All posts tagged: Wellington

Forget Palm Beach. Wellington Has Plenty of Wealth—and All The Horses

Forget Palm Beach. Wellington Has Plenty of Wealth—and All The Horses

Published by Sam Flores

As much as F1 needs an equally good driver and car, equestrian sports have two extremely important variables: the horse and the rider. And unlike in F1, the second piece of the puzzle is a living, breathing, intelligent animal with its own mind and moods. “There’s two athletes you need to train,” 34-year-old Jessica Springsteen, daughter of Bruce, tells me as we sit outside in the Florida humidity by the bougainvilleas at her barn. Springsteen is an accomplished professional athlete on the elite circuit: In 2021 she won a silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics for team jumping on her stallion Don Juan van de Donkhoeve. She has seven horses in Wellington. Some she shows on. Others are in development: While Springsteen herself has the experience to guide a horse over jumps higher than five feet, she needs a horse that knows (and wants) to do so as well. That takes years of training. So while she’s competing in Wellington, she and her team are also preparing her next generation of equines. Unlike most athletes, …

New Zealand’s kiwi bird returns to Wellington hills after a century-long absence

New Zealand’s kiwi bird returns to Wellington hills after a century-long absence

Published by Sam Flores

The kiwi, New Zealand’s sacred national bird, vanished from the hills around Wellington more than a century ago. Now the capital’s residents are waging an unlikely citizen campaign to return the endangered flightless birds to the city. “They are a part of who we are and our sense of belonging here,” said Paul Ward, founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust. “But they’ve been gone from these hills for well over a century and we decided as Wellingtonians that wasn’t right.” A staff member of a conservation organisation carries a kiwi bird during an event at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on April 28, 2026. © Charlotte Graham-McLay, AP On a hill wreathed in mist above the dark sea that runs between New Zealand’s North and South Islands, Ward and others crossed rugged farmland late on Tuesday night, carrying seven crates in silence by dim red torchlight. Inside each one nestled a kiwi, including the 250th bird relocated to Wellington since the Capital Kiwi Project began. The kiwi gives New Zealanders the name …