Restore Hibiscus & Bays welcomes you.

Join us for our annual AGM and briefly learn about our years work and significant environmental impact in your local area.

Hear from our guest speaker, Dr Dianne Brunton, and be re-inspired about our incredible native birds, living in your backyard.

Enjoy warm conversation with friends, kindred spirits and like-minded environmental champions, over hot drinks and delicious bites.

All this in Browns Bay on the 17th of October.

Drop-ins are welcome on the day, but we do encourage you to please register for this event: To give us an idea of numbers and so that we can notify you in the case of any last minute changes.

Ngā mihi nui,

The Restore Hibiscus and Bays Team

🎙️ More about our guest speaker event segment:

“The cultural evolution of bird song - Integrating behavioural ecology & conservation in the Anthropocene"
- Dr Dianne Brunton

Dianne will talk about the incredible song cultures of our native birds in free living populations. The research she and her students have done, within the Hibiscus and Bays Region and the Hauraki Gulf, highlights the crucial and ongoing role that predator control, species translocations, and bird monitoring play in restoring our amazing birdsong to our forests.

Professor Dianne Brunton is a behavioural ecologist and conservation biologist in the School of Natural Sciences, at the Auckland Campus of Massey University. Dianne grew up in Auckland Tamaki Makaurau and completed a BSc and MSc in Zoology at the University of Auckland. Like many young kiwis, she then flew overseas to undertake her PhD studies. Dianne completed a PhD in Wildlife Biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. There she worked on the reproductive strategies of killdeer, (Charadrius vociferus), a large plover found throughout the Americas. She completed Postdocs at University of California, Berkeley on the adoption behaviour of western gulls, and at Yale University, Connecticut, on coloniality in least tern. In 1991, Dianne returned to New Zealand to invest in her own reproductive effort and to take up an academic position at the University of Auckland. In late 2004, Dianne moved to Massey University, Auckland campus, and established and led the Ecology and Conservation Group. Professor Brunton has a diversity of research interests in conservation and behavioural ecology, with innovative research contributions in the field of the cultural evolution of bird and has published more than 140 peer-reviewed articles and has been the primary supervisor to 37 PhD and 75 MSc students. In 2017, she was awarded the Massey University Research Medal for Supervision. Dianne is currently the Chair of the Auckland Zoo Conservation Fund and a Scientific Advisor to TiME (This is My Earth), a non-profit international environmental organisation that offers every citizen of the world an opportunity to protect biodiversity. Her current research projects include research on Tieke, Korimako, and Tui song, conservation of Tara iti the NZ Fairy tern, understanding the impacts of pest species such as hedgehogs.