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In the field

Once bittern

Even by avian standards, bitterns are wickedly shy. They’re quick, too, and very good at vamoosing in the raupō wetlands they favour. Their camouflage is such that even if an exceptionally brazen bittern stalked up and stood right in front of you, you might not see it. “People who’ve managed to photograph one are pretty happy about it,” said Craig McKenzie, who took on the tough assignment of shooting a whole feature’s worth of frames. In 20 years of photographing New Zealand birds McKenzie had only seen a single bittern. The first one he saw on the ground—stalking in a pond as he came around a corner—flew off in the few seconds it took to get his gear set up. The key, McKenzie realised, was to lie in wait. We heard of a birdwatcher who’d found the perfect stake-out spot. She shared her secret, but asked us not to reveal the location. So, picture a rural road beside a wetland on the West Coast. Picture a pair of bitterns wandering along a drainage channel beside that road, every dawn and dusk. Stay in the car, we were told, and they’d stay put. Beauty. McKenzie did, one morning in the car, but he didn’t like the angle, sat up above the wetland. No bitterns came close enough that first day, anyway. The next morning he arrived in the dark, crawling under a camouflage net thrown over a bush the previous evening. “I could see some of the open water and the drainage channels they were using,” he said. If a bittern came through there, he’d get a good shot. Nothing on the second morning. McKenzie had been watching this patch of wetland for something like 10 hours now. Then, two hours after dawn on the third morning, boom. He saw a bittern, just its head, bobbing along in the distance above the reeds. Closer. Closer. Finally, the bird wandered over to the channel McKenzie was staking out, and started to walk towards the perfect spot. It came almost within range—then pivoted and walked away. “A bitter disappointment.” But wait—it turned again. The bird walked straight past the photographer, twice. Must have been a very silent sort of yahoo moment? “Oh yes,” said McKenzie. “It was all very internal.”
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In the field

Roll over

“I never thought I’d say this, but I may actually be tired of talking about dogs,” said Neil Silverwood, dog lover, three days into search-and-rescue dog camp. Silverwood shot more frames in one day than he ever has before—but after the high-pressure camp, was relieved to go home to his chilled-out black Labrador, Griffin.
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In the field

Acquiring taste

Kate Evans was not excited about trying kina roe for the first time. She’d tried sea urchin before, but only once: when she was 18, her dad coaxed her to try some from a piazza stall in Syracuse, Sicily (pictured). “I thought it was absolutely disgusting. I think I actually spat it out.” But when fisherman Herb cracked open a kina fresh from the sea, Evans was surprised to discover she didn’t hate it after all. “It was a fresh, salty slurp of semi-solid ocean and it wasn’t at all bad.”
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A tale of two islands

Kate Evans had a mask. She had a snorkel. She was missing her flippers. And that’s why she’s trailing behind environmental advocate Karen Stone and photographer Richard Robinson in the image above, swimming against the current in an attempt to reach the Tongan islet of Fonua’one’one. The trio were trying to land on the islet, one of many uninhabited places in the Vava’u archipelago, because the rats living on it had been eradicated in 2016. Evans and Robinson wanted to see—and hear, and smell—what the end result of rat eradication might be. As they discovered, a healthy island is a stinky island, at least in places. Since Stone’s previous visit, a bunch of red-footed boobies had started nesting there. “You could smell the guano immediately and you could see these white paint splashes of it on the leaves,” says Evans. Good news for the surrounding coral reef—guano nourishes all kinds of life. “There are a whole bunch of these little tiny perfect tropical islands—white sand with forest sitting on top and a perfect coral reef around the outside,” says Evans. And, islet by islet, that life is being restored.
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Early bird

When we asked Adrian Malloch to go on an armyworm hunt for our feature, he was delighted. A few months prior, he’d found a strange-looking caterpillar in his garden, and fired a photo of it off to MPI. Next day the phone rang. He was the first person in Auckland to report a confirmed sighting of fall armyworm, an invasive and extremely hungry caterpillar. Malloch’s realised that in his garden, the armyworms like to hide under paving stones. Like many gardeners, he has been using BTK (Bacillus thuringiensis Kurstaki) to try to keep numbers in check. Of course, there are other tried-and-true methods. Do armyworms make for a satisfying squish? Malloch laughs. “I didn’t used to love it, but I really do now.”
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My young assistant

Christchurch photographer Joe Harrison shot our Viewfinder photo essay with his son Mick in tow. The project of documenting the city’s rivers began during the slow, tired days of new baby-hood, when Harrison was desperate to get out of the house with bub. More recently, their photography excursions have been about keeping an active toddler busy.
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The pictures we carry with us

