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It was such a rookie mistake.

I was tramping in the Kahurangi, last summer. The Douglas Range, 1000m above sea level. And after we’d pitched a tent, as the sun got heavy and the surrounding hills cast their shadows long and deep, I realised I’d screwed up, big time.

Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz. Zzzzzz.

What made the error so much worse was that it wasn’t a bit of absent-minded forgetfulness. I’d carefully considered my options before loading my pack. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten to bring long johns or pants. It’s that I’d *chosen* not to pack them. Up top I had a poly-prop, jumper and jacket. But down bottom I had shorts… and that was it.

Zzzzz. Zzzzzzzz.

The only way to keep sandflies from biting is to keep moving. And the last thing you feel like doing after 8 or 10 hours of steady climbing… is keep moving. As if to wallow in my own stupidity, I ended up treading a middle ground. Moving just enough so as not to rest, but not enough to stop the sandflies from completely devouring me.

Still, I’ve had worse experiences with them. I’ll not forget my night at the mouth of the Heaphy River, where the swarms were so thick they hung in the skies like pockets of buzzing black smoke. Walking by, you had to make sure to close your mouth so as not to catch a bit of extra protein.

And you know what? I’d still take a sandfly over a biting gnat. I once chose to visit one of Utah’s national parks on a Sunday in the middle of biting gnat season. The locals call them ‘moose flies’ which I suppose could be cos’ they hang around moose, or just as feasibly in my experience because the gnats are a comparable size. It wasn’t just the itching that killed me, though. My bare legs were soon covered in blood. I returned to Salt Lake City to discover every pharmacy closed for the rest of the weekend and spent the night lying in a tepid bath, trying to stave off shock.

Often it’s the obvious downside to natural beauty. If it’s a beautiful natural landscape… there will be something that’ll give you an itchy bite.

At least there’s one place on Earth you could still safely wear shorts.

Sure, you might be a bit nippy striding down the streets of Reykjavik in your stubbies, but at the very least you could be sure there were no sandflies. There were no biting gnats. No midges. No moose flies. No mozzies.

That was at least, until this week.

Scientists have confirmed that for the first time, the World’s deadliest creature has reached the last country on Earth. Iceland officially has mosquitoes.

And while sure, Iceland is not the Amazon. They’re not at risk of a Dengue Fever outbreak, You can still safely leave the Deet at home.

The truth is that the discover probably represents more than just an ecological quirk.

At an individual level, sure, it’s a potential nuisance. But what confirming mosquitoes in Iceland says about the state of the planet is probably far more serious.

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The Widow by John Grisham

The new incredible legal thriller and first ever who-dunnit from John Grisham. She needs a lawyer. He needs a payday. Simon Latch is a small-town lawyer struggling with debt, gambling issues and an impending divorce.

Last One Out by Jane Harper

He had been here, that was clear from the marks in the dust. And he had been alone. In a dying town, Ro Crowley waits for her son on the evening of his 21st birthday. But Sam never comes home.

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Building on Jack’s love of birds and bird-feeding in his garden – new research shows that listening to birdsong may actually benefit your mental health and improve sadness and depression.

Researchers took people with and without depression and then made them feel sad in the laboratory by playing movie clips. Sidenote – I read another study where they made people feel sad by playing a piece of Russian classical music slowed down to half speed and matched with sad faces! It’s not uncommon in psyc studies to mess around with people’s emotions and then make them feel better.

Then taught people mindfulness breathing or gave them opportunity to listen to birdsong. Both of these treatments led to people feeling happier. Listening to birdsong helped peoples heart rates to return to normal functioning, indicating it was good for the body as well as the mind.

What are the implications of this? Both are helpful at improving people’s mood. Mindfulness requires more effort from a person and learning a skill so might be harder to get up and running in the first place. But of course once you’ve learnt it you can do it whenever you want – the ideal self-help tool.

Listening to birdsong requires much less effort on behalf of someone – you just lie back and do it! This might be particularly useful for someone who is quite down and has little energy or motivation to do much. Shows how our emotional state can be changed both intentionally and on-purpose, and just automatically

Also birdsong is free and possibly easily available – but you do need to be near some trees. This could have implications for things like urban design and building green spaces near and around new housing developments.

This builds on a growing amount of research showing the benefits of nature-based interventions for improving mental health. In the UK these are called “green prescriptions” – things like gardening and going fishing – like the UK TV show “Mortimer and Whitehouse - Gone Fishing”. Interestingly, there was a recent NZ study that showed fishing was really helpful in reducing depression, psyc distress, and anxiety Media release: World's largest angling mental health study reveals remarkable benefits - Fish & Game

So get out there – feed the birds and then listen to them sing. Garden or go fishing. It’s good for the mind as well as the body!

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When I arrived in New Zealand as an immigrant (in 1978), the Asian Paperwasp arrived here too. I remember I was impressed by the New Zealand obsessions to keep these invaders out of the kiwi ecosystems.

A few years later I started working for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Asian (or Chinese) Paperwasp was still being pursued; unfortunately without success. We tried to create some pro-active techniques to stop unwanted critters making it to our wonderful country and every time some new pest arrives, I feel awful and ready to have a crack at a counter offensive.

