One spring, Annette Lees was given a bat monitor for her birthday—a black and olive plastic gadget with knobs for adjusting volume and frequency and a speaker to announce when a bat was nearby. It is ...

I'd like to start by thanking everyone who has responded to our We Need Your Help appeal. On Thursday we ticked over 1000 new subscriptions, putting us just 1000 short of our goal. Hundreds of readers ...

In the late 19th century, news of a strange antipodean bird with beautiful tail feathers, orange wattles, and a long curved beak spread around the British Empire. To Māori, it was a tapu bird—a sacred ...

Within minutes of entering a classroom, James Te Tuhi has captivated his young audi­ence with tales of Pingao, how she was placed on the dunes by her father, Tangaroa, to nur­ture her whanau, the ...

Tawaki, or Fiordland crested penguins, have plenty of food along the coastline where they breed, yet every year they make a trip to the Subtropical and Subantarctic Fronts and back to feed—a swim of ...

A resonant whoosh of air and water blasts skywards as a Bryde’s (pronounced “broode­rs”) whale surfaces 60 metres in front of us. The twin blowholes on the top of its head are clearly visible. The ...

Great Mercury was one of the first sites of human habitation in New Zealand. Last year, a radical new public-private partnership sought to rid the island of pests. It was a unique operation, and the ...

Endemic to New Zealand, the Nelson cave spider has the largest leg span among New Zealand spiders—up to 130 millimetres, with its body only 24 millimetres. The first two pairs of legs each have a long ...

Pigs which have grazed on the subantarctic Auckland Islands for almost 200 years are living on borrowed time. Within 10 years, if Depart­ment of Conservation plans go ahead, the animals will be ...

There isn’t a catch limit on the lucrative whitebait fishery, which threatens to extinguish a cherished tradition and a small family of fish in one sweep of the net. If nothing changes, two whitebait ...

The planting of Russell lupins as sheep feed in the Canterbury high country is triggering a clash between farming and conservation values. In early summer, photographers jostle for space on the ...

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 ...