Whether providing shade for a summer picnic, standing sentinel on a crumbling cliff or splashing Christmas crimson along garden edge, street or shoreline, the pohutukawa is one of the trees New ...

New Zealand’s forests were once the home of the largest eagle in the world. This enormous bird had claws as big as a tiger’s, and could strike its prey with the force of a concrete block dropped from ...

Plantations of exotic timber trees, especially pines, are looked on with disdain by many as alien monocultures, an unpleasant accommodation necessary to protect precious indigenous forests from the ...

Austrian born photographer Arno Gasteiger made New Zealand his home in 1988. He landed his first assignment with New Zea­land Geographic in 1989 and has been a mainstay photographer with this magazine ...

The iconic puriri moth is the elephant of New Zealand’s 30 species of swift moth. Its life is brief. The adult moth lives for only 48 hours after as long as five years as a larva. And with no ...

Fifteen years after methamphetamine use exploded in New Zealand, the drug remains a serious problem in many communities. Now, amid reports of large international drug busts and figures showing ...

Decomposition is the ultimate fate of all things: life, human culture, the built environment, you and I. Many photographers obsess over images of decay, from consciously artful pictures of rusting ...

The Mokohinau stag beetle is one of the world’s most endangered species, occupying less than an acre of scrub on a rocky tower in the middle of the ocean. Its habitat is so precarious that Auckland ...

Zip, pip, chuck, goes the call of Aotearoa’s smallest bird. It may turn out to be one of the earliest forms of language. On the flanks of Harbour Cone, on the Otago Peninsula, riflemen nest in the ...

A rare and misunderstood octopus, the argonaut lives far out to sea, where females construct fragile shells to live in, marble-sized males woo them with severed arms, and much of their lifecycle has ...

Half a world apart, a porpoise and a dolphin are locked in a tragic race to extinction. One lives in a developing country riven by drug wars and corruption, the other in a prosperous nation famous for ...

Where do you go to report the theft of a word? The police are too busy and univer­sity English departments have no powers of enforcement. Perhaps we should try the Court of Public Opinion. The word in ...