On December 10, 2024, a juvenile bottlenose dolphin was reported tangled in fishing line near Riverhead, in the upper reaches of the Waitematā Harbour. The dolphin couldn’t flex its tail properly, or dive, or chase fish. Its pod headed elsewhere. One larger dolphin stayed behind, and for the next month it stuck close, spending almost […]...
Tongariro is by far the most popular national park in the North Island, attracting tens of thousands of skiers, walkers and trampers every year. The park centres around three active volcanoes: Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, all of which are considered by local Maori to be sacred ancestors. In 1887 the chief of the local iwi Ngati […]...
Flora Feltham wrote an early version of our cover story when she was living on Wellington’s predator-free reserve Mana Island with her husband, then a DOC ranger. The couple spent two years on the island, often alone, spanning Feltham’s first pregnancy and 10 months of their baby’s life. An incredible honour, she says, but it […]...
I slithered along the gravel through a streamway barely 25 centimetres high, 10 centimetres of water lapping gently along the centre line of my face. With my head turned sideways, I could breathe only through the top of my mouth by pursing my lips, awkwardly, into a snorkel shape, as freezing water sloshed about my […]...
For all sorts of reasons: to defend territory, attract a mate, let a mate know where it is, because it’s fun, because it’s dawn. What is unusual about New Zealand native birds (and many bird species in the southern Hemisphere) is that the females can belt out a tune as well as their male counterparts, […]...
Where can the city dweller look for the inexhaustible wild? Perhaps it lies closer than we think, on the flipside of the ordinary, along the unkempt edges of the familiar. An urban green space can become a site of pilgrimage, a place to discover a waterfall by moonlight....
Seafood is healthy and the world wants more. Too bad that most wild fisheries are overfished and collapsing. Over the last few decades, aquaculture has begun to offer a solution to this difficulty, but it’s not a solution that wins universal acclaim. In New Zealand, the black floats that mark mussel farms (above)—our main form […]...
Robotic in form and startlingly efficient en masse, ants have outlived the dinosaurs and now scuttle over every major landmass but Antarctica. Humans can learn a lot from these diminutive critters, which communicate using cocktails of exotic pheromones, expeditiously divide labour among thousands, and silently conduct their small and significant lives for the greater good—of the colony and their immediate […]...
Fine documentary photojournalists are as rare and as delightful to encounter as any of New Zealand’s endangered species. As this magazine’s art director, I am all too aware of the difficulties that a complex photo-journalistic assignment poses. An instinct that puts a photographer in a certain place at a certain time with an eye for the […]...
