Tag Archives: Kiwi

Walks on the Wild Side

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Wednesday 18 March 2026 (cont’d) – The story so far….

Having wended their scenic way from Te Anau to the scruffy and mural-infested settlement of Bluff, our heroes, Jane and Steve, had braved the elements in a nerve-racking crossing of the Foveaux Strait and had completely confused their reception committee by buggering off to find their accommodation themselves. Now read on….

Stewart Island consists mainly of Rakiura National Park, which is a haven for many species of wild birds, untroubled by the stoats, ferrets, and weasels that humans brought to the main islands (to control the rabbits they also brought to the main islands – sigh) but neither rabbits nor mustelids made it to Stewart Island. It’s not entirely predator-free; there are possums, rats, cats and hedgehogs, and in February 2025, the Department of Conservation (DOC) announced a pest eradication project on the island to address these. One of the species which has thrived on Stewart Island is the tokoeka, or Stewart Island Kiwi, a type of southern brown kiwi that’s nearly as large as the northern brown kiwi. We’d seen other brands of kiwi in carefully controlled environments, and our mission on the Island was to try to see the native species in the wild. Unsurprisingly, more than one company exists to help people on this mission; the one we were booked in with was called Ruggedy Range. Although the Stewart Island Kiwi can be active during the day, our tour was booked to start at 8.30pm.

We presented ourselves at their office at the appointed hour; it was closed and dark, but we remained hopeful that something would happen eventually, and it did. A lady called Furhana emerged and bade us (and five other people who had drifted up in the gloaming) into the office, were she explained how she planned to go about showing us kiwis.

It’s clear that she really knows her stuff and that she had a tried and tested way of maximising the chances of seeing these elusive creatures. Personally, I found her style a rather irritating mix of didactic and scatter-brained, but she made it clear what she was going to do and what processes we were expected to follow. She also gave us lots of information about the birds, some of which we already knew and some of which was new. So, for example, we knew that the female was only just bigger than her egg, from which hatches a chick which is pretty much ready to go and forage for itself; we knew that their nostrils were at the far end of their bill, not at the head end, as this helped them to understand what they were grubbing for. But we hadn’t appreciated that their sight is very poor, their sense of smell is very keen and their sense of hearing very sharp. She also showed us some video footage. One demonstrated how careful you have to be not to scare the kiwi away with unfamiliar noises. Another demonstrated their really weird call. And a third demonstrated their fierce territoriality – they will fight by chasing and kicking an opponent, and can even fight to the death.

We had been given instructions to avoid wearing scented deodorant or insect repellent and to wear sturdy shoes. She also wanted people to wear “quiet” clothes, so my Peter Storm jacket got the thumbs down as I would make unwelcome plasticky rustling noises at the wrong moment. She provided alternative jackets for me and a couple of the others in the group and off we went in her van.

Surprisingly, she didn’t go off into the national park area, but actually stayed on the roads within Oban. The reason for this is that it’s easier for people to be quiet on asphalt than on gravel tracks or forest trails. So she drove around the local roads, using a red light torch to try to highlight any kiwis which might be about, fossicking in the hedgerows or verges. Again, surprisingly, the kiwis would be grubbing around near people’s houses, as this was good hunting for worms and insects. She found one really quite quickly and so we got out of the van as quietly as we could and followed her in line astern as she headed towards the kiwi she’d seen. I wasn’t really sure of when I was allowed to take photos, so I did nothing more than watch whilst the bird – a juvenile, maybe 18 months old – fossicked around, and eventually headed off out of our sight. Furhana then found an older female – probably the juvenile’s mother, given the animals’ territoriality – but this one was too wily for us to get any photos or videos before she disappeared. We went back and found Junior again, and this time we were able to get photos

Head well stuck into the ground looking for food

and even some video.

(Photographic footnote: this was all taken under red torchlight, and I have desaturated the footage so it appears in monochrome.)

This counted as a moderately successful outing (we met someone later who’d seen five the following evening, but still) so we were happy with the evening’s chasing about. It was a perfectly clear sky and the stars had been brilliant in the firmament above us, whenever we got the chance to look up from trying not to fall over in the dark, make too much noise, or otherwise embarrass ourselves; we got to bed just after midnight.  Our wildlife adventures on the island weren’t over, though; as we had another tour booked for, well, later that day.

Thursday 19 March 2026 –  Lying very close to Stewart Island, Ulva Island is also part of the Rakiura National Park. It’s much smaller than Stewart Island, being just 2.67km², and the bit where punters are allowed to walk is only about a quarter of that area. That said, the island is a sanctuary for both birds and plants, holding species that on the mainland of New Zealand are rare or have died out, and the walking that can be done is a good opportunity to see these. We were booked on an afternoon’s ramble on the island, so I looked out the Big Lens and we set off to meet our guide.

