Yesterday I was at the bus stop when I looked over and saw someone reading Small Town Short News. I wonder what they were thinking – did they love it? Did they hate it? Were they dreaming of stretching their cramped legs in endless seas of perennial ryegrass? Were they shocked to their core about that cow statue being vandalized? Did they just think it was kind of stupid? In any case, here’s more short news from our small towns. I hope you like it, bus stop stranger.

Residents had to evacuate their homes after a neighbor in Marokopa started a bonfire using their own shit. After receiving a letter from the Waitomo District Council to move their longdrop, a local resident thought they’d fix the problem by dumping its contents on to a rubbish fire. “[The neighbors] were all running and gagging,” a local resident told King Country News. “They had to sit out the back by the river until it had died down a bit. It was really funny.” Residents reportedly had to steer clear of the area for days until the smell lifted. At the time of writing, the longdrop is still there.

The kiwi population has grown considerably in the Coromandel. There are 225 more kiwi than last recorded in 2009, pushing the number of kiwi around Mount Moehau to 489. The Department of Conservation say this increase is due to a collaborative predator control program, which focused on removing possums and stoats from the area. As well as kiwi, the Moehau ranges are also said to be the habitat of Patupaiarehe and the elusive Moehau Man, who my dad was so concerned about he made sure to warn us every time we drove through the area.

A new trial to see whether seaweed can help clean our waterways has begun. In the polluted Waihou River, Waikato uni students alongside Māori owned seaweed company AgriSea are growing sea lettuce in the hopes that it will soak up some of the more damaging pollutants in the water (like phosphorus and nitrogen). Many of our waterways in Aotearoa are polluted as a direct result of intensive farming and urban runoff,