THE SUN SETS over the Clutha Valley, staining the snow on the Pisa Range strawberry-pink. Outside a fruit-packing shed on the outskirts of Cromwell, melancholy music rises through the chill autumn air. A group of men strum guitars and ukuleles over the thud of the bush bass—a large wooden box with a pole and a string that is plucked. Their harmonised voices form sweet, ephemeral chords full of longing. These are songs of a tropical home, the kind sung by those in exile.
Read MoreReturn of the lost birds →
Janet Wilmshurst’s focus is ten centimetres from her face. Crouching in the dirt in a Swanndri and gumboots, her spiky grey hair almost brushing the cave roof, she peers into a sieve with her headtorch, hoping to find the partially digested remains of a laughing owl’s lunch.
She shakes the sieve over and over, sifting through the tiny particles with practised fingers. Then—“Ooh!” She picks something minuscule out of the rubble, and passes it to Jamie Wood.
“Wing bone,” he says. “Clearly been chewed by an owl.”
Read MoreDepartures →
More than two years later, she struggles to name the date of her exit.
“It was on leap year day, in—what’s the second month, sorry?”
That’s February. Where she grew up, the months and days of the week have only numbers, not names. She never knew her siblings’ birthdays—no one gets to stand out and be celebrated. ”No one should be made special.”
Read MoreLife hackers →
Gene editing has the potential to improve lab research, create new crop varieties, eradicate pests, wipe out pathogens, manage threatened species, and bring extinct ones back from the dead.
That’s the idea, anyway. The reality is we haven’t done much of this yet—and we’re still in the middle of asking ourselves if we should. New Zealand could be at the forefront of gene editing, or take a principled stance against it.
A tale of two currents →
For kayakers like Venable, it is the diminishment of wilderness that is the main reason for opposing Westpower’s plans for hydro on the Waitaha—not merely the loss of a kayaking opportunity. Although most of the river would be unaffected by the scheme, the loss of the final reach would mar the experience of the whole—like tearing the last chapter out of a thriller.
Read MoreGold rush →
To watch a beehive is to observe a city of 50,000 residents, a fast-moving portrait of time and life collapsed: birth, growth, work, breeding, death.
Read MoreThe hunting of the Snipe →
Snipe are not one of the stars of New Zealand’s pantheon of threatened birds. Small, speckled brown, with a long probing beak like a kiwi, they look like a wading bird that’s gone bush. Their eyes seem set too far back in their heads, giving them a dopey expression. Perfect rat-bait, they’ve long been gone from the mainland, and most New Zealanders have never seen one.
But the story of snipe is one of tragedy and mystery, miraculous resurrection and myth. Almost flightless by day, the snipe’s terrifying alter-ego, the hākawai, haunts the night sky. Catching them involves prancing through the scrub with a butterfly net.
Read MoreThe robots will see you now →
“To me, it seems just an iPad on wheels, so what is the difference between an iPad reminding you to take your medication and this guy?” she says. “What they found with this guy is that people actually started having a relationship with it, because it reacts. They were obeying it. They didn’t want to disappoint the little guy so they were taking their medication. But with an iPad, you don’t care.
Read MoreThe last of the giants →
They counted their age in centuries, but it took them less than a decade to die. In kauri time that’s a sudden accident—a heart attack.
Kauri have suffered two great tragedies, and now a third is in progress. The first was logging, when more than 99 per cent of the forest giants were taken. The second was the arrival of agathidicida. The third is our failure to do anything about it.
Our problem with P →
"She’d just be living on the pipe with a needle in her arm and f*ck everything else. She was pretty much the reason I stopped smoking meth. It got f*cking real, real quick.”
At one point, Brad and his friends broke the woman out of a psychiatric unit. “At the time we thought it was brilliant, hilarious—the greatest thing. You’re young, dumb and flying. You feel six foot tall and bulletproof… She’s got a child now. She’s still on the pipe."
Snow birds →
Harrow, a pharmaceutical salesman by trade, is sunny and affable. He’s the sort of person who trusts in the kindness of strangers, has difficulty seeing anything as insurmountable, and describes a 12-hour tramp as an ideal Saturday. The mystery of the snow birds was exactly the type of challenge he relished.