One might have been forgiven for expecting the trip to Ulva Island to start from the Oban waterfront, but no, we had to walk to Golden Bay Wharf, just over 1km from our accommodation. We took the opportunity to have a coffee in the South Sea Hotel

and looked along the Main Street,

(which gives you an idea of the scope of Oban as a metropolis) before embarking on the walk over. One kilometre might not seem much, but this is Stewart Island, so nothing is on the flat,

and we actually had quite a steep climb over a headland to reach the wharf

where eventually our guide, Emma from Ulva’s Guided Walks, joined us, as did a water taxi,

which took us on the five-minute journey over to Ulva Island.

It turned out that we were the only two punters in the group, so we had Emma to ourselves, which was great. She was very knowledgeable about the flora and fauna of the island, and was also a trustee of the island’s charitable trust.

We were bidden to to brush our boots before boarding the taxi, but that was the only precaution needed before going there; and, interestingly, it’s an open conservation area – no special permission needed to visit, no control over the number of visitors. It seems to work OK, because the island is effectively predator-free and the Department of Conservation maintains a sharp watch for any rats which might have swum over from the mainland (they get maybe one a year, but one year the incursion was a pregnant female which meant a lot of work to clear it).

We pottered about for some four hours, wandering over to a cove where we saw a pair of (fairly young) New Zealand Sealions

before heading off on the forest trail

across the top of the island. As well as plying us with a wealth of information about the endemic and native trees and plants (most of which I’ve forgotten), Emma did the usual guide thing, which I envy greatly but can’t emulate, of spotting things I didn’t even know were there, so we saw a decent variety of birds on our afternoon.  A couple of the birds, though, weren’t difficult to spot – Stewart Island Robins: a female

and a male.

New Zealand robins resemble British robins in many ways, but the two groups are not closely related.  One way in which they are similar is their territoriality; on our walk we crossed between the territories of different male robins, and they emphatically do not overlap.  Also, like British robins, they are dead cute and not afraid of people,

and also terrible death-dealing bullies to other, lesser species. Difficult not to find them attractive, though.

What else did we see? Well, some sightings were of species we’d seen elsewhere, such as this Weka, which is however a smaller Stewart Island subspecies,

a local parrot, the Kaka (also a Stewart Island subspecies),

and a Morepork owl

which was tucked away in a very inaccessible corner of a tree. There are kiwis on the island, but we only got to see a burrow,

which might have once been for a Little Blue Penguin, and repurposed by the kiwi.

Some birds have been reintroduced to the island, such as the Saddleback

and the Red-fronted Parakeet.

We also saw some local orchids and a very unusual blue fungus.

We saw other birds, too, but I was unable to photograph them, as the buggers won’t keep still: Yellowheads and Riflemen (the local wren, with a call so high-pitched that it can go beyond human earing). So it was an engaging afternoon and I was pleased with the photos I managed to get.

After taking our return taxi ride back to Stewart Island, we decided to walk up to the Observation Rock Viewpoint, which gave us a nice, erm, view

and then we walked back down into Oban

and rewarded ourselves for the extra effort of all that uphill work by returning to the South Sea Hotel and consuming some of the local produce.

OK, Bluebird is nationwide in New Zealand, but the gin is definitely local there – and very good it is, too.

That was it for our Third Island activities; the morrow would see us take the ferry back to the South Island and continue on our way. We have one more major destination before we head to Christchurch and our return flight to the UK (via Singapore, by the way – our original route through Dubai has been changed). So stay with these pages to find out where we headed next and what we got up to whilst there.

 

 

Kiwi bono?

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Tuesday 17 February 2026 – Apart from the Haka and Brendan McCullum, what New Zealand is best known for is the Kiwi, in all the various connotations of that word – an adjective to describe its inhabitants or its Rugby League team, a brand name for shoe polish (actually developed by an Aussie, but his wife was a New Zealander), a fruit… or the species of the country’s, possibly the world’s, oddest bird. Today we went to the National Kiwi Hatchery to learn more.

I had actually seen Kiwis before, on my last trip to New Zealand, in 1988. I was culturally backward in 1988, but even in those days I knew that Kiwis came from New Zealand, and somehow or other (there was no Google in those days) I found a place then where one could view the birds, in captivity of course, as they’re very difficult to see in the wild, being (a) shy and (b) nocturnal. The place operated 12 hours out of sync with actual time, so that daytime visitors entered a darkened environment in order to see the birds active. I have a clear memory of seeing at least one Kiwi, and possibly even photographing it, but that was nearly forty years ago, my memory has a habit of inventing things and I have no way of finding out if this is true until I get home and can look at the photos from that time. If I can remember where I put them.

So…today, then.

Jane had cleverly averted a major sulk on my part by ensuring I knew in advance that any sort of photography of the birds was not permitted. Kiwis are easily upset by unexpected light and noise, and I (grumpily) accepted that the centre had to be careful because most people (a) use phones, which emit a lot of light and (b) almost certainly have no idea about whether its flash will fire or not, therefore can’t be trusted. Armed with that foreknowledge, off we went.

The first challenge was finding the place. We had an address, but that turned out to be some kind of Māori-themed tourist trap. In the end, Google Maps gave us the place to find, the intriguingly-named Agrodome, which is not a Mad Max style cage fight but is actually a place themed around a family day out on the farm.

The Aardman theme continues once one gets there.

