In 2011, Alastair Johnson was hunting for fossils on a remote beach in Taranaki. Three-million-year-old fossil oysters and scallops are common but remains of vertebrates are much rarer. However, on this occasion, something magical appeared out of the rock – the most complete fossil albatross skull ever found. Curator of vertebrates Alan Tennyson tells us more.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
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
Bird expert Colin Miskelly recently joined an albatross research team on the rarely visited Disappointment Island in the subantarctic Auckland Islands. But he was on a separate mission to research the more secretive species on this misnamed gem of an island.Read more
Vertebrate Curator Alan Tennyson explores the history of the name of the wandering albatross and the hunt for the original specimens.Read 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
Its probably one of the most rugged small island sites around the Southern Ocean….lacking only a glacier to make it truly inhospitable. No huts, no trees, and best of all, no humans! And yet Hautere/Solander Island has something of a reputation of among seabird researchers. Most of the ones I have encountered, who hadRead more
Edgar Stead (1881-1949) was a Canterbury naturalist famous (among other things) for exhuming the enormous Okarito blue whale skeleton now in Canterbury Museum, breeding the Ilam strain of rhododendrons and azaleas, and being an astute observer of New Zealand birds. His magnificent homestead ‘Ilam’ is now the Canterbury University staffRead more
Our return voyage on the Marion Dufresne was very different from the voyage south. The first voyage was for logistics resupply, and delivery (and uplift) of personnel, plus we had twelve fare-paying tourists on board. The voyage back was an oceanographic survey voyage. There were a similar number of passengersRead 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
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
The Crozet Islands are one of three subantarctic island groups in the southern Indian Ocean that together form the ‘Terres Australes’ of the Terres Australes et Antarctiques Françaises (TAAF). They are large islands (though much smaller than Kerguelen, which we visited next), with the two largest islands both exceeding 13,000Read more
After an albatross specimen was collected on a Wellington beach and taken to Te Papa, curator Alan Tennyson and his colleagues were astounded to see a shark’s tail protruding from its neck.Read more
During December 2014, artist and designer Kerry-Ann Lee ran workshops at Te Papa to teach the art of ‘zine-making’. Zines are a sort of hand-crafted vehicle for the ideas and imagination of writers and artists. Working with a local designer, Vera Padhila, and with the story of our recent workRead more
Do albatrosses have personalities? And if so, how do scientists measure such intangible characteristics? This blog provides some of the background to research Te Papa scientists were involved in, examining how birds use their environment, and how individual personality traits of these birds can be measured. The previous blogs on thisRead more
