In inky darkness, Philip Rush dived from the three-metre rigid inflatable and touched a hand to Dog Rock, at the southwest extremity of Kapiti Island. This formality dispensed with, he turned and ...

Ploughing—the epitome of the colonial ‘civilising’ of land—is as fundamental to this country’s history as war and rugby. Perhaps it’s not surprising that we make a sport out of it. The ploughing ...

Wallabies may have evolved in Australia, but they’re so well suited to life in New Zealand that they have reached plague numbers for the second time in a century, eating their way through the ...

A metre and bare milliseconds separate Johnny Racz and Greg Baynes as they vie for the Burt Munro Challenge Trophy on Oreti Beach, near Invercargill. During the 1960s, Munro himself tore up this beach ...

Flora Feltham wrote an early version of our cover story when she was living on Wellington’s predator-free reserve Mana Island with her husband, then a DOC ranger. The couple spent two years on the ...

Amid dying kauri in West Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges, Rowan Panther is making masterpieces from muka—plaiting and weaving pale flax fibres into delicate, wearable lace. The leis, collars and ...

Waiapu River, a treasure of Ngāti Porou, is now known, too, for its volatility. After decades of forestry thrashing the land, every major storm pushes silt and pine slash downriver to the people and ...

In our cover story last issue, we outlined the many threats facing our fur seal colonies. While most populations are stable or growing—for now—a new paper shows that all along the West Coast, birth ...

Photographer Richard Robinson visited Wellington’s Southern Landfill to document the population of black-backed gulls for New Zealand Geographic. It was a tricky assignment. How do you show the number ...

Put a drone up and any self-respecting black-backed gull in the vicinity will be there within moments, pecking and hollering and generally bullying the strange, buzzing interloper. “Black-backs are ...

“A dead fish is a dead fish.” That’s the key finding of a recent study on the scavenging habits of our native crayfish, led by Calum MacNeil, a freshwater and invasion ecologist at Cawthron Institute.

First came the kina, hordes of them taking down kelp forests in shallow waters. But they were a warm-up act. Now, on the deeper reefs, a much bigger, hungrier urchin is going rogue—and once it’s eaten ...