For 13 years conservationists have promoted marine protection as a good thing for the Hauraki Gulf. Now they have their wish, ...

The bittern’s eerie, booming call sounds like a lament, a tangi ringing across the marshes. Now, the birds themselves are in trouble. A bittern’s mottled brown and beige plumage helps it blend into ...

Reconstructing the family tree of New Zealand’s blue-eyed shags has enabled scientists to unravel their past—and may help determine their future. The blue-eyed shag family includes bird species from ...

Don’t call them swamps. Bogs soak up and store more carbon than forests do, but when they’re drained and used for agriculture, that immense amount of carbon is slowly released. The entrance to one of ...

Paul Lynch, an affable middle-aged lawyer, asks the schoolkids gathered around him. He holds up a baseball-sized rock—a polymetallic nodule, so called because it contains multiple metals, among them ...

Anave of silver-grey pillars, gnarled and imposing, rises heavenward. Ferns and perching grasses festoon the massive lower branches, while stout roots clasping the trunk reveal the pres­ence of other, ...

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 ...