Kingfish are big, and they’re tough, and they fight like hell to stay in the sea. Unfortunately, that just makes us want them more.
There are many ways to escape. Every morning, early, I sneak out to the kitchen, open the doors to the garden, and listen to the blackbirds and tūī chortle themselves awake. For half an hour, I am somewhere else. The American poet Mary Oliver was a kindred spirit. She wrote over and over again of the dawn, what she called “the opening of the door of the day”. “This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings or even midnight,” she wrote in her 2016 book, Upstream. “Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift.” (After Oliver’s death, in 2019, Kennedy Warne wrote a piece entirely about her—perhaps the only poet to get such a run in this magazine. See Issue 156.) Oliver was deeply religious and I am not, but in that liminal beat before the light I find reverence, at least; the crickets and the cicadas are all singing at once; it seems that the big willow in our garden is bowing; it feels like the moment before you breathe out. After a little while, about the time it takes to drink a cup of Earl Grey, the sun jumps the back fence and I pivot to lunchboxes, sunscreen, the doing of the day. I am always, already, looking forward to the next morning. When I read Anna Yeoman’s story about harlequin geckos (page 94) what threw me most, of all their strange habits, was that unlike most lizards they tie their activities to weather, not the rising or setting of the sun. They’ll just as happily hunt at midnight as noon, so long as it’s warm enough. When my boy was tiny he woke every day at 5.30am on the button. Our house was uninsulated then, with cold wooden floors. So after a quick breakfast we’d just get dressed and leave. The ruru in the gully over the road would be hooting and we’d hoot back as I fiddled with the car seat. We’d be first in the doors when Pak ‘nSave opened at 7am. The bakery guys would be singing; they’d give my boy a bread roll to chew on and a paper bag to wear as a hat. We would take 40 minutes to buy frozen peas and yoghurt. We were so unbelievably tired. We had everything we could possibly want. Reporting the kingfish feature on page 32, I decided to trek out to Cornwallis wharf at 5am on a public holiday, to catch a fishy tide and the people trying their luck. My early-bird boy, now 10, didn’t have to come with me but he desperately wanted to, and so we drove through the dark with a podcast and a Thermos of Milo. At the beach he curled up on the grass with a book while I wandered the hushed, busy wharf. The first people I talked with, while the gulls were still sharp black shapes in the sky, were Cecile and Alan from the North Shore. Alan was fishing but Cecile was just looking at the sea. The couple work all week but every weekend they’re here at dawn, Cecile told me. The rising sun was pink on her face. She pointed out their favourite spot on the rocks. Alan, she said, learned to fish in the Philippines and had been praying for a kingfish. Then she leaned closer. “We don’t really think that we can get any,” she said. “We’re only just here to feel free.”
Male and female dusky pipefish look exactly the same in all but one aspect—males have a pouch for incubating eggs when they get pregnant. But it’s hard to spot, says Coley Tosto, author of a new study investigating what a pipefish thinks is sexy. Tosto, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Canterbury, caught a couple of hundred pipefish by dragging a makeshift comb attached to a net through seagrass beds. Dusky pipefish are maybe the length of your foot, and they look like a seahorse stretched out into a straight line. “Pipefish are weird for many reasons, but one of them is that they don’t have a stomach,” says Tosto. “It’s just a tube from mouth to anus, and it means that in the wild they’re eating constantly.” Feeding them constantly kept Tosto busy—especially because she wanted her matchmaking to succeed. She separated them into groups of 16, eight males and eight females, to see which fish would hook up. “The official term is ‘experimental breeding populations’,” she says, “but the more fun term is ‘pipefish dating pools’.” Many mating rituals involve males competing for the attention of females, but with pipefish, it goes both ways. Getting pregnant is a burden, so males are discerning about their mates. Females, meanwhile, are looking for the fittest male to take on the responsibility of fertilising and carrying their eggs. Tosto’s analysis found that females generally favoured smaller males—which was so counter to expectations that she ran the results twice. She theorises that smaller males may be younger—or look younger—and that females associate youth with good health. Another theory is that smaller males may perform better in the pipefish mating ritual, a display that begins with group twitching and wiggling and culminates with two pipefish twirling upwards through the water in synchronisation. Or, perhaps, there is something invisible taking place: anything from genetic differences Tosto has yet to identify to a certain pipefish je ne sais quoi.