In the moment, says oceans photographer Richard Robinson, you’re thinking about the light, the water clarity, the framing. Getting the shot in the bag. But as he documented Antipodean albatrosses and marine reserves, certain scenes snagged in his mind. Eight months ago, Robinson and publisher James Frankham sailed to the subantarctic islands. The albatross colony on Antipodes Island was a flurry of big, loud, life. Dozens of chicks were scattered across a plateau. At about seven months old they were still babies, covered in fluff, but they were “ginormous”, Robinson says—standing as high as your hip. “It’s quite surreal, the size of them... And they’re just constantly calling for their parents. They’re sitting on their nests hungry, and they’re crying out for their parents to come back from the sea.” It takes two adults to raise a chick—one bird alone simply can’t provide enough food. And increasingly, the mother birds, which tend to forage differently from the males, are dying on longlines. So when Robinson and Frankham found a chick dead in its nest, its baby fluff a splotch of white against the moss, they had a fair idea what had happened. “The death of that chick would have been horrible,” Robinson says. He thought about it all through the three-day sail back to Bluff, and he still thinks of it now. “That bird just starved to death. And when you hear them calling... it wouldn’t have been nice, you know. That’s something that really quite affected me.” At the Poor Knights four months earlier, it was the rise of the long-spined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii) that left him stunned. Robinson loves the Knights—he’s been diving there for decades—but COVID-19 disruptions kept him away for a couple of years. He quite likes the urchin, too—he’d come across it now and then, and found it pretty to photograph. But on this dive he saw masses of the purple urchins, endlessly chewing. The species, though native,  is exploding in number in our warming seas, and rationally Robinson knew the Knights wouldn’t be immune. Still, he’d hoped the area’s status as a marine reserve would help it withstand the onslaught. “I was shocked to see the numbers, the barrens of them there,” he says. “It just shook me.” We’ve already officially protected the Poor Knights and the Antipodes Islands, Robinson points out. “That’s not enough.”
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In the field

Being teen

When I started looking for stories about young people in New Zealand, I discovered that a lot has been written about them, but very little of it spoke to actual teenagers. This is what you might learn about teenagers from the media: Teens have higher rates of mental illness than ever before. They protest against climate change, but also, they’re not as wild as their parents were. Less sex, fewer drugs. They’re spending an awful lot of time on social media. They’re really pessimistic about the future. We hear from the people around them—their parents and teachers and counsellors. The people who watch them and worry about them. We don’t really hear their own worries, thoughts, concerns. Part of this is because it’s delicious to be outraged about what the youth are up to, sure. But part of this is also to do with good journalistic ethics—it’s not cool to put a kid on the spot for a quote. We’ve all said dumb things as teens and none of them are written down in the pages of a national magazine. And yet, as the pandemic went into its second year, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to be on the precipice of adulthood at this moment in time. An uncertain present and an uncertain future. The big OE temporarily out of the question. Family finances strained. A tough job market to enter. A second world, online, which never stops or sleeps—and which you can’t opt out of without losing friendships. We knew that if we wanted to produce a story about young people, it would require time. A lot of time. Enough to really get a sense of a person, a family, a circumstance. And it couldn’t be about just one person—there would have to be many. It was the kind of project that was too big and expensive to make. It went into the box of impossible stories. Then, in the wake of COVID-19, NZ On Air began offering grants to magazines like this one. Normally, NZ On Air only provides funding to broadcast journalism—television, video and radio—but during the pandemic, for a three-year period, it expanded its remit to include written journalism and photography. We received funding for a year-long project to document a group of young people who were broadly representative of the ages, locations, and ethnicities of teens in New Zealand today. We sought out teenagers. We met their parents. We mobilised a big group of writers and photographers. We bothered our teen participants as they studied for exams (Liam and Seilala), got ready for the ball (Vidi, Will, Ceejay), at their birthday parties (Hawaikii, Ceejay), at their prizegivings (Vidi). We photographed their bedrooms (Te Orahi, Ceejay) and their soft toys (Jaxon), their breakfasts and board games and sports tournaments (Mihi). It turned out to be a tough assignment. “I honestly think these might be my most challenging interview subjects yet,” one writer said. There were floods and COVID-19 outbreaks and a lot of unanswered messages, calls, chats, DMs. But it was also joyful. Documenting one of Seilala’s performances at Papatoetoe High took photographer Edith Amituanai back to her high-school Samoan group dancing days. Photographer Becki Moss sat in on a health class she wished she’d been able to take in school. And we all came to care for these teens and their families. We hope that comes through on the page.
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The dot dot dash

