Stories: New Zealand

Stories connected to New Zealand.

• An octopus escaped. The drain led to the sea.Inky left his aquarium tank in New Zealand, crossed the floor and entered a drain pipe connected to the ocean…
• A goose, a swan, and their unusual family.Thomas the goose lived alongside Henry, a male black swan, for years in New Zealand. When a female swan joine…
• An elephant dropped a log on the electric fence.At Auckland Zoo in 2004, Burma disabled an electric fence with a log, broke through an outer gate and wandere…
• One country once drank more tea than Britain.New Zealand once consumed more tea per person than Britain. Around the 1980s, coffee began overtaking tea the…
• He became a father around age 100.Henry, a New Zealand tuatara thought to have hatched around the turn of the twentieth century, became a fathe…
• This crab sometimes eats other crabs.The paddle crab hunts molluscs and crustaceans at night around New Zealand and nearby waters. It is also nota…
• Real birds arrived. He stayed with a concrete one.Nigel was the only gannet living on New Zealand's Mana Island for much of his life. He nested beside a concre…
• Copy the shoe? Then use the greener materials too.After criticizing an Amazon shoe for looking like its Wool Runner, Allbirds' founders publicly invited Amazon…
• A parrot digs deep into a tree. It is looking for moth larvae.In New Zealand, kākā parrots sometimes scar the trunk and branches of the tree Nothofagus menziesii while sea…
• A church built in 1861 still has 54 rifle loopholes.St Bride's Church in Mauku, New Zealand, was enclosed by a stockade and used as a military outpost during the…
• A college sent him away for refusing shoes. He walked north barefoot anyway.New Zealand conservationist Stephen King was expelled from Bible College after six months because he refused…
• An emperor penguin reached New Zealand. For a while, it eclipsed the prime minister.In 2011, an emperor penguin nicknamed Happy Feet appeared on a New Zealand beach roughly 3,200 kilometres fro…
• He logged weather twice a day. The notes became climate evidence.Richard Davis recorded temperature and pressure in northern New Zealand from 1839 onward, with a gap during m…
• Fifty-two warning sirens vanished. Officials suspected music competitions.In about a year up to May 2023, 52 tsunami sirens were stolen in Auckland. Emergency officials suspected link…
• Rain enters the ground. On average, it travels eight years.Water takes an average of eight years to pass through New Zealand's Wharepapa Arthur Marble Aquifer. It suppl…
• An otter escaped the zoo. Almost a month later, she was found on an island.Jin escaped Auckland Zoo in New Zealand in June 2006 by digging through walls and climbing a barrier. After s…
• Engineers had found a weak point. The building was only partly upgraded when the quake hit.A 2013 review flagged floor-support weaknesses at Statistics House in Wellington, New Zealand. Upgrade work b…
• At a New Zealand pool complex, the slides took inspiration from eels.The hydroslides at Christchurch's Parakiore Recreation and Sport Centre were designed to resemble eels in an…
• Some research proposals pass peer review, then enter a lottery.New Zealand research funders are among institutions that have used partial lotteries. Reviewers first screen…
• Food and health alone do not describe an animal's welfare.The Five Domains model considers nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state. It is designed t…
• This historic bridge no longer has a surface to cross.New Zealand's Opiki Toll Bridge opened in 1918. After a nearby replacement bridge opened in 1969, its deck an…
• After earthquake damage, a century-old store lost its building but kept its front.The Christchurch furniture-store building dated to 1910. It was demolished in 2015 after the 2010–11 earthqua…
• A fish that floats with a jelly-like bodyPsychrolutes marcidus lives in deep water under intense pressure. Much of its body is gelatinous tissue sligh…
• Flummery also became a word for hollow complimentsFlummery names a soft dessert originating in Britain. The word later acquired meanings such as empty complime…
• The very heavy insect was not a typical exampleOne captive female giant wētā reached about seventy grams, but she had retained an abnormal number of eggs. L…
• Māori poi combines objects, movement and songTraditional Māori poi in New Zealand can combine choreographed routines with singing and storytelling. In Māo…
• A storm destroyed Neale’s rebuilt pier the next dayTom Neale began living on Suwarrow in the Cook Islands in 1952. Visitors suggested rebuilding a ruined pier.…
• The rounded boulders began inside seafloor mudNew Zealand’s Moeraki Boulders are large, rounded concretions. Minerals cemented marine mud into these masses…
• The sergeant laid an eggFrancis Fagan acquired duck Siwash in a New Zealand raffle. In 1943 she became a US Marine unit’s mascot and…
• Road signs and drinks crates became artNew Zealand-born Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne worked with found materials, including old road signs an…
• Māori New Year traditions do not all use the same starMatariki is associated with Māori New Year in Aotearoa New Zealand. Some regions and iwi instead use the risi…