It’s been 15 years since kiwi were reintroduced back into the Remutaka Forest and from the initial release of six birds, it’s estimated the population has soared to 150.
The Remutaka Conservation Trust is celebrating the success of the project but its a result years in the making, says Volunteer and kiwi project leader Susan Ellis.
Remutaka Conservation Trust volunteer kiwi handler, Susan Ellis, holds kiwi Marcel after his health-check and transmitter removal Photo: Supplied / NRHutton
“In the early 2000s, the head of the kiwi recovery group at the time gave a talk to us and they had a bit of an issue, they had all of these brown kiwi in captivity that they no longer wanted for breeding purposes, so they were surplus to requirements,” Ellis says.
“He suggested we could actually expand our trapping and release some of these kiwi in the wild in the Remutakas since there were no kiwi there anymore.”
While the trust thought it sounded like a great idea, they had no concept of what they were taking on, Ellis says.
Previously the trust’s trapping programme – of stoats - was across 20 hectares, it now needed to expand to 1000 hectares.
Kiwi chicks are small and vulnerable to stoat predation, Ellis says.
“The adult kiwis, they’re quite robust, they can be predated by ferrets or by people’s uncontrolled dogs but otherwise they’re pretty bomb proof.”
The new trapping programme took a few years to get off the ground before the trust was even able to consider applying to translocate kiwi.
“We had to grow from a small mum and dad kind of outfit, with less than 100 volunteers, to many more volunteers in order to create these trapping lines all over the place and mark them and get helicopters to drop the boxes in.
“That was quite a challenge.”
Eventually the trust was able to prove it was managing the stoat population enough to translocate kiwi.
In 2006, the day had come. Volunteers tramped to the Turere Valley and dug temporary burrows where the kiwi were placed.
“That was a really special time, it was the first time I held a kiwi. Some of us camped and we heard them at night as they came out of their burrows and started calling. They were clearly very confused, calling back and forth like ‘who the heck are all these birds and where am I’.”
Not long after a few birds from kiwi houses were taken into the valley and in 2009 another 20 birds were introduced from Te Hauturu-o-Toi.
Initally the trust used Operation Mystic as a way to increase the success rate of breeding. Essentially, eggs are stolen halfway through the incubation cycle with the young chicks raised in captivity first, Ellis says. “It’s not ideal, you feel very guilty stealing the eggs.”
That was stopped a few years ago and now the chicks are naturally hatching in the ranges.
Ellis says the effort has been worth it, and the trust thinks the kiwi have a really bright future.
“If you’re towards the southern end of Wainuiomata there’s a chance that you may hear one or if you walk a couple of hundred meters up the Sunny Grove track there’s a much higher chance you’ll hear one.”
