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

Paul Quinlan wakes up at four, vaguely nervous about the day ahead. The tūī are up particularly early, too, as if to herald a significant dawn. As Quinlan drives south from his home in Kaeo, others ...

A mycologist on a mission to catalogue all New Zealand’s species of rust has just added another 26 to the list. For Eric McKenzie, the fungal pathogens have been a 55-year passion. Some specimens have ...

What would the beach be without red-billed gulls? We may be about to find out. Two huge colonies have already gone under and the next biggest, in Kaikōura, is failing fast. In December 2023, ...

Science & Environment The stuff of life There are places in our seas where the great, whirring cogs of the world hold still. Where the process of decay pauses—for your lifetime, for your children’s, ...

Where do young sea creatures spend their first weeks? What’s at the root of oceanic food chains? Kelp forests are to Aotearoa what coral reefs are to other marine ecosystems. Or they used to be. South ...

People and livestock gobble so much fish that the seas soon won’t keep up. Is the answer to grow fish on land? After decades of research, scientists are cracking the secrets to commercially ...

The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble. A bittern’s mottled brown and beige plumage helps it blend into ...

It is the larger of Auckland’s twin harbours; at high tide 340 square kilometres of sparkling sea, and at low water half of that, the rest becoming sand and mud-flats. The rugged heads can be glimpsed ...

In a windy land, the most notorious gale is the Canterbury nor’wester. Born in the heart of the mountains, it accelerates down the great valleys east of the Main Divide and roars out across the plains ...

In the 1970s, if you were to wander Italy’s Latium coast on a hot day, you might have found Roberta D’Archino’s father near the sea, his toes dug into the sand, binoculars pointing at the ocean. He ...

Hundreds of pest plant species—many of them garden escapees—run rampant in New Zealand’s biggest city. Now, its citizens are fighting back. Sweat drips down Richard Margesson’s brow as he rappels down ...