The fate of the Nino Bixio
On August 17, 1942, an Italian prisoner-of-war ship carrying Allied soldiers was torpedoed off the coast of Greece. Crammed into the forward hold were 174 New Zealand servicemen. One of them was Ben Stanley’s great-uncle.
On August 17, 1942, an Italian prisoner-of-war ship carrying Allied soldiers was torpedoed off the coast of Greece. Crammed into the forward hold were 174 New Zealand servicemen. One of them was Ben Stanley’s great-uncle.
Much rests on our ability to measure just how much snow lies on top of Antarctic sea ice.
Round or oval? Egg shape reflects birds’ ability to take to the air.
A bat-catching mission in the Grand Canyon.
Language and kapa haka are likely reasons for low rates of dementia among Māori.
Every summer, a plague of wasps gathers, ruining picnics, harassing trampers and disrupting ecosystems. Wasps outcompete bees for food, costing New Zealand about $130 million each year in loss of honey and pasture crops. Where wasps abound, biodiversity suffers: butterflies disappear, songbirds stop breeding and invertebrate communities are looted. But there’s hope on the horizon. Scientists are developing weapons, both biological and genetic, in a bid to cure the pestilence, once and for all.
Last year’s earthquake is now believed to be one of the most complex ever recorded.
Aerospace engineer Mana Vautier helps ensure the International Space Station runs smoothly. One day, he hopes to step aboard.
We have five parakeet species that we can call our own. One lives in the subantarctic, one on the Chathams, and three on the mainland—red, yellow and orange. If you’ve visited a sanctuary, you might have heard their chattering and glimpsed a flash of lime green in the understorey. You might have even got close enough to tell what you were looking at—to see the red mask over their eyes, or a yellow stripe rising over their heads like a mohawk. You probably didn’t see an orange-fronted parakeet—and you’d be able to tell by the pumpkin-coloured band above their beak—because orange-fronts are in a terrific amount of trouble. We’re not very good at protecting them, and it’s not for want of trying. The Department of Conservation has already attempted the interventions that have worked for other species. DOC kills more than 95 per cent of the predators that roam the forest valleys in Canterbury that the orange-fronts call home. A sanctuary breeds the birds in safety, then they’re released on offshore islands, where, free from threat, the birds fail to thrive. Today, the orange-fronted parakeet is widely described as “stuffed”. It looks likely that the destruction of the parakeets’ habitat is driving their decline, and that’s difficult to fix. Whatever the orange-fronted parakeets require has been lost, and we can’t recreate it for them because we don’t know what it was. Perhaps the layer of the forest that they prefer to browse has been stripped by deer and goats. Perhaps their preferred food is no longer available, and, added to all the other environmental changes they have faced in the last century, they can’t cope. DOC lists about 2700 threatened and at-risk species, in varying degrees of trouble. Some of those are clawing back ground—record breeding seasons of takahē, kākāpō, kiwi and whio being among the success stories. But some native wildlife does not have a good prognosis, and this issue’s story on orange-fronted parakeets will be the first in a series examining the fauna most at risk of being lost without dramatic intervention. Keep an eye on nzgeo.com/curtain-call. These species are diverse, but have one thing in common—our one-size-fits-all backup strategy doesn’t work for them. We rely on being able to rescue endangered wildlife by sequestering breeding pairs on predator-free islands. But the species in our curtain call all have habitat requirements that those islands can’t provide. Some of these species might surprise you. Some of them seem numerous now, but their population is in freefall. Some of them you have probably never seen in the wild, but you may have heard their calls, or eaten them for lunch. We look to the Predator Free 2050 moonshoot as the universal saviour of our threatened species, but evidence shows that the orange-fronted parakeet’s problems don’t all have four legs and a stomach. It would be concerning if support for a wide range of conservation services—research, habitat restoration, ecosystem preservation—is withdrawn in favour of predator eradication. And in the case of the orange-fronts, a predator-free mainland won’t make a difference. Either we fund the research and intensive care the parakeet requires, or witness this long goodbye, where conservation staff have just enough resources to try, but not quite enough to make a difference.
Baby humpback whales whisper to their mothers as they dive.
Twice the kākāriki karaka has returned from the dead. Orange-fronted parakeets were declared extinct in 1919 and again in 1965, but each time, the birds were concealed deep in the beech-forested valleys of Nelson and Canterbury. Now, the bird is approaching its third extinction, and this time, rangers have already scoured the valleys for hidden strongholds. This time, there isn’t a secret population waiting in the wings.
The North Island’s second-highest hut is perched on Fanthams Peak.
The legacy of a life.
Ihumātao, a west-facing peninsula on the shore of Auckland’s Manukau Harbour, is the city’s oldest settlement. In 1863, the land was illegally confiscated from Māori. Sacred hills were quarried, 800-year-old burial sites were demolished, archaeological remains were destroyed, a sewage-treatment plant was built over traditional fishing grounds, and a dye spill killed the local creek. Now Ihumātao has been designated a Special Housing Area, without public consultation, and a development of nearly 500 houses is in progress. But for some tangata whenua, enough is enough.
The first sea creature to be protected by law.
The chemistry of seawater is changing, becoming more acidic, and this transformation is most profound along our coastlines. In this delicate borderland between land and sea, some places are experiencing a surge in acidity, peaking at levels that the open ocean isn’t predicted to reach until the end of this century. What does this mean for marine life?
Formerly the editor of Mana magazine, Leonie Hayden faced a unique set of challenges writing for a more mainstream audience in this magazine. “I was surprised by how many words and concepts common to Māori required definition,” she says. “I thought that ancestral maunga, the idea that a mountain can be more than mountain, was a concept that all New Zealanders understood. But despite hundreds of years of shared history, not everyone understands the physical and psychological connections to landmarks that are important to Māori.” This lack of understanding in language is also reflected in law, the ultimate construct of state. “But world views differ,” says Hayden. “Māori are unable to question it, and still have to play by the rules. We have to look to academic leaders to lead the conversation, to slowly translate and incorporate the Māori world view into the British legal system. But how do you even do that? It feels like a long and impossible task.” The SOUL protestors, profiled in her feature, are part of advancing that public discussion of difference, of redefining what it is to own land and what it is to belong to the land. “I’m not convinced that we’re very good at protecting our taonga,” she says. “In researching this I feel like Heritage New Zealand have let a lot of New Zealanders down. I don’t see how outcomes like this can protect special places. “Providing resources for people who are here right now is more important than what has gone before. You have to house and clothe people, and history won’t do that, but I hope that thinking of the past as a living thing will be a concept that’s relevant to more than only Māori.”
For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, right? Not in the maverick world of this new form of matter.
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