Anne-Sophie Pagé grew up on the Otago Peninsula, where her mother, marine biologist Sally Carson, ran the marine study centre and kept the kitchen bench in a permanent state of scientific enquiry. Dissecting a shark before dinner was a normal Tuesday in the Pagé household, and by the time most children were mastering shoelaces, Annie was learning how to sex a praying mantis. It was, by any conventional measure, an unusual childhood, though it produced someone who has spent the years since trying to return the favour to the creatures that shaped it.
Her path south began at the Royal Albatross Colony on Taiaroa Head, where she guided visitors through summer seasons from 2013 to 2018 and fell, as she puts it, quietly and irrevocably in love with the birds. In 2017, an Enderby Trust scholarship took her to the subantarctic islands for the first time, one of three recipients aboard the Spirit of Enderby, surrounded by fifty seasoned birders who had saved their whole lives for the trip. She has written about that first voyage in Forest & Bird magazine and in a spoken word piece she later presented at New Zealand’s Parliament, describing how she leaned over the bow with fifty albatross flying around her and felt something shift inside her that has never shifted back. “I just fell in love with the region,” she says. “It was super pivotal for me in seeing what things could be like on the mainland.” That voyage changed the trajectory of her veterinary career, pulling her focus toward Southern Ocean species and the kinds of remote, wind-battered ecosystems most people will only ever see in photographs.
Annie trained as a veterinarian at Massey University, graduating with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science in 2021, and spent a couple of years working in a mixed animal clinic on the north coast of Tasmania with a large wildlife caseload. She found the individual medicine side of things difficult, the constant euthanasia wearing, and came back to New Zealand to pursue a Master of Veterinary Science in wildlife pathology at Massey under supervisors Wendi Roe and Stuart Hunter. The residency, which she is finishing in August 2026, has a focus she describes with characteristic dry humour as “pretty much doctor death sort of thing.” Under a contract with the Department of Conservation, any critically endangered species found dead in New Zealand gets sent to her team for post-mortem, and the findings go back to DOC with recommendations on what could change in management. The species range from kiwi to three-gram forest geckos to sperm whales, and the work feeds directly into the evidence base that conservation decisions depend on.
Since 2022, Annie has also worked as the veterinarian on DOC’s Whakahao/Pakake Threat Management Project, heading to the subantarctic on seasonal expeditions to monitor New Zealand sea lion populations, conduct mortality investigations in the field, and assist with anaesthesia for satellite tagging. She has spent a good couple of months on Enderby Island, a flat pancake of rock off the coast of the main Auckland Island that is no bigger than a rugby field and happens to host the largest sea lion breeding colony in the island group. Her specific role involves collecting dead pups and performing post-mortems to determine what is killing them, work that contributed to a 2024 DOC report on pup mortality she authored. She also guides for Heritage Expeditions on seasonal voyages to the Snares, Auckland Islands, Campbell Island and Macquarie Island, which means she has seen more of these places than most New Zealanders will in a lifetime and still finds herself moved by what she encounters there.
The Auckland Islands themselves sit 465 kilometres south of the South Island, a Nature Reserve and World Heritage site that supports over 500 native plants and animals, with more than 100 found nowhere else on Earth. The landscape is dominated by formidable cliffs, coastal windswept rātā forests, alpine tussock and carpets of bright megaherbs whose leaves can grow to the size of dinner plates and whose fine surface hairs trap warmth against the relentless subantarctic wind. Annie describes the megaherbs as one of the things that most captivates visitors. “As a guide, when we go down to these islands, people are absolutely enamoured by the plants,” she says. “I’ve never seen the herbs so good out there.” Some species grow only on the Auckland Islands, and the surrounding marine reserve is home to Gibson’s albatross, southern right whales, hoiho (yellow-eyed penguins) and the New Zealand sea lion.
