We began work on our cover story thinking we were documenting the end of a species. We’d known for decades that the pukunui, southern New Zealand dotterels, were in existential strife. But early in 2025, someone working to save the birds called me: a new count, they said, showed the pukunui could have only a few seasons left. It felt like getting summoned to a hospital bedside.

The Department of Conservation made a short documentary about the work of keeping the birds alive. The dotterels breed only on Stewart Island/Rakiura and they are most vulnerable on the nest, especially at night, when feral cats are on the prowl. Ranger Dan Cocker talked about an especially friendly pukunui he named after his girlfriend. He’d had a wee chat with it, he said, and promised the bird he’d do everything he could. On his next visit, he found just a clump of feathers in the tussock. He tucked a leg band in his pocket. I sent the doco to Nelson writer Naomi Arnold.

“Jesus,” she replied. “Sign me up.”

What happened next—what happened on Rakiura last summer—is the best kind of miracle. Pragmatic, timely, replicable. I hope that you find time, amidst the churn of geopolitics and “weather events”, to sit and read the story of the pukunui, and let those little birds lift you up.

At the other end of the country, right in my backyard in fact, another empirical miracle.

You’ve probably heard about the fight to eradicate yellow-legged hornets. Officials have regularly updated the tally of nests destroyed: at last count, 132.

But a far more impressive data point has been missed. Four thousand, six hundred and forty-six hornets were, over summer, zipping merrily around the wilder side of Auckland’s North Shore—nesting in tangled, steep gullies, and overgrown gardens—and now they’re not. A further 39,653 hornets-in-waiting died as larvae and pupae, before they had a chance to launch.

These hornets are dark, very easy to lose in the bush. They’re fast. They can fly for something like 30 kilometres in one go. And, as entomologist Guaraci Dias told me as he dissected the biggest nest of the season, “everything in the nest is programmed” for rapid expansion.

It staggers me that we’ve been able to keep on top of them at all and that it looks like we will, in fact, stamp them out for good.

Dan Etheridge, one of two hornet experts who came over from the UK to train the New Zealand team, says King Charles once suggested that you could just blast the nests with a shotgun. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Well, technically, that would be a disaster, Your Royal Highness.’ I think I might have done one of those really loud laughs.”

Shoot a nest and all you’d do is send the queen zinging off to start a new one—and that nest, like the last, would be a mission to find. So what’s needed, instead, is reconnaissance, and cleverness, and patience. When you kill a nest—when you slide in the spear and its payload of permethrin powder—you do it gently, so the hornets don’t realise they’re under attack.

That’s how you kill 44,299 hornets in one summer. That’s how you leave none behind.

There are other numbers whirling in the ether. As I write, we have 19.5 days’ worth of diesel on shore. We’re projected to blow past two degrees Celsius of global warming. There’s a 50 per cent chance that the lifegiving network of currents in the Atlantic Ocean collapses by 2100, shunting New Zealand into a super-heated, dry future. We can choose to despair at these numbers—or we can take the increasingly radical option: optimism. It feels the same as bloody-mindedness, sometimes, and it can feel pointless, and petty. But it’s the first step in the deliberate construction of miracles. And we could do with a few more of those.