Rowi are the rarest of the rare—a species of kiwi so critically restricted in distribution and breeding success that they were almost done for. But a last-ditch effort—codenamed Operation Nest Egg—has ...

The bird with a big mouth. The bird who leads the flock. The bird who announces the day. The bird who sounds the alarm. The dark bird. The rare bird. The noble, silly, insomniac parrot we’re going to ...

On page 54, Nic Low writes about a beach settlement at Moeraki. The sea is eating it, graves and taonga and all. Sheep and ...

For years, scientists have been using water samples to trace plants, microbes, animals and fungi via the invisible bits of DNA they leave behind. Recently this eDNA technology has taken to the air, ...

The bone belonged to a songbird, but it didn’t belong to any existing New Zealand songbird, alive or dead, and so Elizabeth ...

In 2022, an extraordinary set of images surfaced at auction. Taken in Christchurch around a hundred years ago, they show a ...

Since the 1850s, two per cent of marine mammal species have gone extinct. But if we look at the biomass—if we add up everything that makes up whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, dugongs, manatees, and ...

Most dairy cows in New Zealand are Friesians—the ones with black spots dappling white backs and bellies. Figuring out which ...

Almost all sponges live in the sea, “and they’re the kind that people know about”, as University of Otago palaeontologist ...

In first-year philosophy we chewed over the theory that humans were most interested in watching water, fire, and sky. The ...

On the road before the clean running of an EV makes up for the emissions created during its manufacture, according to scientists at Duke University in the US. The cars get off to a messy start because ...

In 2019, scientists asked the public to catch and freeze mosquitoes, then post them to Te Papa. Over three years almost 900 tiny packages turned up. About a third of the insects weren’t mosquitoes at ...