Mowing a blob shape into a field can dramatically help insects, research has found—and it’s better for pollinators than leaving a long verge alongside a mown area. Belgian scientist Laurian Parmentier has long been thinking about the best ways to manage grasslands—paddocks, parks, nature reserves, golf courses, or lawns. These are important insect habitats, and mowing particularly affects bees and butterflies. Could there be a better way to mow? After considering the lack of straight lines in nature, Parmentier wondered if mowing in an amoeba shape might foster insect life better, as freshly mown parts wouldn’t be too far from areas with longer growth. Trialling the system in a three-year study, he asked some farmers to mow normally, while others mowed a carefully mapped blob corresponding to the same total area. The key: mowing a different blob every time, leaving some of the previous blob to grow. This is a challenge, says Parmentier, because the human inclination is to follow existing patterns. “So you have to really cut into the previous line, and just drive as if nothing has happened before,” he says. Parmentier’s system results in grass of different heights, which creates a range of different habitats for insects (and a layered-haircut look rather than a buzz). After two years, he was already recording benefits: more bees and butterflies on the blob-mown fields, with a 50 per cent increase in solitary bees, which do much more of the work of pollination than honeybees. Letting a verge grow long doesn’t have the same impact, a previous study of Parmentier’s found, because insects flourish in the variety of grass heights. The study potentially contains lessons for New Zealand: the vast majority of native bees are solitary bees, and the country has the fifth-highest proportion of pasture in the OECD, at 40 per cent of the total land area. (Belgium comes in 18th.) Parmentier acknowledges that his approach is radical, and that some mowers may need to shed their inhibitions before they give it a go. He has a recommendation for that, too: “In Belgium, we say, first you drink a couple of good Belgian beers and then you start.”
In November 2024, on the wind-whipped shores of Ōtūwharekai, the Ashburton Lakes, retired farmer John Evans was checking his trapline when he spied three bugs on the speargrass. They looked like “hare turds”, he thought. Sensing they had an audience, the critters started bumbling towards the base of the spiky plant to tuck themselves out of reach. Curious about the unusual, knobbly creatures, Evans snapped a photo to see if anyone could ID them online. Overnight, the entomology community of Aotearoa all but exploded with excitement. Evans had found a new population of the critically endangered Canterbury knobbled weevil, Hadramphus tuberculatus. “All the blimmin' entomologists are just over the moon,” he says. “Someone even tried to say I was like that guy who rediscovered the takahē.” In fact, this was the second big breakthrough on the knobbly-weevil front. For 80 years, despite regular searches by entomologists, the weevil was presumed extinct. Then, in 2004, a single specimen was spotted beside a busy highway in Burkes Pass. The Lazarus emergence of the species was incredible news, but a single, isolated community is a fragile buffer against the ongoing threats these insects face. Drought, fire or a particularly hungry hedgehog could all spell extinction for the weevil—again. In recent years, the Burkes Pass population hasn’t been tracking well. There were never that many weevils there, and numbers have long been in the single digits. “This second population is a game changer,” says Tara Murray, project lead for the species with the Department of Conservation. Unlike their cousins across the divide, the Ōtūwharekai population is pumping. “We counted more weevils in our first few surveys than we have ever seen at Burkes Pass,” says Murray. “Now that we have two populations to study, we can work out what conditions they need to thrive.”
For all their showiness, tree ferns are extraordinary survivors. They hold their secrets close—but now, scientists are finding new ways to unfurl them.
For Jay Kuethe, there’s just something about Passiflora.
Nine years ago the people of Tāneatua saw that their tamariki were hungry, and bored. The people had no idea how to garden. They made a garden anyway.
One hundred years ago, we thought IQ tests could predict the future.
The harlequin gecko does many things that seem high risk. It stays stock still whenever it’s cold. It lives in extreme slow motion. Somehow, it’s managed to survive on predator-ridden Rakiura/Stewart Island, but can it weather our plans for its stormy home?