The main Auckland Island, though, has had uninvited guests for the past 200 years. Feral pigs, cats and mice have driven 32 native bird species off the island entirely, and the species that remain have been pushed onto smaller, nearby islands where their populations are vulnerable. Pigs have torn through large swaths of rātā forest, disturbing soils and stunting understory that took centuries to build. Cats hunt yellow-eyed penguins during their annual moult, when the birds replace every feather at once and cannot enter the water for weeks. And when beech trees mast, mouse populations explode, putting pressure on every native species sharing the habitat. Annie sees the damage up close, season after season, and talks about the west coast of the main island with the kind of knowledge that comes from having actually been there, something few people can claim. She has photographs of the dramatic cliffs and terrain that give a sense of both the beauty and the quiet devastation of losing an ecosystem piece by piece.
For all her work with sea lions, Annie’s deepest attachment is to the albatross. “I get quite emotional around those birds,” she admits. “I think they’re very spiritual.” On Campbell Island, she has stood on a ridge where the birds fly so close to the top of your head that you hear the whoosh of their feathers, a sound she describes as the most amazing experience of her life. In her spoken word piece, she wrote about what it means to sit in the presence of an albatross, how it touches you with a feeling so profound it can only be described as spiritual, and how the sound of feathers rustling overhead makes her soul exhale. She wrote about a young albatross stepping off a cliff for its first flight, drawn to the blue turmoil of the Southern Ocean with no second thought and no sentiment, and about a bird that races the wind to the horizon, constantly going somewhere only to end up nowhere. It is the kind of writing that comes from someone who has watched these birds long enough to feel the weight of what they carry, and who understands, with a clarity that her scientific training only deepens, how much is at risk if we do nothing.
Her interest in population health over individual medicine runs through everything she does. She is less interested in saving one animal at a time, which she describes as resource-heavy and expensive, and more focused on understanding why populations are declining and what management changes could prevent it. That philosophy sits at the centre of her residency research, which includes investigating mortality of New Zealand sea lion pups in the subantarctic and the prevalence of avian malaria in Fiordland crested penguins, and it shapes the way she thinks about the future of conservation medicine in the Southern Ocean.
Annie is also part of the team keeping watch for avian influenza, co-authoring a 2025 paper on avian influenza virus surveillance across New Zealand and its subantarctic islands. She describes the preparation for a potential HPAI outbreak with the kind of gallows practicality that comes with the territory. “If avian influenza comes, that’s going to be a big, big thing,” she says. “Everything’s been sort of in preparation for that, in a morbid way. It’s a morbid job, but I find it really fulfilling.” She has tested giant petrels on the Auckland Islands for the virus, and when DOC did not send the team down with nets, she and her colleagues had to catch the birds by surprise, an exercise she recalls as an absolute nightmare and a lot of fun in roughly equal measure.
The Maukahuka Pest Free project, which the NZ Nature Fund is helping to fund, aims to remove all three invasive pest species from the main Auckland Island in a single operation, which would make it the largest pest-free subantarctic island in the world. It is the kind of project that requires years of feasibility research, significant funding and an unusual level of coordination between government, scientists, iwi and the public. For the albatross that return to these islands generation after generation, for the sea lion pups born on a rock the size of a rugby field, for the megaherbs and the penguins and the hundred-odd species that exist nowhere else, the stakes could not be higher. Annie, who has seen both sides of these islands, the breathtaking and the quietly devastating, puts it simply. “It’s a project I’m super passionate about. If I can help in any way, I’m keen.”
People who care about New Zealand’s wildest places tend to find one another, and Annie’s willingness to share her knowledge, her photographs and her time with the conservation community is a reminder that the work extends well beyond the field teams. Whether she is post-morteming a sea lion pup on a windswept beach, lecturing on a Heritage Expeditions voyage, or catching a giant petrel by stealth in the subantarctic rain, she brings the same thing to each encounter: a deep, practical love for species that most New Zealanders will never see, and a determination to make sure they are still there when the next generation looks south.
You can learn more about the Maukahuka/Auckland Island project and support the work here.
