Wellington Reaches 200 Kiwi In The Wild

Friday, 18 April 2025, 12:33 pm
Article: RNZ

Krystal Gibbens, Journalist

In the hills of Makara on the coast of Wellington nearly 75 kiwi are settling into their new home.

It's kiwi translocation season, and for the Capital Kiwi Project the latest releases have brought their numbers up to just over 200 birds.

The project is working to have enough kiwi to establish a population, and its latest releases bring it closer to hitting its quota, with a permit to release 250 birds in total.

"We might not have any Whittaker's Kiwi Easter eggs this year, but we've got the real thing in abundance out on the hills of our capital city," project founder Paul Ward said.

The kiwi in Wellington are North Island Brown Kiwi or Kiwi Nui, and have been relocated from another wild source site.

Ward said the kiwi translocation season was an "epic effort across the motu to look after our national symbol and and icon collectively".

This year the kiwi in Wellington are from Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari and Taranaki's Rotokare Sanctuary.

Ward said a few weeks before the birds were moved trained kiwi sniffer dogs and their handlers go in to locate the birds and move them to a smaller area.

Then just before the birds are moved they are located and checked over to ensure they're healthy. The kiwi are then put in boxes and driven to their new homes.

Ward said depending on what time of day the kiwi were released, they were put into a roost site where they could rest until darkness.

"Then they'll emerge to start exploring, start finding food, finding mates and and establishing themselves."

Capital Kiwi used upturned fish bins as their roost sites, and would later remove them and reuse them at the next release.

Ward said where possible they would drop a male and a female off at each release spot. He said some of those birds then stayed together.

He said they had previously had a male and female from Otorohanga Kiwi House that had been released and stayed together, and this year had their first chick.

The first two kiwi chicks to be born from Capital Kiwi's monitored birds hatched at the end of 2023. Another two were born the same season, while 10 have hatched this season, the last just a few weeks ago.

Ward said they were seeing good rates of chick survivorship so far and nearly half of the chicks born this season were now around fighting weight, where they could fend of predators like stoats, and would soon be able to have their transmitters snipped off.

More areas to see kiwi

Save the Kiwi chief executive Michelle Impey said translocating the kiwi was quite an operation, but this year it had been "incredibly smooth running".

For the last 11 weeks teams had been out collecting, checking and transporting birds, and as of last week 214 North Island brown kiwi had been released to Wellington, Taranaki, and Tongariro from Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari.

More releases were planned for May.

Save the Kiwi and The Brook Waimārama Sanctuary would be translocating up to 40 little spotted kiwi from Kapiti Island to The Brook Waimarama Sanctuary in early May.

Impey said it would be the first time the little spotted kiwi had been returned to the South Island in at least 50 years, and potentially up to a century.

In mid-May, Save the Kiwi, Ngāti Paoa and Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki would be translocating up to 10 North Island brown kiwi from Ponui Island to Waiheke Island.

With the release she said Waiheke Island would become the first urban area in Auckland where kiwi have been released.

In late May, Save the Kiwi would also be transporting a number of kiwi between Rotoroa Island, and Motutapu Island and the Hauraki-Coromandel region.

Impey said in the North Island where the core of their work was the species had got out of crisis mode and their focus was on growing to abundance.

She said there had been a lot of momentum to restore kiwi numbers, and in some places the potential of having kiwi returned was driving predator control.

Impey was hopeful kiwi would become more commonplace in New Zealand within her lifetime.

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