No one knew that Kaikōura was home to the world’s only alpine-dwelling seabird until an amateur ornithologist following a rumour discovered its burrows high in the mountains. As the bizarre attributes ...

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 ...

A rare and misunderstood octopus, the argonaut lives far out to sea, where females construct fragile shells to live in, marble-sized males woo them with severed arms, and much of their lifecycle has ...

Nineteenth-century photographer John McGarrigle is something of an enigma. A feisty, litigious man who tried his hand at farming, gold speculation and (more than once) the liquor trade, he left few ...

For a long time, no one knew. But after a multi-year study, published in February in Scientific Reports, researchers at the University of Otago have finally figured out what produces New Zealand ...

The first in a series of guides to the recently opened Te Araroa trail, selected by its founder Geoff Chapple. Te Araroa starts at Cape Reinga lighthouse on the northwestern tip of the North Island.

What is a brightly coloured parakeet whose nearest ancestors live in the tropics, doing in the company of penguins in the subantarctic? Kakariki, New Zealand’s endemic parakeets, break all the rules.

When the four-masted barque Pamir burst into Wellington Harbour out of the rolling vastness of the Southern Ocean on a cold and blustery day in late July, 1941, its captain, Verner Björkfelt, would ...

Your perch: a giant tōtara in the central North Island. Your view: thousands of hectares of podocarp forest, chainsaws chewing its edge. Your mission: to stage the world’s first treetop protest. Your ...

In April 2000, a small boulder that had for decades graced the garden of the old St Stephen’s Presbyterian manse in Dunedin was ceremoniously welcomed home by the people of Moeraki. The rock had begun ...

A scything ridge of sand—very emblem of desert lands—runs into the great wilderness that is Kokota, the bull-nosed southern head of Parengarenga Harbour. The Far North is a region built on sand, much ...

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 ...