A team comprised of staff from Te Papa and the Department of Conservation (DOC) recently spent a week surveying islands in northern Fiordland. In this second blog based on the trip, vertebrates curator Colin Miskelly describes some of the sites visited and discoveries made.Read more
Kāti Mahaki and Te Papa scientists recently teamed up for a trip to one of the jewels in the iwi’s crown – the tiny islands of Taumaka and Popotai (aka the Open Bay Islands) in remote South Westland, near Haast – as part of their research of Fiordland penguins.Read more
What do you do when you discover what is possibly the largest penguin ever? You name it after your mum. This is what Curator Vertebrates Alan Tennyson – who has a paper on the discovery out today – did.Read more
From welcome swallows to Australian magpies, bird expert Colin Miskelly looks at the variety of birdlife who’ve come to call Coromandel home over the past half-century. Spending the summer at the beach is part of the great New Zealand holiday tradition. For many families, attachment to a particular location resultsRead more
A team of Te Papa scientists recently visited Dusky Sound as the first stage in an investigation of changes in biodiversity since Cook’s visit in 1773. Read more
David Riley, who works in our Digital Collections and Access team, is digitising 190 film reels – the contents of which hasn’t been seen for 70 years. Find out what he’s found so far. Discovering the film reels Since joining Te Papa I have been curious about a collection ofRead more
See fur seal pups, prions, little penguins, and Fiordland crested penguins caught on camera through a burrowscope lens on Taumaka (Open Bay Islands).Read more
The 10,000th image loaded on New Zealand Birds Online might seem an unlikely image to celebrate, but it has an astonishing back-story. It is a well-camouflaged clutch of four eggs, laid by a tiny wading bird that doesn’t even breed in New Zealand. The image was taken by Russian biologistRead more
Hautere/Solander Island is a rugged, inhospitable lump of an island lying in the western approaches to Foveaux Strait. About 40 km south of Fiordland and 70 km north-west of Stewart Island, it is 1.6 km on its longest axis, with cliffs rising steeply to the 330 m summit. The only flatRead more
Te Papa turned 150 years old on 8 December 2015. To celebrate 150 years since the opening of the Colonial Museum in Wellington, the exhibition ‘You called me WHAT?!’ is open on Level 3 until the end of 2016. The exhibition, and this series of blogs, explore the history ofRead more
The Te Papa-hosted website New Zealand Birds Online has reached another milestone, with the 9000th image loaded on 12 January.Read more
After 36 hours at Port aux Français, it was time for Charly Bost and me to head into the field again. We were accompanied by Aymeric Fromant, another IPEV ‘VSC’ (Volontaire Service Civique) volunteer. There are a dozen such ‘volunteers’ on Kerguelen each year, with two (Côme Rebaudet and AymericRead more
Snow blanketed the ground when we awoke on Boxing Day, though it had largely melted before we left camp about 2:30 pm, to start the walk east to Cap Noir. Our task for the day (and the next) was to count Antarctic fur seal pups, and also any vagrant subantarcticRead more
The reason for our visit to Cap Cotter was to continue Charly Bost’s long-term studies of the macaroni penguins. During our 1-week stay we undertook five separate projects, beginning with attaching GPS loggers and dive time/depth recorders to eight breeding females. Like most crested penguins, macaroni penguins are highly synchronousRead more
The name ‘macaroni’ to most people means short, curved tubes of hollow pasta, or they may have recollections of Yankee Doodle Dandy sticking a feather in his cap. However, bird enthusiasts associate the name with one of the larger species of crested penguin that breeds at remote sites in theRead more
