Little Blue Penguins run the gauntlet to escape Great White Sharks – but they’re not the only species flirting with death on New Zealand’s famous Stewart Island....
On New Zealand’s remote Open Bay Islands, New Zealand fur seals protect their newborns from surging seas, starvation, and predation by Great White Sharks....
New Zealand’s Kaikoura peninsula is home to the world’s most acrobatic dolphin species, some of New Zealand’s most robust young Fur Seals, and an unconventional group of Red-Billed Gull families who defend their chicks from dangers both within and outside the colony...
New Zealand’s Poor Knights Islands is considered one of the world’s top dive sites and for good reason, with a rich collection of extraordinary characters and bizarre behaviors, including a unique congregation of stingrays and sex-changing Sandagers Wrasse....
The creatures of New Zealand’s oldest marine reserve are safe from humans, but that doesn’t mean life is easy. They are under constant attack from marauding dolphins, diving cormorants, and the sharks and the marlin that live beyond the boundaries of the reserve....
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 […]...
Trampers, mountaineers and explorers alike have sought shelter within the wooden and iron frames of the nationwide network of backcountry huts for nearly 200 years. Shelter from the Storm details the stories behind these remote abodes. Huts were often built from corrugated iron and whatever materials could be scavenged from the site. In Bealey Spur […]...
On January 23 1863, the German-born geologist Johann Franz Julius von Haast reached the mountain pass that bears his name; a momentous occasion as he believed his party of five to be the first Europeans to traverse the 564 m crossing....
I grew up with a mainsheet between my teeth, and every summer as the mercury rises, the salinity of my blood seems to increase in anticipation of another dousing. There is nothing, in all the world, more satisfying than hoisting a rag, casting off from the tangle of civilisation and sailing towards a beckoning horizon. You […]...
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 […]...
That Earth’s humblest materials can be transformed into sublime and beautiful objects is part of the romance of the potter’s art. But it takes patience and strong hands to work such miracles. Barry Brickell, the doyen of Coromandel potters, has shaped clay dug on his property at Driving Creek for close to 40 ears. His […]...