Read MoreThe Kiwi Bushman →
At the mussel beds, empty beach stretches in both directions, a gentle curve snaking back and forward along the coastline. The high-tide line marks the entrance to a driftwood forest—bleached trees the only witnesses to the endless roar of the Tasman Sea. Against the melancholy isolation, the family looks like a band of survivors, the last people on Earth, a warm nucleus of home.
Read MoreThe Sound of the Sea →
It’s another level of remoteness from what Joy knew growing up, but she’s had it easier than her mother-in-law Heather, who arrived as a 20-year-old bride from Auckland to a house without electricity or telephone. Yet even with satellite internet, twice-weekly visits from the mailboat and a fast boat, living this far out still requires a healthy sense of self-reliance. Like her own mother, Joy has had to school her kids, years of correspondence lessons at this very kitchen table.
“That’s been the hardest thing about living here,” she says of educating the girls, both of whom are now in their 20s and have left home. “It was such a big responsibility, and you never knew whether you were doing it well enough.”
Read MoreIn search of the grey ghost →
I start to wonder whether Buckingham sees himself as a kind of latter-day Charlie Douglas. With so much of New Zealand already explored, perhaps finding a bird believed to be extinct is the equivalent of discovering a new species, mapping a new valley, naming a mountain range.
“Charlie’s a cult hero for me; I would have been his best friend, I think!” Buckingham tells me later. They’re both a bit reclusive, both bushmen, both bird-lovers and bachelors. “We have so much in common,” he says. “I was just born 100 years too late.”
Buried treasure →
This is New Zealand’s third kauri bonanza: first the forests were felled, then the gum was dug up. What’s left is the swamp kauri, or ancient kauri, or sub-fossil kauri, depending on who you ask. And depending on who you ask, it’s a taonga, a precious and wonderful timber, a unique scientific resource and globally-significant record of climate change, a source of employment, the focus of illegal activity and the agent of destruction of Northland’s rare and vanishing wetlands.
Read MoreInto the Frying Pan; Volunteer Firefighters →
And so it was that four burly firemen delivered a healthy baby girl on the living room floor in Rolleston. When the ambulance—which had to travel from a station 30 minutes away—finally arrived, they were mopping up the scene and Reid was cradling her newborn daughter. Lilley took it as a sign that it was safe to recall his troops to base. They lingered a little, soaking up the magic of the moment that the happy arrival of new life had brought about. More commonly they had to deal with people at the other end of their life, or those coming perilously close to it.
Read MoreThe puzzle of pilot whales →
What kind of animal are these, which we rarely see except when they come to grief—increasingly a shared grief, theirs and ours. If we are so disposed, we might ask who these creatures are—warm-blooded like us, possessing brains of deep complexity and wondrous size. Who are these ocean minds?
Read MoreWithout a trace →
He told them what he was planning, and Karen started worrying. They’d been up Mt Owen several times, but the route Levy had in mind wasn’t something they would have attempted—and they had managed the distance from Courthouse Flat to the hut with no trouble. She said, “Do you realise how far that is?”
Levy’s route took him up the mountain, and across a marble boulderfield riddled with crevasses. He was walking into a minefield.
Read MoreThe future of our forests →
King wants to take me to a lookout point to get a vista over the forest, but the rain has come, spreading across the hills like a cloak and blotting out the view. As I leave, I thank him for Pureora, for snatching the chiefly totara—the rakau rangatira—from the teeth of the chainsaws. King remarks that we have fewer tall totara standing today than we have MPs, and there are no reserves specifically set aside for totara. “Yet this is our national tree for eulogy,” he says. Kua hinga te totara. A totara has fallen.
He shakes his head. “It’s incredible what we have lost.”
Read MoreThe unforgiving face →
“I’m not feeling it today,” Brown said to his climbing partner. He was sore and for some reason increasingly uneasy about continuing. So they turned around and started making their way back down the slope.
Then they saw it. That ice axe. Those crampons. That helmet. That skull.
Read More