Nicola Toki is disarmingly frank about people’s perceptions of conservationists. The biologist and CEO of conservation charity Forest & Bird says, “I have this theory that us nature people have done ourselves a disservice over the years by being very earnest and, of course, we are because we see the stuff we care about slipping away and we work really hard to look after it. But it’s sometimes hard to engage people if you’re very serious all the time. I can’t help but find the funny things and that’s probably why Critter of the Week has worked.”
Critter of the Week has become a fixture on Jesse Mulligan’s afternoon radio show on RNZ. It began nine years ago, when Nicola was invited in her capacity as the Department of Conservation’s Threatened Species Ambassador, to talk about corporate sponsorship for conservation projects.
She recalls, “In the course of the phone call, I heard myself talking about leverage and synergies – really tedious management speak – and I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s bored and if he’s bored, everyone else is bored and, actually, I’m bored.’
“Earlier that week, I’d run into a member of our marine science team and one of them told me about finding Smeagol the gravel maggot, a tiny form of sea slug that breathes air and lives
