Post Office Box 146
Greytown 5742
Wairarapa
New Zealand
Telephone Number 064 (0)6 3048080
narena@nzbirds.com
Truth
That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse;
The wrastling for this world axeth a fal.
Her is non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of they stal!
Know they contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the heye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede;
And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.
— Geoffrey Chaucer
Narena Olliver,
who started developing this web site on New Zealand's birds in 1999, is neither an ornithologist nor a scientist but a writer with an intense interest in natural history. She has written a natural history/environment column for two Bay of Plenty newspapers, the Bay of Plenty Times and the Opotiki News and has also written the occasional article for the New Zealand Herald.
Narena's career has been varied, ranging from writing to
teaching English, cattle breeding, magazine publishing and politics.
She was for six years a district councillor and Chair of Planning
Hearings for the Opotiki District Council as well as a member of the
East Coast/Hawkes Bay Conservation Board. She has also been a member of
the NZ National Council of Women's environment standing committee and
is a member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand.
Narena has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Classical
Greek and a Masters degree in Teaching English as a Second Language
from the University of Illinois in the United States where she lived
for ten years. She also lived in the United Kingdom for five years. She
is a New Zealander by birth, her ancestry being English, Irish,
Scottish and Italian. Her ancestors on both the paternal and maternal
side settled in New Zealand in the 1860s.
Since 2004, Jaclyn Kras and Dick Bos have done an enormous amount of work in reorganising and upgrading this web site. A special thanks is due to Dick who, while living in the Netherlands, initiated the changes.