John Flux - Lifelong ecologist

Internationally respected New Zealand ecologist John Flux has spent his life studying hares, starlings, and even his own cats. His study of starlings in Belmont Regional Park, near Wellington, has become one of the longest continuous ecological studies in the world, running from 1970 to today. At its peak he and his wife Meg would examine 500 starling nest boxes, located in munitions bunkers built by the US military in 1942. John still climbs a ladder each year to check on 50 nesting boxes to see what effect climate change is having on the timing of egg laying. He's recently authored a paper in the European Journal of Ecology about what humans might learn from the fate of feral populations of domesticated rabbits.