One spring, Annette Lees was given a bat monitor for her birthday—a black and olive plastic gadget with knobs for adjusting volume and frequency and a speaker to announce when a bat was nearby. It is ...

The drive to East Cape from Opotiki is one of the most memorable in New Zealand. Here, Māori communities have steadfastly maintained links with their culture, history and landscape. Evidence of this ...

A one-centimetre-long shrimp can’t create an ocean current when it swims, but en masse, these tiny creatures could be contributing to ocean mixing. A Stanford University study published in Nature ...

Samuel Marsden was one of the most influential Europeans in early New Zealand. He brought Christianity and agriculture to the Maori and tried to stop the sale of muskets to them and the trade in ...

Lampreys have done without bones—even jaws—for 360 million years, making do instead with a mouthful of rasps designed for shredding. But those teeth are no match for a new and invisible enemy. Are ...

Here we are—a nation of parents, grandparents and children all in the same boat, together at home. He waka eke noa. Every day of the lock-down we will post a story or video and set of activities that ...

No boats are allowed—competitors must wade to their hunting grounds. Taupō’s highest densities of catfish are found in these warm, muddy shallows around Motuoapa Bay: a 1995 census caught 639 in a ...

A forest is a place of peace. We go there to soak up the stillness, the quietude. But even the most Zen of gardens is in fact a frenetic trading floor, abuzz with an exchange of commodities and ...

Your perch: a giant tōtara in the central North Island. Your view: thousands of hectares of podocarp forest, chainsaws chewing its edge. Your mission: to stage the world’s first treetop protest. Your ...

In April 2000, a small boulder that had for decades graced the garden of the old St Stephen’s Presbyterian manse in Dunedin was ceremoniously welcomed home by the people of Moeraki. The rock had begun ...

A new record has been set for the longest dive by an emperor penguin. In a study led by NIWA marine ecologist Kim Goetz during the penguin breeding season, 20 birds that hadn’t paired up were tagged ...

The tradition of kava has brought people together and consummated important social occasions in the Pacific for 3000 years. The use of kava is growing in New Zealand, with some 25,000 drinkers ...