Fifty years ago, when four University of Canterbury students went missing in the Ross Sea, reporter Bruce Laybourn, right, and assistant postmaster Lester Price, were the 21-year-old babies of Scott Base. “Everyone was incredibly worried and trying to figure it out,” Laybourn remembers. Fossicking through correspondence for leads, they found red herring after red herring: one of the men, for example, had written to his family in Christchurch about an island he wanted to visit. “Every clue had to be followed.” When news came over the radio that the four men were safe, a yell went the length of Scott Base. With a bunch of colleagues, Laybourn leapt in a Land Rover and belted over the hill to meet the chopper flying the rescued group to McMurdo Station. Laybourn took photographs of the men as they emerged into the crowd, then whipped out his notebook and started scribbling. “They were very happy to chat. We were all mates. They were just massively relieved.” From there it was a race back to the Scott Base newsroom. Seconded to the New Zealand Press Association, Laybourn was effectively writing for the world’s papers—and because atmospherics at Antarctica made radio comms so hairy, the story had to go out in Morse code. As each page came clacking off Laybourn’s typewriter, he handed it to Price, “an absolute champion on Morse [code]—his speeds were phenomenal”. Tap, tap, tap. “I didn’t even get a byline, but I didn’t care. We were just delighted to have the boys home.”
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Many happy returns

Geoff Chapple and Miriam Beatson didn’t tell anyone except the minister that they were getting married on February 14, 1988. Everyone else was simply invited to Cheltenham Beach in Devonport: “Please join Geoff and Miriam in a St Valentine’s Day celebration—bring your own champagne picnic.” Robin and Dinah Morrison had an invitation like anyone else—as good friends. Geoff didn’t ask Robin to photograph the event, but maybe he should have known. Robin brought his Nikon and got the shot of the day, featuring the newlyweds’ five-year-old son, Amos (now a photographer himself), clearing away streamers in front. And maybe the secrecy thing had slipped a bit. Someone threw rice. This issue, Geoff Chapple writes about the re-publication of Robin Morrison’s seminal 1981 book The South Island of New Zealand from the Road.
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A life in art

On page 18 of this magazine is a knock-your-socks-off painting of kareao/supplejack. It was created by renowned botanical illustrator Audrey Eagle, who died on 27 November, aged 97. Audrey spent much of her life painting New Zealand’s plants, using her childhood paintbox for more than 70 years. Her daughter Alison remembers that the family fridge was always stuffed with plant specimens, and the kitchen table, where her mother worked when the kids were young, was sacrosanct. “We’d come home and dump our school bags down and it was always ‘Don’t bump the table!’ because her work was so finely detailed.” She laughs. In other ways, too, Audrey’s work was much less romantic than one might think: not so much jaunts in the countryside as constant back-and-forths with botanists, making sure she got every detail right. She had an honourary doctorate in science and in 2001 she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Audrey had to push herself hard, Alison says, to finish her landmark two-volume book, Eagle’s Complete Trees and Shrubs of New Zealand. It was published in 2006, when Audrey was 80—and it won the Montana medal. The family held a small service for Audrey and plan to scatter her ashes in the bush. “That will be our little farewell to her,” Alison says. “It’s what she always wanted.” More of Audrey’s paintings will appear in New Zealand Geographic this year, alongside botany columns by Rob Tipa.
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In the field

One fish, two fish, pink fish, blue fish

Journalist Kate Evans grew up next to Leigh Fisheries and has been reporting on oceans for four years. But she doesn’t really fish, and being on board a commercial trawler, Tengawai, was a first. It was a rush, she says, watching the fish gush from the nets into the holding bins, and from there into the sorting trough. She was fascinated, clomping around like a toddler in oversized gumboots. “There was a stingray’s barb hidden among the fish very close to me and the deckhand was like ‘Watch out, there’s a stingray in there!’ He had once taken one to the stomach—it’s an occupational hazard.” Tengawai pulled up things Evans had never seen before, like the frost fish and pink maomao. A few weeks later, after an outing with one-man trawling operation Karl Warr, Evans’ kids Indigo and Amalia (above) met their first gurnard. “It was fascination but also fear. You could still see the beautiful wings.” They ate it for dinner.
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In the field

Two takes on the end of the world

Tom Doig has come full circle on prepping. He spent a couple of years stressed to the max—agonising over the pragmatics of what to buy and where to stash it and, most importantly, gaming it all out: what difference would a pallet of rice make in the end, really?

