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, ...

Feijoas have become a New Zealand emblem. So how did they end up in Aotearoa, and how did we end up adoring them—to the point of obsession, for some—when feijoas have not really caught on anywhere ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

For four decades, John Johns has roamed the forests of New Zealand, making pictures that have opened people’s eyes to this country’s woodland heritage. As official photo­grapher for the New Zealand ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...