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    • Birds of Te Araroa Trail – Every Last Word
      • Natural history curator Dr Colin Miskelly completed Te Araroa Trail a year ago today. His epic mission was to count every individual bird seen and heard along the 3,257 km trail, from Cape Reinga to Bluff. He has now completed another marathon – analysing, writing-up and publishing his findings as a scientific paper. ‘Birds of Te Araroa Trail – Aotearoa New Zealand’s long pathway’ was published in the March 2025 issue of the journal Notornis, just xx days ago. Colin shares the main findings here.

    • Nancy Adams on Rakiura Stewart Island
      • Nancy Adams (1926–2007) was one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prolific botanists and a talented artist. She produced many botanical illustrations, which were included in widely distributed and well-regarded books about the New Zealand flora. During her botanical career at the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa Tongarewa), she went

    • Palaeo introductions #1 – Palaeontology at Te Papa
      • Welcome to a blog series that introduces places, people, methods, and species that are important to palaeontological research at Te Papa and beyond. Curators Felix Marx and Alan Tennyson, along with researchers William Baker and Collection Manager Hazel Richards, start us off with a summary of what palaeontology is and how it works...

    • The elegant leek orchid – a new species for Aotearoa
      • A new species of orchid, the elegant leek orchid, has recently been described and named by botanists from Te Papa and Ōtari Native Botanic Garden. The elegant leek orchid is found from the central North Island south to the Auckland Islands but is very uncommon and classified as threatened. Curator Botany Carlos Lehnebach and Science Researcher Lara Shepherd introduce us to the new species.

    • Urban myth or reality? Did whales keep Wellington awake in the 19th Century?
      • Last year a Te Papa curator approached the library team with an intriguing question. Could we help them find more information about the story that in the 19th century whales in the Wellington Harbour were so noisy that they kept people awake at night? The curator couldn’t find any first-hand contemporary accounts, known as primary sources, from the 1800s to confirm the tale and hoped the library team might be able to help. Cataloguing and Acquisitions Librarian Kim McClintock talks about her discoveries.

    • Nancy Adams: Botanist, artist… and landscaper
      • Nancy Adams was a key player in the early decades of the Dominion Museum (predecessor to Te Papa), making substantial curatorial contributions to collections spanning from colonial history to botany and producing illustrations, now a valuable part of the Te Papa Art collection. As Lucia Adams and Margo Montes de Oca discovered during their summer research this year, traces of her influence and curatorial eye can be found not only in Te Papa’s archives but also in the outside world, specifically in the gardens by the old Dominion Museum building in Buckle Street.

    • The great New Zealand “Bug of the Year” competition 
      • Did you know that insects, spiders, and other “bugs” make up well over half of Aotearoa New Zealand’s animal diversity and that most of them are found nowhere else on planet Earth? These creatures keep our crops and flowers pollinated, our soils aerated, our streams and forests healthy, our waste

    • Research to help with the conservation of a rare native orchid yields first fruits
      • Many of New Zealand’s native orchids need our help to secure their long-term survival, but it is hard to help when we know so little about them. Master’s student Rebecca Greenwood (recipient of Te Papa Foundation Orchid Conservation Scholarship) is embarking on research to explore the pollinators and fungal-root interactions of a small group of spider orchids from south Auckland.

    • Summer fern hunting
      • The warmer months are, in many respects, the ideal time for enjoying nature, including connecting with the amazing diversity of plants around us. This time last year, Curator Botany Leon Perrie was traversing the country to get the final photos for the fern guidebook he co-authored with Patrick Brownsey.

    • A remarkable New Zealand discovery tops iNaturalist in 2024
      • With our small size and population, Aotearoa New Zealand doesn’t often top global charts. However, in 2024, a discovery from our country became the most popular observation on the iNaturalist platform, outshining over 50 million other observations made that year! Te Papa Scientist Lara Shepherd discusses a few of New Zealand’s most notable iNaturalist findings of the last year.

    • Gen AI collection descriptions – is it a pass?
      • In their first Gen AI blog, Gareth and Katie left you hanging as to how the descriptions created using Generative Artificial Intelligence turned out. Before they show an example and talk about how they assessed the content, there were a couple of discoveries they made about supplying images to the AI model.

