The blast of the harpoon may have given way to the click of the camera, but whales are still the cornerstone of commerce—and the subject of many a decorative mural—in the north Canterbury town of Kaikoura. In little more than a decade, marine ecotourism has transformed a coastal backwater into an international travel hotspot....
For decades, the extinct endemic bird known as the Hodgens’ Waterhen has flummoxed taxonomists—since the first fossils were found in 1955 the flightless species, which favoured swamps and grasslands, has bounced between six different genera. But mitochondrial DNA has now settled things: the bird is a gigantic crake, five times bigger than its closest living […]...
After unfulfilled hype that surrounded the passage of several comets in recent decades, Comet McNaught was a pleasant surprise. It was impressively visible from mid-January into early February and can likely still be found with binoculars as it heads away from the Sun towards the outer solar system. Its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) […]...
The Paparoa Track, set to open in September 2019, is the first new Great Walk in 25 years, and the first built for shared use between walkers and cyclists. Traversing the coal-rich hills between Blackball and Punakaiki, it will pay its respects to the 29 men who lost their lives in the Pike River Mine....
You could say that Selena kept herself warm in the most exotic sleeping bag in New Zealand. Researchers John Dowding and Elaine Murphy uncovered her dwelling while working in Fiordland’s Eglinton valley. “When we looked inside,” recalls John, “we found a bowl of feathers from some of the most endangered native forest birds in the country, including […]...
The sea ice around Antarctica melts and refreezes with the seasons, usually doubling the size of the continent by the end of winter. For most of 2023, about two million square kilometres has been missing in action—a record low. We’ve only been keeping satellite records of sea ice for 44 years, but the extent of […]...
