Samuel Bloch Istock

New Zealand Subantarctic Islands

By Mark Stratton

MAY 17, 2024

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Time travel hasn’t been invented yet. If it were, a journey back thousands of years to New Zealand’s Subantarctic islands would yield the same wildlife and scenery you can see today on a small ship expedition voyage. New Zealand’s five subantarctic island groups, or the ‘Subs’ in the local vernacular, are located in the Southern Ocean, south of South Island, between 47º-54º latitude. They are possibly the most incredible wildlife spectacle many will never have heard of.

New Zealand’s five subantarctic island chains, all uninhabited now and strictly controlled nature reserves, are the Auckland Islands, Snares, Campbell, Bounty, and Antipodes. Volcanically formed, they range in size from tiny Bounty Island, just 135 hectares to Auckland Island’s 53,000 hectares. A 6th subantarctic island, famous on expedition cruises, is Australia’s MacQuarie, described by the explorer Douglas Mawson as ‘one of the wonder spots of the world’. Together, they have been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status because some 11% of the world’s seabirds come down here to nest.

Take Enderby Island, one of the Auckland Islands, an archipelago 465 kilometres from mainland South Island. Ploughing deeper into the Southern Ocean amid the boisterous westerlies of the ‘Roaring 40s’, after being delivered ashore by a zodiac dingy, it may take a while for the horizon to stop swaying. Yet your first footsteps will be on uninhabited terrain barely influenced by humankind. Just a few ships sailing by small vessels make it here each season.

Nature has evolved here independently, even of neighbouring island chains. For botanists, these islands are a refuge for vegetation found nowhere else. At the same time, ornithologists will have binoculars trained for endemics such as Auckland Island shags and tomtits – rotund little black-and-yellow passerines. Much of New Zealand’s breeding population of white-capped mollymawks also breed here. Your eyes, too, will surely be diverted by the world’s rarest penguin, the yellow-eyed, found around beaches patrolled by large male beachmasters of the rare Hooker’s Sea Lion. In offshore waters, keep your eyes peeled for southern right whales.

Expedition cruises will either manifest as specialist nature-watching voyages solely around the ‘Subs’ or will be add-ons to longer trips en route to the Ross Sea ice shelf further south. Departures will typically leave from Dunedin or Queensland or veer further west to end (or start) in Hobart, Tasmania.

Most island visits will be via zodiac cruises as New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) strictly limits landing to all but Enderby (on Auckland Island) and Campbell. The latter is recovering splendidly from a rat eradication program after farming left its mark here from 1895 until abandoned in 1934. Some 700 kilometres south of the South Island, Campbell offers the greatest spectacle of albatrosses on earth, with six species, including the largest of them all, the wandering. Elsewhere, you will zodiac cruise to see the endemics of Snares Islands; they have rare crested penguins, the Bounty Islands, with their shag species, and the faraway Antipodes, to hopefully spot a splendid endemic parakeet.