Our first kiwis

For some reason I had thought the kiwi was extinct – maybe I was getting it mixed up with the dodo.  Anyway, once I discovered that some of them, at least, are alive and well and living in NZ, I was hoping to be able to see at least one.

I was delighted to find that the Franz Josef Wildlife Centre and Kiwi Breeding Program was just around the corner from where we were staying.  So of course we had to go!

This breeding program is involved with the Rowi, NZ’s rarest kiwi, and we were able to go and see two of them.  So now I have seen a kiwi – well, two of them.  We were not able to take photos there – kiwis are nocturnal, so the viewing area was darkened so that the kiwis would at least be up and walking around and not asleep.  One of the kiwis we saw was quite active, walking around and looking just like pictures of kiwis I have seen, and not extinct.

Apparently there were lots of kiwis when Europeans first arrived in NZ.  One of the Europeans’ many undesirable imports was rabbits, which on arrival bred like……well, rabbits.  In an attempt to deal with the rabbits, they then imported stoats.  The stoats found it was much easier to live on the slow, flightless kiwis, which just about wiped out the kiwis and multiplied the stoats, which are still a problem today.

The Rowi kiwi in the wild has a 95% breeding failure rate, because of predators and the fragility of the egg.  Through the breeding program, Operation Nest Egg, kiwis are fitted with a little transmitter which allows staff to monitor whether they are feeding, incubating or dead.  The kiwis are then released back into their natural habitat. When they are incubating, the transmitter allows staff to locate them, so the rangers then go and retrieve the egg from the burrow.  The kiwis don’t seem to object – they just go off and lay another egg.  The egg is then incubated and hatched at the Franz Josef Wildlife Centre.

A couple of days later, the front page of the Marlborough Express featured a story about six-month-old kiwi chick Lani being transported from Franz Josef to the predator-free bird sanctuary  Motuara Island in the Marlborough Sounds, which we had just passed on the mail-boat cruise the day before.  Lani would join 37 other kiwi chicks there for a year before being released back into her original habitat near Franz Josef.  This program, begun in 1998, has increased the chicks’ survival rate from 5% to 95%.  The known total of Rowi in NZ is currently 375 – hopefully increasing.

 

This statue of a Rowi kiwi and egg is to be found in the main street of Franz Josef.  The size of the egg is said to be one-third the size of the kiwi – Pat thinks the sculptor got the proportions wrong here.

Kiwis seen on 19th April 2012.