NZBC science programme.
In 1972 it screened fortnightly, alternating with Peter Read’s Night Sky. For that years shows producer - director David Pumphrey took a film crew to Cuvier Island during the breeding season of the red billed gull to cover research by Auckland University scientists into the behaviour of these birds. On the island the crew also filmed material - for later Search For Tomorrow programmes — the habitat of the so-called “native” rat and the fate of 29 North Island saddle- backs released on Cuvier five years ago in a bid to save the species from extinction.
The first programme also contained a look at ultrasonic scanning as an aid to diagnosis at the National Women’s Hospital, Auckland.
Among topics in other programmes to screen that year were inventions for finding fish under water and for testing the roughness of roads. Wildlife items ranged from wildpigs being tagged in Canterbury to eels being measured in Pukepuke Lagoon. The team went to South Westland to cover research on a seal colony and to Nelson investigating the discovery of a water beetle species which inhabits the icy depths of artesian bores - a species only found in about three other locations in the world.
David Pumphrey also had plans to do an item on the controversial research being done by Americans at Mount John, South Canterbury.
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