Adroit as a hummingbird, agile as a gymnast, these builders of elegant paper mansions are becoming a familiar sight in many northern areas. Can they be the same insects that savage some of our favourite garden residents and mete out painful stings to unwary gardeners?...
After years of every sort of viciousness imaginable, years which have seen the killing of hundreds of thousands out of a population of only four-and-a-half million, perhaps hopscotch under the barrel of a protective machine-gun really is peace. New Zealand soldiers with the United Nations are trying to keep peace, and finding it is a lot tougher than waging […]...
The sea is glassy now as a sand barge is towed down the northern Kaipara, but in another hour, who knows? Shoals, narrow channels, merciless currents and sweeping winds demand constant vigilance from those who ply the waters of New Zealand’s largest harbour. A century ago, the Kaipara was one of the country’s major waterways—a […]...
For the astronomy buff, recent decades have been a time of unprecedented and, at the same time, baffling discovery. Advances in the physical sciences have meant that we now recognise a whole host of celestial phenomena which, even 40 years ago, when Fred Hoyle’s popular Frontiers of Astronomy was published, were unknown or poorly understood. […]...
Year of the dog, year of the rooster, year of the goldfish—doesn’t every year belong to some creature or other? This year, throughout the South Pacific, it’s the turn of the turtle. Because turtles are rare in New Zealand waters, we tend not to think much about them. Our image is of wrinkled, rather wise-looking […]...
Until surprisingly recent times it was government policy to clear all native bush from land that could prove suitable for agriculture. Fertile plains, such as those that constitute much of the Manawatu, were early stripped of their forest. One of the few fragments of bush in that area to escape was an 11-hectare block originally […]...
Each day our 50 million sheep deposit an estimated 864 million pellets of droppings weighing 26,000 tonnes, and cattle convert uncounted acres of lush pasture into 113 million pats weighing 205,000 tonnes. This excreta is estimated to be equivalent to the amount produced daily by some 275 million humans. Cow pats persist on the pasture […]...
Imagine if a movie theatre were to offer free lifetime passes to anyone who asked. “Preposterous!” you exclaim. “They’d be out of business quicker than you could say ‘Orson Welles’!” Yet, in a sense, that is what the skies offer us every day, throughout our lives: a non-stop film festival complete with drama, adventure, romance and even humour. Playing […]...
Claustrophobic burrows deep in the ground, dust, noise and danger of roof collapse and explosion—prising coal from the earth was never a task for the fainthearted. Ron “Sparrow” Sparks has been coaling on the West Coast for 32 years, living the hard life of the mine which still forms the heart of many Coast communities....
Sometimes the “fair, frail palaces” of a poet’s sunset, ephemeral as the rainbow’s cache of gold; at other times lead grey tanks advancing to the accompaniment of artillery fire-clouds delight, intrigue, threaten, and periodically destroy. Seen in another way, they are the supertankers of the sky, ferrying billions of tonnes of water vapour around the […]...