Royal spoonbills are thriving in New Zealand, with birdwatchers spotting their extravagant head feathers in more and more estuaries and lagoons. The population is now growing at a rate of 10 per cent per year, according to the most recent Birds New Zealand census, which recorded 4593 spoonbills nationwide. “Aren’t they amazing to watch when they fly?” says Bernie Kelly, who took part in the census. “I remember looking at them through binoculars and thinking, ‘I’m not in Africa, I live in Clive. And they’re just down in my wetland.’” In 2012, Kelly, along with John Sheen, found the North Island’s first large-scale spoonbill colony at Pōrangahau estuary in Hawke’s Bay. Spoonbills flew over from Australia in the early 1900s, and were first spotted breeding here in 1949. The birds’ te reo name, kōtuku ngutupapa, means “white heron with big lips”.
Huia were last seen alive in 1907, according to official records. But the New Zealand bird artist Raymond Ching tells another story. A Wellington taxidermist killed a trio of the birds in 1912, Ching believes—and surreptitiously stuffed them.
Una Cruickshank, Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35
Theophila Pratt, Bateman Books, $39.99
Plantation forests take up about seven per cent of New Zealand’s land area, mostly in the North Island. Now, researchers have mapped these forests using a combination of airborne laser scanning and artificial intelligence. There are 1.8 million hectares of commercial forestry in the country, and about 90 per cent of that is planted with radiata pine. Plantations are especially concentrated in the Bay of Plenty and on the East Coast, where recent storms have washed forestry debris onto beaches and pastures, leaving them littered with waste (see Issue 189). The map can be updated using satellite images, making it possible to track the trees’ growth almost in real time and determine when they need to be harvested. Before this, New Zealand didn’t have a clear national picture of its small-scale commercial forests—only its medium and large ones. Not pictured are the 1.8 million hectares covered in wilding pines, which are spreading rapidly and crowding out native forest.
Jessica Hutchings and Jo Smith with Johnson Witehira and Yvonne Taura, Massey University Press, $45
Photographer Erica Sinclair shot half of this magazine, occasionally with her children in tow—her daughter Maiea was happy to settle in with a book while Mum documented a remarkable community garden in Tāneatua (see ‘The Garden of Life’, page 78). The tables turned when Sinclair was photographing a piupiu wānanga held by her husband’s kapa haka team Te Taumata o Apanui (Viewfinder, page 10). There were plenty of children running around, of course. A couple of the younger girls begged for a turn with the camera and hared off to take photos. After a while they came back and asked for a lesson in composing a portrait. Sinclair was more than happy to sit down for a moment and model. Her tips? Think about the rule of thirds, of course. “Also, when I take portraits, I like to do it just below the person’s eye level. I crouch down a little bit so that I’m looking up at the person.” This makes the subject stand out from the background, Sinclair says, and appear more powerful. Conveniently, it’s also second nature to a child.
The enviable upsides of having something sticking out of your backside.
Often, kapa haka teams order their piupiu in batches. This year, a newbie team from the East Cape decided to make their own—40 piupiu, all with individual designs—and debut them on the biggest stage in the country. Erica Sinclair photographed the elaborate process.
Lily Duval’s first piece for New Zealand Geographic is a news story about the resurgence of the magnificent Canterbury knobbled weevil which bears the delightfully bumpy Latin name Hadramphus tuberculatus (page 19). The artist and critter expert filed straight from the field after a happy day fossicking through speargrass helping Department of Conservation staff count the bugs. Duval also painted the weevil for her 2024 book Six-Legged Ghosts: The insects of Aotearoa—and yep, there it is on her T-shirt. “I’m a bit obsessed with this bug,” she says. “It’s my favourite insect so I’ve been pumped to be out there seeing them in the wild.”
Kate Evans, flat out reporting her tree ferns feature (page 64). To be fair, this trip landed right in the middle of the pre-Christmas flurry, and she’d just managed to bust her phone in a harried slammed-door mishap. Plus there was surfing to be done, and festivals attended, and many treks from her Raglan home to Auckland to record the audiobook for her Ockham-longlisted book, Feijoa: A story of obsession and belonging.
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