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
Summer scholar Caitlin Lynch has taken a particular interest in a number of photos featuring soldiers badly wounded in battle.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
Te Papa framers James Kirk and Matthew O’Reilly recently visited The Corsini Collection exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki to study fine examples from the Florentine framing tradition.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
History curator Stephanie Gibson has a particular interest in how tiny things can have big impacts – especially in protest movements. She talks through some of these objects which feature in Te Papa’s collection, but also her personal one.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
In celebration of Toi Art’s opening on 17 March, we asked Megan from Mode & Methodology to come up with looks inspired by works in the national art collection. Here is the first, inspired by Sing Tai Wong’s Man in the mountains. Read more
This year sees the 125th anniversary of the granting of women’s suffrage in New Zealand. Te Papa is proud to be commemorating this event, and one of the ways we will be marking it is by collecting ten objects that explore the diversity of women’s experiences as they have worked to achieve positive social change.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
Summer scholar Caitlin Lynch has taken a particular interest in a 19th-century portrait of New Zealand wars soldier Frederick Rowan that we knew very little about. Caitlin describes how a breakthrough clue, in the form of an ornate chair, led to the intriguing story of the solider’s facial disfiguration and reconstruction.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
