Grebes are an ancient group of diving birds, quite unrelated to ducks and swans. The southern, or Australasian, crested grebe is one of New Zealand’s least known aquatic birds, a secretive but ...

Hatched in rivers, mayflies rise to the surface and unfurl new wings, the final phase of their precarious and astonishing lifecycle. At dusk, on the upper Waiau River under the swingbridge entrance to ...

It is the larger of Auckland’s twin harbours; at high tide 340 square kilometres of sparkling sea, and at low water half of that, the rest becoming sand and mud-flats. The rugged heads can be glimpsed ...

New Zealanders love their native galaxiids—sandwiched between two pieces of white bread for the most part. What most people don’t realise is that whitebait are actually the juvenile of a spectacular ...

More than technical prowess, the photographs that were short-listed in each category share an original perspective—a insight into the fabric of our country and society that tells us something new ...

New Zealand’s forests were once the home of the largest eagle in the world. This enormous bird had claws as big as a tiger’s, and could strike its prey with the force of a concrete block dropped from ...

One of the rarest ecologies in the world is hiding in plain sight, in the centre of the most central suburb of the largest city in New Zealand. Of more than 5000 hectares of rock forest that once ...

A resonant whoosh of air and water blasts skywards as a Bryde’s (pronounced “broode­rs”) whale surfaces 60 metres in front of us. The twin blowholes on the top of its head are clearly visible. The ...

When the four-masted barque Pamir burst into Wellington Harbour out of the rolling vastness of the Southern Ocean on a cold and blustery day in late July, 1941, its captain, Verner Björkfelt, would ...

The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble. A bittern’s mottled brown and beige plumage helps it blend into ...

The first Europeans to reach Sāmoa—aboard three Dutch vessels in 1722—reported that the locals who paddled out to them were dressed from waist to heel in fringes and “a sort of artistically made silk ...

The Mokohinau stag beetle is one of the world’s most endangered species, occupying less than an acre of scrub on a rocky tower in the middle of the ocean. Its habitat is so precarious that Auckland ...