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 Louis Macalister first met the Huntly crew in our story on page 52, they were riding dirt bikes—hooning through parks and public spaces, and hacking people off with the noise and disruption. Good fodder for a documentary. Macalister and his friends run a YouTube channel, Department of Information. It’s a bit like a New […]...
To shoot the feature on our rarest native forget-me-not, Brennan Thomas had clambered around Hawke’s Bay mountains in the chilly pre-dawn. He’d documented a nursery in Taradale, and people tending the forget-me-nots at Napier’s Centennial Gardens. But to do this beauty justice he still needed some glamour shots—the kind that required a studio, and lights. […]...
Derek Morrison photographs Dunedin’s most celebrated citizens: the dozens of sea lions making themselves at home in gardens, golf courses, and fish and chip shops....
Fifteen years after kakaruwai were brought to Dunedin’s Orokonui Ecosanctuary, a new study shows the tiny robins are doing so well that they have booked up every bit of real estate and are now kicking juveniles into the surrounding bush. Researchers counted at least 23 of the friendly birds living up to 1.5 kilometres outside […]...
Something strange is happening inside the Sun. In the last 40 years, the pattern of tiny sound waves produced deep beneath the surface of our star has mysteriously changed, say scientists reporting in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This solar activity fluctuates in intensity in reliable 11-year cycles, at times driving solar […]...
In the world of academic publishing, there has been no more enjoyable read this year than a recent paper out of Sweden titled ‘Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel’. Published by Geology Today, the analysis covers 141 films released between 1919 and 2023 and took a group of geologists more than 10 years to compile. It […]...
For several years, kōtare, our native kingfishers, have been turning up at West Auckland rehab centre BirdCare Aotearoa with a mysterious affliction: mouths laced with tiny, almost translucent worms. “It sort of looks like strings of saliva sticking between the roof and the bottom of the mouth,” says Catriona Robertson, a hospital manager at BirdCare. […]...
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 […]...
After being hunted to less than three per cent of their original population by commercial whalers, blue whales are once again being spotted around mainland New Zealand. Some 370 sightings have been logged in DOC’s marine mammal database in recent decades. Most of those are incidental sightings from tourism and commercial fishing boats, seismic survey […]...
Some traits are so nice that evolution made them twice. Or thrice. Complex intelligence, for example, and caffeine. But is it true that everything, eventually, is going to become a crab?...
Ken Hall, with Helena Walker, Christchurch Art Gallery, $60, August 14...