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Riding with siren crews

Six years ago, Edith Amituanai visited a west Auckland park to find a group of siren cars blasting out the kind of music played in island nightclubs. Now, she’s practically a member of the Switch Hittaz. Sports stadiums would wish for the same atmosphere as a siren battle, she says: “There’s a lot of joy in it.”
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Underneath the city

Skateboarding photographer turned commercial shooter Mark Barber didn’t expect to find himself on a mining induction course for a job, but he’s relishing the glimpses of Auckland under construction as he documents the City Rail Link.
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In the field

Another perspective

The fifth issue of New Zealand Geographic, published on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, began with an observation that “differences were not understood, respect not offered, deals not honoured, wrongs not righted and, for many, a corroding ignorance widens the gulf”. Thirty-two years later, those words are still accurate, so we asked ourselves how we could do better as a media outlet to address the widening gulf and bravely confront some of the questions still vexing New Zealand society. We turned to writer and author Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), funded by NZ On Air’s Public Interest Journalism initiative, as a sort of navigator to help steer the waka through these difficult seas. We set out priorities. Developing Māori journalism talent is critical, but so is the careful, considerate, respectful explanation of what is meant by rangatiratanga, how co-governance might be relevant, how iwi can balance commercial priorities with kaitiakitanga and how to close the yawning faultlines created by the trauma of colonisation. “Luckily these aren’t uncharted seas,” says Low. “Māori writers, thinkers and leaders have had to grapple with these questions since before the time of Te Tiriti, so there’s generations of matauranga to draw on. My small part is to try to bring Māori voices and perspectives into New Zealand Geographic in substantial ways, give people the space to tell their stories, and provide some of the history and context needed so these issues make sense.” A picture is worth a thousand data points In 2008, Edith Woischin and Timo Franz went on their big OE, exploring surf beaches around the Pacific before arriving in New Zealand. Here, they co-founded Dumpark, an agency specialising in data visualisation and infographics. From mapping oil spills and plastic pollution to reporting on social development and human rights, their work involves making complex information intelligible. This issue, they took up the challenge of transforming sea-level rise data into visualisations for the story A map of the future. The long reach of war Tatsiana Chypsanava’s multi-stop journey to her present-day home of Nelson has encompassed being a dance student in Belarus and a cocoa farmer in Brazil. Now, she’s a photojournalist. With family in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, Tatsiana has first-hand experience of how much the conflict in Ukraine is affecting Kiwis with roots in the region. It grew into this issue’s story about how authorities overseas can intimidate or crack down from afar on dissent. Hold still As a 12-year-old, Becki Moss won a camera at the Fieldays biosecurity tent, then taught herself photography from the online community Flickr. From the age of 14 onwards she was spending summers shooting weddings, and eventually, she quit her science degree to freelance full-time. In Wellington for a contract, she began documenting the local drag scene, and continued to photograph the LGBTIQA+ community over the course of several years—a project that was part of the portfolio that won her Young Photographer of the Year in 2020. Much of her work touches on invisible chronic illnesses—such as her story Stay Home Club.
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In the field

Gone fishing

If you had looked in the New Zealand Geographic office fridge in the summer of 2018 you would have found, next to the beer and the old film, a carefully wrapped plastic bag containing half a dozen transmitting GPS tags. Each one was worth thousands of dollars, and each was destined to be attached to a manta ray. Except no one knew where to find a manta ray. Department of Conservation marine scientist Clinton Duffy and Conservation International’s Mark Erdmann had assembled enough sightings of manta rays in New Zealand waters to know they visited. But the observations were spread from Cape Brett to Cape Colville, right on the edge of New Zealand’s territorial limit. Neither Duffy nor Erdmann could summon funding to investigate further at that time, so they were riding along on other boats doing other things—such as on photoshoots with New Zealand Geographic. It took a year to get the first tag into a manta ray, but then the animal immediately set a record for diving. By 2020, Erdmann had his own boat, and photojournalist Richie Robinson joined him to document the manta ray search. It involved a lot more looking than it did photographing. Richie spent 20 days on the water across two summers searching for manta rays before he was able to photograph one underwater. (Journalist Kate Evans, on the other hand, saw one on her third day.) All up, this issue’s cover story represents close to a month on the water for Richie. As this issue went to press, he was still out looking for manta rays—and not finding any. “I’m back to thinking mantas don’t exist,” he says.

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