Rangatira Island is best known as a refuge for rare birds, but it is also home to a spectacular variety of flightless insects, giant spiders, lizards, and seals. Te Papa natural environment curator Colin Miskelly recently spent a month on the island as a volunteer for the Department of Conservation.Read more
Rangatira Island is world famous for its immense seabird colonies. Te Papa bird expert Colin Miskelly recently took leave to join a Department of Conservation team focussed on black robin and Chatham petrel recovery programmes on the island.Read more
Te Papa bird expert Colin Miskelly first visited Rangatira Island Nature Reserve in the Chatham Islands as an undergraduate student studying snipe in 1983. He recently returned to the island as a volunteer for the Department of Conservation.Read more
Over 7–9 April, Te Papa is helping to host New Zealand’s first symposium dedicated to citizen science – the involvement of the community in scientific research.Read more
Last year, a four-year project to digitise nearly 1,500 Theo Schoon photographs of bubbling mud and thermal landscapes came to an end. Thanks to the hard work of Image Coordinator Lucy Jackson and Archivist Jennifer Twist all of these images can now be viewed on Collections Online.Read more
Bird experts Colin Miskelly and Alan Tennyson recently returned from a research trip to the subantarctic Auckland Islands. Although their main aim was to study birds, Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt sent them on a separate mission – to collect a rare flower.Read more
Librarian Martin Lewis describes one of his more bizarre coffee breaks at work – drinking Caffe L’affare Primo ground coffee that travelled where no person has been before, 10,000 metres below the sea.Read more
Sea lions, albatrosses, and penguins usually grab the attention of visitors to the remote Auckland Islands south of New Zealand. But when Te Papa curators Colin Miskelly and Alan Tennyson explored the islands recently, they were focussed on species that are easily overlooked, and particularly those that come out after dark…Read more
Three species of forget-me-nots new to science have just been formally described by Te Papa Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt and colleagues. Heidi introduces us to their names, what they look like, and describes what makes them unique. In the latest volume of Australian Systematic Botany, Heidi Meudt (Te Papa) and Jessie Prebble (ManaakiRead more
A recent blog about white-tailed spiders by spider expert Phil Sirvid prompted a flood of questions from our readers. Phil answers some of these and attempts to alleviate your fears.Read more
Bird expert Colin Miskelly has recently returned from the subantarctic Auckland Islands, far south of Stewart Island. Here, he tells us about his ongoing research on a little-known bird that he’s been fixated with for the past 35 years.Read more
Did you know New Zealand has its own Pokémon? It’s called Relicanth and our science researcher Rodrigo Salvador has been speculating on why this creature was chosen to represent Aotearoa.Read more
Bird experts Colin Miskelly and Alan Tennyson visited the islands in late January, and here they document some of the extraordinary diversity of seabirds that breed on these little-known islands.Read more
The 12,000th image loaded on New Zealand Birds Online was of a cute fluffy baby goose, taken in Hungary. Bird expert Colin Miskelly explains how this image ended up on a New Zealand website.Read more
Elements of biology entail a certain ‘eww’ factor – and studying the diet of seabirds certainly fits that description. In research into the foraging habits of Buller’s albatross, a threatened endemic species from southern New Zealand, published in the journal Plos one in 2017, scientist Dr Susan Waugh and colleagues discovered more thanRead more
