The rarest bird in this country is the fairy tern, with perhaps 36 adults left in existence. It’s got everything going against it: weather, cats, its own DNA, and the fact that humans love the white-sand beaches where it raises its young. Only a small group of people, many of them volunteers, stand between it and oblivion. What will we lose if it vanishes altogether?
Richard Robinson is an award-winning photojournalist. With a 20-year career in magazines and newspapers, he has captured some of the most memorable images of this country’s biggest news and sporting events. Using his talents to highlight the plights of our Ocean’s he gives voice to our endangered species and is known for his unique and haunting images of life below the waterline.
Are there plenty more fish in the sea? Reports of falling hoki stocks off the West Coast and the near-disappearance of crayfish from the Hauraki Gulf suggest that our ‘best in the world’ fisheries management may not be living up to the hype. Three decades ago, the right to catch and sell fish became a property right, one that has now accumulated in the hands of a few. How has that worked out for people—and for fish?
New Zealand’s forests were cleared at a record pace, and from this destruction, a sport arose: who can fell a tree the fastest? Competitive woodchopping transformed the labour of forestry into a community event. Now, 150 years on, a diminishing number of axemen and axewomen chop for top honours at A&P shows around the country.
Naomi Arnold takes up timbersports—very briefly.
Roger Grace was one of New Zealand's underwater pioneers. He and his contemporaries changed the way we thought about the sea.
Spearfishers are taking aim at freshwater pests instead of dwindling marine species.
Why did hundreds of dead kororā—little blue penguins—wash up on beaches around the country two summers ago? Has their fate got anything to do with the weather? Or has it got something to do with us?
New Zealand has only one endemic gull, the tarāpuka, and it’s more endangered than the takahē, the hoiho and all five species of kiwi. Its survival depends on the preservation of the South Island’s unique braided-river ecosystems.
One of the world’s smallest nations is transforming its economy from subsistence to sustainability. Will Niue’s brave new plan work?
Most of the stellar yachting careers of New Zealand’s America’s Cup sailors began in humble seven-foot boats—a class now a century old—designed by a Public Works employee who couldn’t swim, and who was too hard up to build anything larger.
Barely seven per cent of New Zealand is land. The rest of it, the wet bit, covers four million square kilometres. In 2016, photographer Richard Robinson won a Canon Personal Project Grant that enabled a dozen expeditions into this vast marine prairie, arguably the country’s last great tract of undisturbed wilderness.
An unlikely crew is given the assignment of catching birds in butterfly nets on a weather-beaten subantarctic island.
Across the world, ecosystems have been transformed by the mass extinctions that followed the arrival of humans. In New Zealand, the moa, the world’s largest eagle, sea lions, elephant seals and whales were wiped from the register at lightning speed. How did our megafauna become reduced to lawn ornaments?
No one knew that Kaikōura was home to the world’s only alpine-dwelling seabird until an amateur ornithologist following a rumour discovered its burrows high in the mountains. As the bizarre attributes and tenuous existence of the Hutton’s shearwater slowly came to light, Kaikōura took up the mantle of protecting its local bird—just in time to witness the destruction of its breeding grounds in the November 2016 earthquake.
Like New Zealanders, penguins occupy the margin of land and sea, being dependent on both habitats, and vulnerable to changes in either as well. Their fate is wedded to our coasts, and as scientists have begun to understand, they are a perfect indicator of the health of this fragile boundary too. What can penguins tell us about our seas and shores?
They strand on our shores in greater numbers than any other species of whale. Scientists believe they know why, but there is much about these animals that remains an enigma, and the strandings continue to happen.
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 whales travelling south. What they discovered only made the great migration more intriguing.
New Zealand sea-lion numbers have plummeted. Is it fishing pressure, climate change, the mysterious disappearance of octopuses, or a deadly new virus?
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 results have been astonishing.
New Zealanders love their native galaxiids—sandwiched between two pieces of white bread for the most part. What most people don’t realise is that whitebait are actually the juvenile of a spectacular family of native fish, a group of species as unique as our kiwi, kakapō and kereru, only far less visible. And just as we are getting to know our galaxiids, we are driving them towards extinction.
3
Unlimited access to every NZGeo story ever written and hundreds of hours of natural history documentaries on all your devices.
$1 trial for two weeks, thereafter $8.50 every two months, cancel any time
Already a subscriber? Sign in
Signed in as . Sign out
Thanks, you're good to go!
Thanks, you're good to go!
Ask your librarian to subscribe to this service next year. Alternatively, use a home network and buy a digital subscription—just $1/week...
Subscribe to our free newsletter for news and prizes
