50 kiwi released back into the wild
Ko¯ hanga Kiwi a big step forward
Fifty kiwi have been released into the hills of Wellington, a move which conservationists are calling an important step towards restoring the country’s wild kiwi population.
The first 25 North Island Brown kiwi made their way down from Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari in Waikato and were released on May 9, while the other half followed a week later.
The flightless birds were welcomed by Taranaki Whānui at a pōwhiri at Pipitea Marae at sunrise on the morning they arrived.
Their arrival marks a huge step forward to help boost the number of kiwi to the hills of the capital and a milestone for multiple groups including iwi, landowners, founders and sanctuaries.
The group of 50 are part of Kōhanga Kiwi, a breeding programme managed by Save the Kiwi that is Aotearoa’s largest predatorfenced sanctuary at 3400 hectares.
Save the Kiwi executive director Michelle Impey said the Kōhanga Kiwi programme was a huge step in helping revive the kiwi population across Aotearoa on an ongoing basis.
“If you were to leave a couple of breeding pairs of kiwi to their own
Walking into a dark forest full of bats might sound like a spooky movie scene to most people, but it’s an exciting and rewarding field task for the Department of Conservation staff.
The 2023 round of short-tailed bat/ pekapeka monitoring has been completed in the Pureora Forest, one of New Zealand’s biodiversity hotspots and a key location for the native mammals, which, under the NZ Threat Classification System, are classified as “at risk — declining”.
The monitoring information will be used to give an estimate of population survival and gauge the effectiveness of predator control programmes in the area.
Tertia Thurley, a DOC technical adviser, says this year’s capturing and tagging of more than 200 bats marked a successful week in a favourable weather window.
The bat monitoring work involved setting up harp traps which, as their name suggests, look like harps with bags beneath them and capturing the devices in the wild, it would take a very long time for them to grow into a thriving population.
“Using Kōhanga Kiwi, we now have a ready-made population of kiwi that can be gifted to areas where kiwi are locally extinct,” Impey said.
Save the Kiwi worked in partnership with Ngāti Korokii Kahukura who were the gifting iwi and alongside the Capital Kiwi Project team.
Capital Kiwi Project founder Paul Ward said the partnership represented a change in the way conservation was done towards repopulating kiwi.
“Today’s release demonstrates that the future of conservation lies in genuine partnerships — between iwi, landowners, and local communities. The partnership with Save the Kiwi matches 24,000 hectares of predatorcontrolled kiwi habitat with the country’s most ambitious kiwi breeding programme,” Ward said.
The Capital Kiwi Project is a community initiative which works across 24,000 hectares of mostly private land to restore a large wild kiwi population in the south and west of Wellington. It contains around 4500 stoat traps, the largest in the country to help kiwi live in an environment where they can thrive. — RNZ bats unharmed. The Pureora work involved a team of 27 people, with 18 carrying out the capture and tagging of the animals, and nine others acting as observers.
Bats already tagged were let go, and ones that weren’t tagged were put into special bags and taken to a central area where a PIT tag was inserted.
These PIT tags — the same sort of device used to microchip dogs — are used to individually identify bats as they fly in and out of known roosts. The roosts are equipped with aerials that can read the tag number and store this information along with the date and time.
“We tagged 219 bats over three nights, surpassing our target of 200, and catching a good mix of juveniles and adults, males and females.”
Tertia says 788 individual tagged bats were detected, comprising animals tagged in previous years and newly tagged specimens captured during the 2023 work.