Miranda Naturalists' Trust

The Miranda Naturalists' Trust is a charitable trust, that established and maintains the Miranda Shorebird Centre, located at Miranda on the western shore of the Firth of Thames on the North Island of New Zealand. The Miranda Naturalists' Trust (MNT) was formed in 1975 to encourage people to visit the coastline and appreciate its wide range of flora and fauna. The trust promotes education and public awareness of coastal ecology, shorebird research and conservation. Work done by the trust, to increase knowledge of shorebird migration, includes bird banding, research and data exchange. The Shorebird Centre has information displays on waders and a library and helps raise funds for the trust's work through their shop sales and visitor accommodation.

Miranda is on the western shore of the Firth of Thames where the Hauraki Plains drains into the Hauraki Gulf. The wetlands of the Firth of Thames consist of extensive intertidal mudflats (about 8500 hectares), which are the feeding grounds for flocks of migratory wading birds. Along the Miranda coast large shell banks were formed over the past 4500 years, which provide roosting areas for the waders at high tide.

In 1990 the area was listed as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.

The Miranda Naturalists' Trust was established in 1975 by a group of Auckland-based birdwatchers. One of them was Richard B. Sibson. He had arrived in Auckland from England in 1939 to take up a position as a classics' master with King's College at Middlemore. He was a keen birdwatcher, making bicycle tours to the Firth of Thames in the 1940s, e.g. in 1942 with a group of students from King's College. At Miranda, at the site of a then operating lime-works, he discovered a bird high-tide roost with bar-tailed godwits (Limosa lapponica), wrybills (Anarhynchus frontalis) and South Island pied oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus). Other founders of the MNT were author and naturalist Ronald Lockley and Beth Brown. Beth was later to become the South Auckland representative and the first woman president of the Ornithological Society.

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