Trail blazers

A new book showcases the dust and drama of mountain biking in New Zealand....

What is the hullabaloo about the Hauraki Gulf, and what on Earth is ring-net fishing?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Turns out the answer to both of these questions is complicated....

Day of the dolphin

SailGP wanted to run a yacht race in a marine mammal sanctuary. They made a plan in the event of dolphins swimming into the course. Dolphins happened. They stuck to the plan. The racing was wildly successful. Is it just me, or does this seem like a good outcome for New Zealand?...

A toe on the start line

After 23 years, we have made the first tangible step towards recovery of the Hauraki Gulf....

A land far, far away

Glimpses of life on the Chatham Islands, roughly 840 kilometres east of Christchurch, population 600....

The meaning of an epidemic

COVID-19 has caused upheaval in our lives, changing them for the worse—but also for the better. What we can take from this time?...

A gulf between us

We’ve failed the Hauraki Gulf. Here’s why....

Ignorance is arrogance

Science denial, like so much brash narcissism, may actually be a cry for help....

Martin in the mangroves

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis rubbish collectors took shelter from pelting rain inside their compactor truck. Moments later, the dilapidated and defective vehicle malfunctioned, crushing Echol Cole and Robert Walker in its machinery. For the city’s 1300 mostly black sanitation workers, the men’s horrible death was a spark in their long-simmering protest against miserable […]...

Unpacking Ruataniwha

What does the Supreme Court decision mean for the rest of New Zealand?...

Edward Wilson’s bird

Why did an Antarctic explorer carry with him a painting he’d made in Switzerland a decade earlier? And how did it end up on the western edge of the Ross Sea, 700 kilometres north of where he travelled?...

A birthday present for Shakespear

Fifty years after Auckland Regional Council acquired land at the tip of Whangaparāoa Peninsula for a park, little spotted kiwi have been released to form the nucleus of a new mainland population....

Listen: Is this the call of the Grey Ghost?

Somewhere, maybe, the South Island kōkako is calling in the bush. One avid pursuant reckons he’s recorded it....

Swap a forest park for an irrigation dam

Is the Department of Conservation allowed to exchange conservation land for farmland?...

A tale of two extinctions

The vaquita and the Māui’s dolphin, and their twin fates....

What Kaikōura taught us about Wellington

Seismic engineering is failing to anticipate the complexity of earthquakes....

Science in the time of post-truth

Chemtrails, 9/11 “truthers”, lizard people. It’s like the Renaissance never happened....

Credit where none is due

A new report reveals how 12 companies profited from pollution using fake carbon credits from Russia....

Whangaroa story sparks students’ writing

For students at a Northland school, a story about “their place” became a chance to think differently about “my place”....

Magazine

Issue 200

Jul - Aug 2026

Solar power
Horses of Huntly
Forget me not
Whaling
Red admirals

Issue 200 Jul - Aug 2026

Trending

When a male South Island robin is in want of a mate, he sings. It’s not a glamorous sound, says ecologist Manaia Pearmain-Fenton. Plee plee plee / chee chee chee. Loud, plinky, like a kid picking at a keyboard. Pearmain-Fenton has whakapapa to Ngāti Hokopū, Ngāti Awa and Te Whakatōhea in the Bay of Plenty. […]...
When the forecast is just right, Irene and Crispin Middleton wake up in the middle of the night and put to sea....
Tararua Forest Park, 2 days...
Charles Alcock and the fate of the universe....
Marine scientist and freediver Kura Paul-Burke on restoring the moana—with action, not just research....
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....
The wind tore at the wave tops until they stood up stiff, driving spray from their crests which was carried with the breeze and lit up by the early morning sun until the air itself seemed filled with glitter. Though the forecasters had predicted a gentle zephyr for the final day of a voyage around […]...
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 […]...
Did you ever get a new Fitbit? Did you then spend the next few weeks compulsively checking your wrist, seeing how ‘good’ you’d been that day? Did you take the dog for an extra walk at 10pm just to watch the device tick over 10,000 steps, and go to bed basking in the glow of […]...
As early as 1793, the Frenchman Nicephore Niepce and his brother Claude imagined a photographic process, and experimented with various light-sensitive substances and cameras. In 1826, Niépce exposed a pewter plate coated in bitumen for eight hours to produce what he called a “heliograph”, or sun drawing, of a view from his window. Unlike his predecessors, who had […]...

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