Look, sometimes there just isn’t that much small town short news, alright? It isn’t every week that someone makes a bonfire out of shit, or the clock in Te Kuiti stops working. Sometimes it’s just gonna be people talking about the weather, and you’re just gonna have to accept it. I’m doing my best here.

A group of native skinks have been relocated to a pest free sanctuary in Rotopiko. 14 copper skinks, known collectively as mokomoko, were found during construction of a new housing development in Te Awamutu, and consequently relocated to a wetland sanctuary at Lake Rotopiko. Volunteers at Rotary constructed some cute little wood stack refuges for the mokomoko, and local tribe Ngāti Apakura welcomed the new additions with a waiata. While our copper-coloured friends’ conservation status is ‘threatened,’ they aren’t currently at risk of extinction – but there certainly are worse uses of your day than saving a handful of strange little reptiles.

While bee numbers continue to decline worldwide, the Waipā District Council has adopted a new bylaw which will see restrictions placed around where bees are allowed to be(e). After a plan change accidentally allowed residents to just straight up put beehives in their backyard without a resource consent, Council ruled that said bees need to be kept far away from the neighbours, fenced in, and provided with a nice cool drink of water at all times – punishable by death (jk). I did try to find more information about the bylaw, but the link to the document provided by Waipā 404’d and they never replied to my email, which is probably due to my open disdain for Councils in all their forms.

After a particularly long and hot summer, Waikato farmers are facing incredibly dry conditions, much like Ben Shapiro’s wife. Due to climate change, farms over the Waikato haven’t seen much rain, which is the naturally occurring phenomenon where condensed liquid water becomes heavy enough to fall from the sky. While a few extreme weather events over the last few months provided a little bit of rain, the Waikato Primary Industries Adverse Event Cluster (great name btw) is urging farmers to start their winter jobs early just in case Metservice keeps lying about when the rain is coming. “Shit, it’s a bit bloody dry, isn’t it,” a local farmer told Nexus, squinting at the sky from underneath his FMG hat. “Yeah, nah, it’s fucken… Yeah.”

Local councils are still whinging and whining about Three Waters. I honestly don’t know shit about Three Waters, but every single time I open a rural newspaper or newsletter, there’s another old white dude having a snotty cry about socialism and their deep, endless love for rusting and decaying water pipes in their area. To be frank, I don’t think that any of these Councillors really know anything about Three Waters either, but they need to justify the existence of their jobs somehow, and complaining about shit people don’t care about is the easiest way to do so. I was thinking of doing a write up about Three Waters, but I was too busy trying to figure out how to pay rent and buy groceries without going into bankruptcy. Maybe if local councils took better care of their infrastructure, then we wouldn’t need Mommy Government to step in and fix everything.