So – here we are …. With a real “Hornet” (Hornets are a different group of wasps): The yellow-Legged Hornet. Have a look at the pictures of these brutes: they have yellow legs and are way bigger than the wasps we are used to.

They are originally from East and South-East Asia (My birth place: Indonesia!!) and rapidly moving all over the place: the rest of Asia, Korea, Japan, Now Europe, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy Belgium and the UK.

Almost exactly 8 years ago it showed its “EU Passport” in the Netherlands; Let me tell you that the Dutch moved rather quickly to knock that hornet on the head… Good Luck!! Rather recently it was found in Ireland – an island with perhaps better chances to eradicate it. This Hymenopteran is on the move!!

Nobody likes this beastie – it simply has no sense of humour; in terms of its dietary preference you could say that this Hornet is as selective as a vacuum cleaner.

It goes for all sorts of native insects (flies, beetles, wasps, honey bees) ripe fruits, pollen and nectar, as well as people with allergies to wasp stings.

So right now is the time to gather the Nature Nerds of our country and start our counter attack, together with the Ministry of Primary Industries.

So far we’ve found 2 adult male yellow-legged hornets in Grafton and Albany – that was some months ago. A week ago there was a female (a Queen) in Glenfield, trying to build a brand-new nest. That nest was still small and light in colour:

The very beginning of the nest, made by the queen (a so-called “primary nest”)
This nest can grow much bigger as the colony builds up in numbers (up to 60 centimetre diameter); so far MPI haven’t found any established nests yet

So, how can we all help to give MPI a hand getting rid of this pest species:

Gardeners are usually extremely observant, when it comes to insects on the property and in this case the identification is relatively easy (especially with NatureNerd kids in the household!!)

Identification: The Hornets (on the left) are quite a bit bigger than German wasps (on the right), common wasps and our established species of paperwasps. Thorax and abdomen have different colours too. Wings rather dark and not translucent – I reckon most people can see that easily.

At this stage we simply do not have a useful treatment to kill these rotters in your garden; I’m sure some scientists as well as back-yard inventors might try their luck with all sorts of concoctions, fatal to the hornets, but in my opinion it’s best to do the following as soon as you find a nest or some big hornets in your garden:

First Report it to MPI: Contact MPI’s exotic pest and disease hotline: 0800 809 966

Carefully take a photo of the suspect insect(s)

Alternatively: report these pests online: https://report.mpi.govt.nz/pest/

Have a look at the Fact Sheet: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=keep+an+eye+out+for+yellow-legged+hornets

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Immigrant's Vineyard Sparkling Méthode Traditionnelle NV, Central Otago

RRP from $38.00

Roland and Lucienne moved to New Zealand from the Netherlands 1986, ultimately settling in Central Otago’s Alexandra area.

Some years later Lucy studied viticulture in Hawke's Bay and after working in hospitality and retail for many years took the leap of faith and passion and acquired our vineyard. Their first vintage was in 2015 launching Ruru wines under the umbrella company – Immigrant’s Vineyard

The wine:

Made with 100% Pinot Noir fruit this is a very attractive methode traditionelle with a bold leesy autolysis quality with aromas and flavours of fresh oatmeal and apple, fresh grapefruit and white peach. A crunchy texture with plenty of acidity and youthful mouthfeel framing pomaceous and citrus fruits. Nice weight and length, a wine to enjoy through the warmer weeks of summer and very food friendly. Well tinkered with best drinking from day of purchase through 2028+.

The Food:

The default for many with a dry sparkling wine is Mussels or Oysters, salty in food brings out the fruit flavours in wine. Salo, salt lowers the tasters perceptions of acidity.

There’s a great coffee table book called Champagne and Chandeliers (Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hardie Grant) , a page turner with some fantastic menus and matches. Try a soft boiled egg with caviar alongside Champagne, or just keep it super simple with a shallots

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ChatGPT has launched a browser

It's only for Mac though. I tried it and was a little underwhelmed. The first two things I tried to get it to do it failed at. I asked it to get headlines from CNN and the NYTimes but those sites are restricted -- which may be a common issue as you start using it for your every day. Publishers and Apps are thinking about their AI access strategies after being burned from giving so much of their content to Google.

I then asked it to draft an email and get it ready in Gmail - but it wasn't any faster than copy and pasting from ChatGPT directly. Not sure there is enough benefit just yet!

The big outage earlier the week shows just how reliant we are on AWS

Oh boy.. that was a day. 14 hours of downtime with spotty services as different Amazon web services were online and offline. It turned out to be a DNS issue. The ip addresses of the DynamoDB servers were wiped - effectively making them invisible to the internet. It would be like removing all the phone numbers from the phone book - it doesn't make the phone book very useful. Only trouble is that the cloud servers and other AWS services people use rely on that phone book to operate and connect to the internet. It meant they were all taken offline and exposed a bad failure point.

It really showed that some companies don't have adequate failovers, or proper multi-cloud implementations. But, it didn't hurt them - their stock actually popped on the day of the outage and they have ended the week up ~5%.

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