The first major discovery from Rowley Taylor’s cabinet: a VHS tape containing 16mm footage from the 1950 expedition to the Antipodes and Bounty Islands! These days, finding a VHS tape usually means stumbling across some grainy recordings of 1980s TV shows. But tucked away in one of the cabinet drawers was a tape labelled “Alert...
Last weekend, Thomas travelled from Dunedin to Charleston on the West Coast to follow up on a remarkable lead. Back in 2023, Shelley Taylor – daughter of subantarctic research pioneer Rowley Taylor – had mentioned that she still had a filing cabinet “full of picture slides, photos, and research notes on the subantarctic islands” sitting...
After another expedition to the sub-antarctic Bounty and Antipodes Islands came to a close in late December 2024, the team dove head first into reporting season. And as with the previous expedition, the amount of new information gathered was once again massive so that the resulting report approached the dimensions of a novella. There is...
Who likes to read scientific publications? The experts perhaps. But film conveys the key messages to a broad audience...
In late June and early July, our chair, Thomas Mattern, traveled to Switzerland for the inaugural Zoo Zürich Conservation Academy workshop. The Zoo Zürich Conservation Academy is organized and run by Zoo Zürich, comprising researchers and conservationists working on projects that align with the zoo’s principal regional exhibits. Zoo Zürich employs an ‘ecosystem’ approach, displaying...
How we count penguins on drone images - with the help of netizens...
Our work in the subantarctic region relies heavily on the use of drones. But surveying penguin colonies with flying cameras is only a third of the job done. Another third is processing these data into massive aerial photos (aka “orthomosaics”) that allow us to count penguins. And this is why our partnership with DroneDeploy is...
During the past two expeditions to the subantarctic islands, our team was joined by journalists from both Radio New Zealand and NZ Geographic. During the 2022 expedition, NZ Geographic publisher James Frankham and award winning photographer Richie Robinson documented our work on the Bounty Islands, while in January 2024, Claire Concannon came along when the...
The first episode of Radio New Zealand's coverage of the Tawaki Project's subantarctic expeditions 2023/24 is out...
Tawaki/Fiordland penguins are about to join the ranks of New Zealand wildlife that can be observed virtually in their natural habitat...
