800 km east of New Zealand, the Chatham Islands sit in the Roaring Forties: southern bull kelp, rock lobster, Moriori heritage and the Chatham Rise.
Eight hundred kilometres east of Christchurch, where the Roaring Forties have nothing between them and the Chathams but open ocean, a scatter of islands lifts out of one of the most productive patches of temperate sea on Earth. The Chatham Islands — Rēkohu in the Moriori language, Wharekauri in te reo Māori — are New Zealand's far shore: a few hundred residents, a famous crayfish fleet, some of conservation's greatest comeback stories, and coasts armoured in bull kelp that thrashes in the swell like something alive, because of course it is.
Two islands are inhabited — Chatham (the main island, with the settlement of Waitangi and a large shallow lagoon, Te Whanga) and nearby Pitt. Scheduled flights run from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, around two hours depending on origin; the islands run their own time zone, forty-five minutes ahead of New Zealand, which tells you something about how they regard the mainland.
Although the islands aren't tropical — pack jerseys — the latitude softens them, and the climate is famously misty, windy and mild, smeared with cloud and sudden shafts of sun. Renting a vehicle and staying with locals in small lodges is the norm; there are no big resorts, which is the point.
The islands sit atop the Chatham Rise, a vast submerged plateau where warm subtropical water pushing down from the north slides into cold subantarctic water riding up from the south. That meeting — a boundary layer where two oceans shake hands — is one of the great natural productivity engines of the hemisphere. Plankton blooms; baitfish boil; seabirds, seals, tuna and everything hungry gathers at the edge of the current seam.
For the islands this means abundance and its consequences. Fishing — famously southern rock lobster, blue cod and pāua — is the backbone of the economy, and the wharves of Waitangi and Flower Pot Bay anchor the working rhythm of the place. A single beach walk tells the same story in other words: pāua and kina shells by the kilogram, enormous fish frames drying on shed roofs.
Everywhere the swell pounds, and especially on the south and west coasts, the intertidal and shallow subtidal are wrapped in southern bull kelp (Durvillaea species) — the great rubbery, honeycombed kelps of the Southern Ocean. They are astonishing plants: anchored to bare rock in the most violent intertidal habitat on Earth, with fronds like bullwhips and bodies full of air-honeycomb that keeps them buoyant when every reasonable plant would be ashore in ribbons. Our southern bull kelp species profile digs into the biology — including the kelp's remarkable talent for rafting across entire oceans with whole invertebrate communities aboard.
Southeast swells thundering up from Antarctica have kept everything here honest, and the wave-exposed rocky shore communities — grazing pāua, kina, molluscs and small rockfishes within the kelp — are what intact looks like. For the same reason, beachcombing after storms is a contact sport: enormous kelp rafts, miscellaneous lost fishing buoys from half the Pacific, and occasionally marine mammals coming ashore onto Chathams' wild beaches.
The Chathams were settled by the Moriori — a Polynesian people who developed a distinctive culture of peace, with warfare renounced as a cultural principle — centuries before later Māori and then European arrivals. That history is beautiful and painful, and it is increasingly told, on the islands, first-hand: carved dendroglyphs on kōpi trees (a rare art form where figures were incised into living bark), marae visits, museum collections devoted to Moriori taonga, and a renaissance of language and identity. For a visitor, this human story is as much the reason to come as the wildlife: there are few places where an island's identity is so entangled with its seas, and where stewardship of both is so directly practiced.
The Chathams hold some of the most improbable bird stories in conservation. The black robin — pulled back from a total world population of five birds in 1980, largely through the extraordinary work of ranger Don Merton and a single fertile female known ever since as Old Blue — is a byword for what conservation can pull off on an island. The Chatham albatross breeds on a single rock stack; the once-presumed-extinct taiko (magenta petrel) was rediscovered on the main island in the twentieth century after more than a century unrecorded, and now survives through intensive predator control. Endemic shore plovers, oystercatchers and parrots fill out the life list of any birder patient enough.
For travellers hooked on remote kelp coasts, the Chathams live in excellent company: Stewart Island / Rakiura lies under New Zealand's southern end; the Otago coast is closer to where the flights leave from; and far across the Southern Ocean the Falkland Islands run the same bull-kelp economy of birds, seals and spray. Together they sketch what the temperate south does when you give it rock and let it alone.
Scheduled flights run from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch on the islands' own airline to the airstrip on Chatham's west side, roughly a two-hour ride depending on routing and weather. Accommodation, rental vehicles and tour guides should be locked in before booking the flight — the infrastructure is charmingly small.
Enormously. Crayfish and cod, empty surf beaches, basalt columns, wildflower-dense 'megaherb' meadows, Moriori heritage and kelp-armoured coastline compose one of the most distinctive slow-travel destinations in the Pacific. Birders get a bonus; they don't hold a monopoly.
The Chathams have no dive industry to speak of — this is expedition-style coast, with cold Southern Ocean water, serious swell and no rescue infrastructure nearby. Confident snorkellers with full cold-water gear can dip sheltered spots in settled weather, but respect the power of the water fully; the kelp forests here are better admired from the shore, in most sea states.
Summer and early autumn (November–April) bring the most settled weather, the megaherb flowering and warmest conditions, though islands this remote have no guaranteed season. Crayfish seasons, seabird breeding and storm-watching each have their fans — come in any month prepared for four seasons in a day, and you won't be disappointed.
Southern bull kelp (Durvillaea) grips the roughest surf coasts on Earth with the strongest holdfast of any kelp. Honeycomb blades, Māori pōhā, ocean rafting.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Inside the Falkland Islands' giant kelp beds — among the most extensive on Earth — and the penguins, seals and steamer ducks that run on them.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
South of New Zealand lie wind-torn islands wrapped in some of Earth's densest kelp forests. A guide to the Auckland and Campbell islands' wild underwater world.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·