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, ...

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 ...

A cave beneath Mt Albert, was found to have become a dumping ground for rubbish. One hundred kilometres below Auckland, a vast reservoir of magma seethes, still testing the crust that keeps it captive ...

The migration of Oceania’s humpback whales, and their final destination in Antarctica, has remained shrouded in mystery. This year, a team of scientists travelled north to intercept and track the ...

Retreating glaciers and thinning snow and ice are the future of New Zealand’s mountains. Climate change is predicted to warm the country’s atmosphere by 1–4°C by the end of the century, altering the ...

The ocean is our playground, storehouse, transport corridor, driver of weather and coastal change. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s possible for us to exhaust its resources and overwhelm its ...

What is a brightly coloured parakeet whose nearest ancestors live in the tropics, doing in the company of penguins in the subantarctic? Kakariki, New Zealand’s endemic parakeets, break all the rules.

For a week in April 2010, I sat in a window­less courtroom in central Auckland while a coronial inquest dissected the details of what had gone wrong in a Tongariro canyon two years earlier, when six ...

Octopuses are solitary, except for when they breed. But gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) have been spotted shacking up together in a mass settlement—for the second time. Up to 15 octopuses live ...

Great Mercury was one of the first sites of human habitation in New Zealand. Last year, a radical new public-private partnership sought to rid the island of pests. It was a unique operation, and the ...

The planting of Russell lupins as sheep feed in the Canterbury high country is triggering a clash between farming and conservation values. In early summer, photographers jostle for space on the ...

In the largest pest-eradication operation yet undertaken in New Zealand, 11,300 ha Campbell Island was blitzed with rat poison in the winter of 2001. Helicopters, such as this Jet Ranger, buzzing ...