Meet Alex

Hi! My name is Alex and I’ll be keeping you up-to-date with life on Rangatira Island for the first five weeks of the field trip. Right now, I live in Dunedin where my favourite animal is a blue heeler called Herb who likes to collect things from around the house and pile them beside the front door for when you get home. He also likes licking shoes.

Over the last five years I have explored as much of the world as I could and I have had loads of different jobs. One year, I worked on a luxury yacht that had gold-plated toilet-brush handles and acres of wood-panelling that I had to clean with a cotton bud - but it was worth it for the chance to sail across the Atlantic and visit desert islands in the Caribbean. We even went through the Panama Canal four times.

During my travels, I have been close enough to touch real red-hot lava on a volcano in Guatemala - I don’t recommend wearing shorts! I went ziplining through the jungle in Panama and visited Aztec ruins in Mexico. I spent a summer living in a basement in Rome with seven other people and a scorpion. In Morocco, I played football in the sand dunes on the edge of the Sahara desert and slept in a castle built out of straw and camel dung. Diving in Thailand, I was bitten (nibbled at, really) by schools of tiny stripey fish and followed by leopard sharks (they didn’t bite).

So far I have been to thirty-five countries but never to New Zealand’s outer edges. Rangatira Island will be a completely new adventure and an opportunity to use what I have learned through my studies of Science Communication at Otago University. I am especially excited about getting up close to all the local seabirds as I work with Melanie and the other scientists on the island and I’m really looking forward to meeting the Black Robins!