Two months ago Claire Mabey wrote a piece for The Spinoff she titled “the dire state of school libraries and the years-long cry for help”. It described the libraries as “essential infrastructure”, the ...

The ozone hole above Antarctica seems to be changing, scientists warn—it spanned 27 million square kilometres this September, the second-largest ever observed for that time of year. Weeks later “it’s ...

Five years ago, poet and potter Sam Duckor-Jones searched “cheapest house in New Zealand” on Trade Me and up popped an old church in Greymouth. “No plumbing,” he writes, “no kitchen or loo, no ...

In Wellington, Rob Suisted documented the night-filming project at the centre of the story and followed “dragonfly ambassadors” Ruary Mackenzie Dodds and Kari de Koenigswarter to public talks at ...

The southern pied babbler is a very chatty bird. It lives in family groups of maybe a dozen birds, and all of them pitch in with the chores: incubating eggs, feeding nestlings, defending their ...

Invasive caulerpa, the seaweed threatening huge swathes of our coastline, can regenerate from fragments too small to see. It can survive in the dark, in the cold, and even out of water. Disagreement ...

Some of the stories photographer Richard Robinson and I work on are fairly grim. But heading back to Hawke’s Bay, where both of us grew up and cut our journalism teeth, was a delight. I have vague ...

At primary school, in Hawke’s Bay, Isaac McCormick was already thinking like an engineer. It was in the blood, his mum tells me—his dad designed bridges; his grandad was legendary for making floats.

Eight years ago, we knew almost nothing about the larvae of kapowai, the native dragonflies so huge they can cover your hand. So citizen scientists set about an epic project, using night cameras to ...

Ruth Adams was 23 in the summer of 1948, and holding her own with Ed Hillary and two experienced mountain guides, Harry Ayres and Mick Sullivan. On February 5, the four of them knocked off a challenge ...

For millions of years the ecosystems of Aotearoa have skittered with lizards. On some counts, they outnumber our native birds—but like the birds, the lizards are doing it tough. Auckland Zoo is ...

Ruth Adams was 23 in the summer of 1948, and holding her own with Ed Hillary and two experienced mountain guides, Harry Ayres and Mick Sullivan. On February 5, the four of them knocked off a challenge ...