

Help support this podcast and future episodes by checking out Autio, the perfect travel companion app for more engaging road trips. Autio is a network of stories, told by master storytellers like Kevin Costner, Phil Jackson, and John Lithgow, with the power to bring the landscape, its people, and its history alive as you pass through it.

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