Walking Into the Night

Every 24 hours, the Earth rolls into its own vast shadow and darkness floods across the land and sea. In a 1600-kilometre-long gliding plumb-line down the length of New Zealand, our beaches, towns, cities, farms, forests, lakes and mountains sink into shadow. In the darkness that follows, landscapes become altered, mysterious and charge with potency.

To research this book, I spent several years in the company of bats, owls, moths, singing crickets and seabirds, and the people who study them, to learn more about what goes on outdoors once the sun goes down.

The result is After Dark: Walking into the nights of Aotearoa, published by Potton and Burton in 2021.  Beside the natural history tales, it is filled with human night stories: tales of war stealth, fireworks and ghosts; nights lit by candles, lanterns, fires and lighthouses; night surfing, night fishing, night diving and night skiing; mountains walking in the dark and night navigation on ocean voyaging waka. 

You can purchase a copy of the book here: https://www.pottonandburton.co.nz/product/after-dark/

You can listen to my interview with Kim Hill on this here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018813819/annette-lees-exploring-the-enchanting-nights-of-aotearoa

Nights and strategy

I am fortunate indeed that I can weave together my working world with my love of the natural world.  Researching and exploring nights for this book led to two wonderful contracts for pekapeka tou-roa/long-tailed bat conservation. 

For Community Waitākere in Auckland I drew together a diverse partnership to explore a number of initiatives to safeguard bat habitat in the region. 

And for the Waikato Bat Alliance (a partnership comprising Waikato-Tainui, Te Haa o te Whenua o Kirikiriroa, Ngā Iwi Tōpū O Waipā, Department of Conservation and four regional and local governments) I have facilitated a strategic partnership to better understand the priorities and actions needed for long-term survival of these extraordinary native mammals that share our urban and rural environments.