Godwits and wrybills roost on chenier shell banks at Miranda, and the western shore of the Firth of Thames. Each year, godwits will embark on the longest non-stop migration of any bird in the world, flying from this site to the Yellow Sea in China, then to Alaska, and returning across the Pacific, direct, to New Zealand.
Deep channels lead inland from the harbour entrance. The edges are laced with mangroves and the shallows green with meadows of seagrass. These are nurseries for small fish and rich habitats for shellfish and other crustaceans.
Eagle rays bask in the warm, clear shallows of Parengarenga, one of the best preserved harbour systems in New Zealand.
In many of Auckland's older suburbs, stormwater and sewerage is combined. As the population has increased, infrastructure has failed to adapt adequately, and changes in climate make rainfall events more intense.
The irony is that the camera can't see far enough to properly document the worst sites in the Hauraki Gulf—they're too turbid to see more than a foot. So we're here, in the serene and relatively intact harbour environment at Leigh, to film human impact where the water remains clear enough to get a picture, but where our influence is becoming obvious.
At Pōnui Island, under the shade of picturesque pōhutukawa, effluent from a farm drains into the Waiheke Channel adjacent to the Te Matuku Marine Reserve. Stock roam freely through the waterway and the wetland above it. The smell, fortunately for the viewer, can only be imagined.
A Leigh Fisheries longliner reels in a catch with practiced efficiency. Target species—such as snapper—go to the fish bin and then to market, and a flick of the wrist dispatches non-target species back into the sea.
We are citizens of the sea. Māori arrived in New Zealand by sea, as did Pakeha, and our commercial centre of Auckland lies on the shores of two harbours and at the headwaters of the immense Hauraki Gulf, Tikapa Moana.
Snapper congregate in the shallows of Cape Rodney-Okakari Point Marine Reserve at an abundance and maturity that may closely reflect the original snapper populations of the Hauraki Gulf. There are three to four times the number of snapper inside the reserve as outside and up to ten times the number of crayfish.
Fishing effort, day after day, century after century, has changed the shape of this place. It’s still heaving with reef fish, but the predators are gone. It’s still resplendent with sargassum weed, but kina that were once devoured by snapper and other reef predators are tearing holes through the fabric of the ecosystem.
Northern Arch is a 40-metre-deep cut in a sheer rock wall at the northern end of the Poor Knights. Like a busy city alley it attracts hoards of life—thousands of fish,
South of the Poor Knights stand a crop of rocky spires called The Pinnacles. Under the largest is a cathedral-like cavern called Tie Dye Arch, named for the kaleidoscope of colours that clad every surface like graffiti.
Viewing the world through a rectangular frame is becoming a thing of the past now that virtual-reality technology allows people to look around in 360º while watching a video—following the trajectory of a stingray passing overhead, or watching dolphins swim below.
Mike Dickison wants to fling open the vaults of the country’s museums and research institutions.
The NZ-VR team is trying to make New Zealand more real, using virtual reality.
One of the world’s smallest nations is transforming its economy from subsistence to sustainability. Will Niue’s brave new plan work?
Retreating glaciers and thinning snow and ice are the future of New Zealand’s mountains. Climate change is predicted to warm the country’s atmosphere by 1–4°C by the end of the century, altering the natural water cycle—how much is frozen as snow, how much falls as rain, and how much flows in rivers. Climate researchers are seeking to predict what will change, and when. What will be the impact on hydroelectric power stations and irrigation schemes? Which areas will be hit hardest by flooding, or increasingly severe drought? The Deep South National Science Challenge is taking a lead role in helping decision-makers plan for the coming century.
We’ve all heard of moa, and probably the enormous Haast’s eagle, too, but there were a lot more giant flightless oddities running around the forests of New Zealand when people first stepped ashore, and it’s a mystery to me why we’re not talking just as much about the adzebill. The adzebill was, as far as anyone can tell, a giant flightless killer in the shape of a goose. It had a formidable beak shaped like a pick, very strong legs, and probably weighed around 20 kilograms. We don’t know what it ate, but from its skeleton, it looks perfectly capable of running other species down, tackling and stabbing them—the All Black of the bird world, if you don’t count the stabbing. I first heard of it because ‘adzebill’ is one of the online pseudonyms used by Mike Dickison, former curator of natural history, current professional improver of Wikipedia. “They were just the most amazing skeletons, if you studied bird anatomy—super chunky and robust,” he told me. “They must have been doing incredible damage to something. And almost nobody in New Zealand has heard of them. “To me the adzebill is symbolic of the gulf between what scientists know and what the public knows. They were one of the things you would almost have certainly encountered 750 years ago when you walked ashore. And any New Zealand palaeontologist—well, there are about six of them—knows about all the other things that used to be wandering around, that you were just as likely to meet as the moa.” Have you heard of the snipe-rail, the owlet-nightjar, the musk duck? How about the laughing owl, the wren that ran around the forest like a mouse, or the other giant predator of the skies, Eyles’s harrier? New advances in DNA technology are telling us more about how these species lived (Kate Evans investigates six of them) but all deserve a better introduction to the public in the first place. So it’s fitting that our story on recent discoveries about prehistoric birds sits alongside our story on citizen science. Citizen science is about the public contributing to research, but it’s also about removing barriers of access between professionals and amateurs, experts and enthusiasts. These days, Dickison works full-time at getting knowledge that’s common among scientists out into the world—by putting it on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. (Yes, anyone. Including you.) Its accuracy is preserved by the millions of people who act as its caretakers—vandalistic attempts to introduce false information are generally corrected within minutes, if not seconds. Facts must be supported by citations, and if not, they’re excised. Dickison recently spent three weeks at New Zealand Geographic, adding information from the magazine’s archive to the site. While he was here, he organised a group of experts and volunteers to spend an evening dramatically improving the Wikipedia page about kauri dieback, incorporating research references sourced for our story on the subject. (Creating a detailed, accurate Wikipedia page is something that the government agency charged with informing the public about kauri dieback could have done for free.) Wikipedia is the fifth-most-visited website in the world—when you Google something like ‘kauri dieback’, a Wikipedia page is one of the first things that comes up—but we lag behind other developed countries in terms of Wikipedia’s coverage about New Zealand. We live in a world with all the tools for more open and inclusive sharing of information, but many of the old walls between institutions, professionals, experts and the rest of us still exist. Let’s keep dismantling them.
The Paparoa Track, set to open in September 2019, is the first new Great Walk in 25 years, and the first built for shared use between walkers and cyclists. Traversing the coal-rich hills between Blackball and Punakaiki, it will pay its respects to the 29 men who lost their lives in the Pike River Mine.
A life dedicated to the hidden secrets beneath our feet.
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