    • A new bird for New Zealand – Horsfield’s bronze cuckoo
      • Aotearoa New Zealand is a long way from anywhere. Despite being 2,000 km from the nearest continent, vagrant land birds regularly find their way across the Tasman Sea – though some don’t quite make it. Bird curator Colin Miskelly describes the latest new species to come to grief on our

    • How do you catalogue a 150-year-old library?
      • Te Aka Matua Research Library at Te Papa currently has a collection of over 60,000 books and supports the work of Te Papa kaimahi with its wide-ranging books and resources about Aotearoa New Zealand history, Pacific cultures, mātauranga Māori, art, natural history, and museum studies. The library was first mentioned

    • Sniffing out seabirds on Mana Island
      • Te Papa vertebrates curator Colin Miskelly recently spent 3 days on Mana Island following a conservation dog searching for well-concealed petrels in the lush vegetation. He kindly agreed to share a ‘blog with a dog’ with us. Miro is a 4-year-old German short-haired pointer cross. He is one of the

    • New genetic research puts endemic forget-me-nots in the spotlight
      • Aotearoa New Zealand is a hot spot for forget-me-nots (genus Myosotis), with about 50 species found here and nowhere else. Te Papa Botany Curator Heidi Meudt teamed up with botanist Jessie Prebble from Manaaki Whenua, and Massey University scientists Jennifer Tate, Sofie Pearson, and Weixuan Ning to generate and analyse quite a bit of new genetic data to study the taxonomy and relationships of endemic forget-me-nots. Their new paper paints a complex yet compelling picture of how these species have evolved and radiated throughout the mountains of Aotearoa New Zealand, and makes an important contribution to their taxonomic revision.

    • Benefits of insects to humans – Forensic entomology
      • “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” E.O. Wilson, father of the modern naturalist movement. In this series of blogs, Te Papa entomology curator

    • Colin Miskelly – a fine Fellow
      • We are dedicating this blog post to acknowledge two honours recently bestowed on one of our own, Curator Vertebrates Dr Colin Miskelly. He has been made a Fellow of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand and received the New Zealand Association of Scientists Cranwell Medal. A huge congratulations on these achievements, Colin!

    • Big name changes needed for New Zealand’s tiny landhoppers
      • Landhoppers are an important, but often overlooked, component of our invertebrate fauna. Northland entomologists Olly Ball and Steve Pohe teamed up with Te Papa geneticist Lara Shepherd and University College Cork’s amphipod expert Alan Myer to summarise the current knowledge of New Zealand’s landhoppers. Their new paper shows that landhoppers are far more diverse than we thought, with many new species hiding right under our feet.

    • Unlocking collections: Casting new light with AI
      • The possibilities of using Generative AI in a positive way to enhance collection accessibility and findability has sparked a pilot project by history curator Katie Cooper and Collections Data Manager Gareth Watkins. In the first of a series of blogs, Katie and Gareth take you on their AI journey.

    • Birds of the Hump Ridge Track
      • The Hump Ridge Track was officially opened as Aotearoa New Zealand’s eleventh Great Walk in late October 2024. Te Papa natural history curator Dr Colin Miskelly walked the track a few weeks later and compared its birdaciousness with the ten other Great Walks. The newest Great Walk The Hump Ridge

    • Exploring nature in our cities – new documentary released
      • For the past four years, Te Papa’s scientists Lara Shepherd and Leon Perrie have participated in the iNaturalist City Nature Challenge – a global competition that connects people with nature by encouraging them to record the wildlife in our cities. This year, as well as being behind the camera, we also had fun in front of the lens whilst being filmed for a short documentary about the challenge and goals.

    • Vampire folklore and the diseases transmitted by bloodsuckers
      • With Halloween coming up and summer around the corner, it is time for bloodsucking beasties to come out. Insect curator Julia Kasper specialises in flies and bloodsucking insects and has a strong interest in the historical and cultural aspects of entomology. Here, she sheds a bright light on the vampire world and explains what actually caused the diseases that were blamed on – and furthered the belief in – the vampire.

    • A rabbit’s fur: Documenting the natural world through art
      • This September, students from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Design Innovation visited Te Papa to learn about animal illustration. Art curators Rebecca Rice and Lizzie Bisley showed them a group of artworks from across the collection. Starting with Albrecht Dürer’s 1505 engraving The large horse, the works ranged from the 16th to 20th centuries, showcasing a huge variety of styles, techniques, and approaches to representing animals. After looking at these works, the students drew their own animal illustrations in Te Papa’s Te Taiao | Nature space. Curator Art Lizzie Bisley discusses how it went.

    • Museum collecting: Acknowledging our Colonial past
      • When we think about New Zealand’s national museum, we often think about Te Papa, with its enormous building on the waterfront and bicultural philosophy. ‘Our Place’. Or we might imagine the National Museum at Buckle Street with the National War Memorial or the carillon standing tall in front – a place you might remember visiting as a child. But our national museum’s history begins over 100 years before that, in 1865, to be exact. Curator Mātauranga Māori Amber Aranui takes us back to this creatively documented time.

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