August brought remarkable snowfalls to parts of the country. In Christchurch, still coping with earthquake damage and power outages, the snow compared with historic falls in 1992 and 1945 although, ...

Many of our skinks and geckos are so new to science that they don’t even have names. Much of what we do know about our lizards is thanks to an amateur herpetologist from Invercargill with no academic ...

In the late 19th century, news of a strange antipodean bird with beautiful tail feathers, orange wattles, and a long curved beak spread around the British Empire. To Māori, it was a tapu bird—a sacred ...

Popularly regarded as brainless kamikazes lacking all road sense, pukeko are confounding scientists with their complex, flexible social lives. And, while other native birds struggle to survive ...

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 ...

When I call Ramari Oliphant Stewart, she’s busy nailing down a new roof ahead of a cyclone that threatens to lash the West Coast. She built the house herself, here in the teeth of the Tasman Sea on a ...

An English convict exiled to Australia who went on to pioneer New Zealand’s shore-whaling industry, John Guard was friend to Te Rauparaha and the instigator of an armed sortie against Taranaki Maori ...

What would the beach be without red-billed gulls? We may be about to find out. Two huge colonies have already gone under and the next biggest, in Kaikōura, is failing fast. In December 2023, ...

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 ...

Six parrot species are set to be banned in the Auckland region due to the dangers they pose to native wildlife. Is this fair? The bird watches me with an inquisitive eye. She’s huge, nearly a metre ...

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 ...

In 1834, the Englishman William Swainson was at the height of his scientific career. Aged 45, loaded with honours from the scientific academies and institutions of Paris, Quebec, South Africa, ...