TawakiCam (https://tawaki.cam) our long-anticipated live penguin camera that’s now streaming from the remote Antipodes Islands in the New Zealand subantarctic! After more than two and a half years of planning, testing and overcoming setbacks, TawakiCam went live on 17 January 2026 at 12 pm NZST, bringing audiences from around the world closer than ever to...
After a brief but successful visit to the Bounty Islands, our expedition team continued their journey to the ultimate destination: the Antipodes Island group. This marked the fourth visit of our five-year project, so the first glimpse of the islands wrapped in mist was a familiar one. What was also familiar – and frustrating –...
This year’s subantarctic expedition is under way! On the 25th our gear passed biosecurity inspection at the Invercargill quarantine store before we headed to Bluff to load Evohe for departure. By late afternoon we were under way, pushing east along the Southland coast. The following two days were spent at sea in slow, often uncomfortable...
We’re hosting a special two-night voyage into Patea / Doubtful Sound at the height of tawaki (Fiordland penguin) season – a rare chance to experience one of Aotearoa’s wildest fiords and meet one of its most charismatic (and elusive) birds. The trip runs Friday, 31 Oct – Sunday, 2 Nov. On board, you’ll settle into...
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...
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...
