WĒTĀ

CONSERVATION
CHARITABLE TRUST

Report a wētā sighting

Have you come across an interesting wētā? Or, in fact, any interesting animal or plant? If you have, we encourage you to do the following:

  1. Take a photograph
  2. Record its accurate location. Nowadays, any smart-phone will automatically attach GPS coordinates to all photographs you take, unless you have changed your settings and denied your phone permission to do so.
  3. Report your observation.

It is our preference that all wētā observations are entered in iNaturalist, so that they are publicly accessible and not in the hands of a selected few. iNaturalist observations are fully searchable and are stored long-term; they thus constitute an important public record.

In order to use iNaturalist, you need to create an account first. If, for any reason, you do not wish to create an iNaturalist account, then please email us your observation, with photograph and location, at info@wetaconservation.org.nz. We’ll be grateful to you for it!

If you are reporting a threatened species, then the precise location needs to be obscured to prevent poaching and smuggling overseas. iNaturalist allows you to obscure the coordinates by means of a drop-down menu in the left hand panel:

You should still share the coordinates of your obscured observation with scientist who study wētā. You can do this as follows (note: you only need to do this once, not every time you enter an observation):

  1. Join the “Wētā Getter” project. This project is managed by scientists who study wētā at Massey University.
  2. After clicking on the “join” button in the top right corner, a new window will open on your screen. At the bottom, it will ask you if you would like to make your private or obscured coordinates visible to the project coordinators.
  3. Select the second option (“Yes, no matter who adds the observation to the project”). All New Zealand observations of Orthoptera are added to the project automatically, unless a user opts out.

This is it.

Every observation matters. Thank you for taking your time to share!