It arrived in a wooden cabinet, each drawer of it a family: Calliostomatinae, Volutidae, Turbinidae. One of every kind of ...

When James Cook rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific aboard Endeavour in January 1769, his first job was a scientific one—to observe the transit of Venus. But Cook was also under Admiralty ...

Get out of the city this summer and you’re bound to glimpse a kāhu. The powerful, clever native hawks are revered by those ...

Dunes–even the most massive, containing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sand-are constructs of the wind. Wind is a form of global energy redistribution. The sun’s rays are not received in equal ...

Packs of kea are reliable entertainers in places such as Arthur’s Pass or Glacier Country, and new research is showing that kea are smarter and have more complex communication than previously thought.

New Zealand has only one endemic gull, the tarāpuka, and it’s more endangered than the takahē, the hoiho and all five species of kiwi. Its survival depends on the preservation of the South Island’s ...

New Zealand’s forests were cleared at a record pace, and from this destruction, a sport arose: who can fell a tree the fastest? Competitive woodchopping transformed the labour of forestry into a ...

One of the rarest ecologies in the world is hiding in plain sight, in the centre of the most central suburb of the largest city in New Zealand. Of more than 5000 hectares of rock forest that once ...

Sharks embody our deep fears… and our fears of the deep. Because we fear them, we persecute them… yet it appears not all sharks were created equal. They are not all cold blooded killing machines. A ...

Lake Taupo lies in the caldera of an active supervolcano, the site of the world’s most violent eruption of the last 70,000 years. Just 10 km beneath it sits another lake of molten rock 50 km wide and ...

The Scots Brought their past and their present with them — and a determina­tion to forget neither. Long before surveyor William Tuckett rowed to the head of Otago harbour in April, 1844, and ...

Hailing from Australia, where it is most common in Melbourne, the Gisborne cockroach was first recorded in Gisborne in the 1960s, but is thought to have arrived earlier as it was noticed in Auckland ...