Promising season for world's rarest wading bird
Department of Conservation staff dedicated to helping save the world’s rarest wading bird say they have a haul of about 110 eggs from wild and captive breeding pairs this season with 35 kakı¯ chicks already hatched.
The kakı¯ is the world’s rarest wading bird, with just 106 adults in the wild, and five adult breeding pairs in captivity.
DOC Twizel branch biodiversity manager Dean Nelson said it was a ‘‘pretty good for this time of year’’, and the birds would continue laying eggs until about Christmas.
‘‘It’s still relatively early.’’ Another 11 eggs were in the process of hatching, which took a day or so from the start of the ‘‘cracking and pipping’’, Nelson said.
DOC has a captive breeding centre just out of Twizel in the Mackenzie Basin where two of the captive pairs are based.
Each captive breeding pair in the Kakı¯ Recovery Programme can produce about four clutches of eggs - up to 16 chicks - in a season. Once the eggs were taken off the parents, they produced another clutch, Nelson said.
The birds would be released into the wild at about nine months of age - and only 30 per cent of them would survive to adulthood.
‘‘It’s not brilliant, but it’s still better than them all dying to predators as eggs,’’ Nelson said.
This is the first year in modern times that the wild adult kakı¯ population had topped 100 birds.
Some young kakı¯ did not adapt to life in the wild and would starve - but Nelson believed most of the young kakı¯ that died would fall victim to predators.
In June, it was announced a new $500,000 breeding aviary would be built in Twizel.
It could result in up to 175 extra birds being released into the wild each year.
In captivity, kakı¯ could live to be 15 or 20-years-old, but in the wild they lived between eight and 10 years.