Stuart Chambers

Stuart Chambers' first job on leaving school in 1955 was to milk cows on a large dairy farm at Horsham Downs near Hamilton, New Zealand. He then moved into sheep farming and during a diploma course at Massey Agricultural College, Palmerston North, worked on a large sheep farm at Fortrose near Invercargill in South Island. This followed a sheep farming career of 28 years, starting with an undeveloped block of land at Mangatarata near the Hauraki Plains. This he developed from manuka scrub mainly with funds from the government-run Marginal Lands Board. During that time he pioneered on-farm tourism over a 12 year period. During these years he became a regular writer for the New Zealand Farmer magazine. He later worked on projects in Tanzania and Fiji and was involved for some years with the Miranda Naturalists' Trust. For 9 years he worked part-time for the Queen Elizabeth II National Trust as a field representative. This led on to establishing the Aroha Island Ecological Centre in the Bay of Islands. Currently he runs a small boutique publishing business called Arun Books. This helps people get their unpublished works between book covers, or on to Amazon Kindle. He has written many books himself, some of which are now on Kindle. His hobbies have always been land development, bird watching and book publishing, the bird-watching hobby leading him on to writing Birds of New Zealand - Locality Guide. This came about after he led several bird-watching tours in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.