In the South Island’s remote subalpine regions, a highly terrestrial songbird—one of two surviving species of New Zealand wren—has hopped, chirped and flown in the face of extinction. There are four ...

One of the most superbly located huts in the country, Syme Hut rests on a secondary cone of Mt Taranaki at an elevation of 1950 metres. Syme’s lofty roost gives an other-worldly sense of being high ...

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 ...

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 ...

Endemic to New Zealand, the Nelson cave spider has the largest leg span among New Zealand spiders—up to 130 millimetres, with its body only 24 millimetres. The first two pairs of legs each have a long ...

Pumice and ash, scoria and grit-the harsh layers of pulverised volcanic refuse that form Rangipo Dessert east of Mount Ruapehu-may offer little succour to plants, but from such unpromising materials ...

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 ...

The North Otago rural landscape is characterised by fossil-laden limestone in formations that remain remarkably undisturbed. Geology students are brought here to see textbook examples of sedimentary ...

A traveller through Northland who takes a wrong turn at Moerewa could stumble on Matawaia, and the verdict might be: this is a place God forgot to finish. There are no shops, just a school, a marae ...

The southern right whales of the Auckland Islands were once reduced to a population that included only 25 mature females. Now numbering more than 1000, their recovery is a testament to the natural ...

In the last century illegal whisky production in Southland’s Hokonui Hills was a subject of police investigations. Today that shady past is a cause for celebration. The legend of Hokonui leads back to ...

Eclipsed by better known species in New Zealand’s pantheon of endangered birds, the quirky brown teal was until recently slipping quietly toward extinction. A handful of volunteers and a ...