It’s actually quite the operation, running farm tours around what is quite a large area.

They have a variety of livestock, including sheep, goats and cattle. Sheep are their main focus; the gift shop and cafe is housed in the Woollen Mill, where they have an old carding machine

alongside the sales of Pure New Zealand wool in the shop.

They have a pig,

a Kunekune pig (“Kunekune” means “fat and round” in Māori). They also have an ostrich

which has many similarities to a Kiwi – flightless, grumpy and with very strong legs.

This similarity was pointed out on the guided tour that the National Hatchery operates. One is picked up at the Agrodome and taken by minibus to the hatchery centre.

The lass who drove our van was also our guide for our trip

and she did a very good job of explaining about the bird, its environment, its challenges and the role of the hatchery. She also emphasised that photography of the birds would not be permitted before leading us through to where they keep a few (currently three) kiwis in the same inverted time that I saw thirty eight years ago, switching day and night.  As it turns out, it was so dark in there that any sensible photography was simply not feasible anyway, so I didn’t miss out on a photo opportunity.

So: the Kiwi, then. It’s a weird, weird creature.

  • Its feathers are more like hair
  • It has whiskers like a cat
  • In many ways it’s more like a mammal. It has two ovaries; a low body temperature of about 38°C; and marrow in its bones (flighted birds’ bones are honeycombed and hollow to save weight)
  • It is very heavy, which is not a problem because it is flightless. Our guide passed around a couple of fluffy model Kiwis made to weigh the same as a chick and an adult and it was a real surprise: the adult female weighs around 3kg

It is thought to be the world’s most ancient bird, having evolved some 30 million years ago. It developed, of course, with no mammalian predators at all (only avian ones, like hawks or crows), so introduced animals such as ferrets and stoats have wrought much damage to the Kiwi population, and predate Kiwi chicks (though an adult will give a stoat a good kicking, apparently). Even hedgehogs are their enemies, since a hedgehog is not above making a nice proteinaceous meal out of a Kiwi egg.

Ah, yes. The eggs. They are enormous, compared with the bird in which they develop.

Somehow or other, a female Kiwi can develop an egg like that in about a week. An X-ray gives an extraordinary picture.

One wonders how uncomfortable it is for the poor bird to deliver it, but somehow she does, and she delivers it into the care of the male (with whom she is likely bonded monogamously). Then, because she hasn’t had anything to eat for a week because of the size of the egg, she goes off to find food, developing the while a second egg (from her other ovary), which she then also delivers into the male’s care. That is then her job done; she has no further interest in eggs or chicks at all.  The bloke Kiwi has to incubate these eggs for 80 days before they hatch. When they do, the chicks are basically fully-formed Kiwis who need no teaching about how to feed themselves, which is just as well, since the male makes no effort to teach them anything.

There are actually five types of Kiwi; the North Island has mainly Brown Kiwis, about 25,000 of them. The other types are: Rowi Kiwi, about the same size as a Brown Kiwi, but a greyer colour, and critically endangered with around 500 birds at the moment; Great Spotted Kiwi, the largest and toughest, spotted only on the South Island; Little Spotted Kiwi, which is, erm, small, and exists almost entirely in remote island colonies; and Tokoeka Kiwi, the Southern Brown Kiwi, which we might get to see later on this trip as it is not entirely nocturnal.

Unsurprisingly there were some stuffed kiwis for us to look at.  A male

The red tag is to allow tracking. If it’s not moving, it’s incubating an egg, which can be brought to the hatchery

and a female

To be absolutely certain in distinguishing one sex from the other it is necessary to analyse their DNA, but typically males are smaller and skinnier, and females larger and rounder. One can see their whiskers

and (if one looks very carefully) their nostrils, which are at the end of their bills, making them officially the birds with the shortest beaks in the world. It is possible to make a coat out of their feathers

and this would be for extremely high-ranking Māori. It takes a lot of birds to make a coat like that, and, these days, the species is under threat.  The National Hatchery exists to try to increase the chances of survival of Kiwi eggs. There are about 68,000 Kiwi left in all of New Zealand and the nation is losing 2% of its unmanaged Kiwi every year. The Brown Kiwi population is steadily declining by about 1-2% a year. Without ongoing support, experts estimate it will be extinct in the wild within two generations: only 50% of Kiwi eggs in the wild hatch; of those that do, only 5% of the resulting chicks survive to adulthood. The centre has overseen the successful hatching of nearly 3,000 eggs since it came into operation some 20 years ago.

The final part of our tour was to see the support the centre gives for hatching chicks. Eggs are located using a variety of tactics, such as tagging the males – if they’re stationary, they’re likely incubating – to locate eggs and bring them to the hatchery. They are carefully incubated, the chicks are microchipped, checked for health, measured and fed to bring them to the point where they are heavy and strong enough to withstand a stoat and so can be released back into the wild; they are then set free in the same region that the egg was found. This is not traumatic for either the male or the chick, since the former doesn’t care for the latter and the latter is pretty much ready for the wild and hasn’t imprinted at all on people during its time in the hatchery.  It’s a funny old business, but deeply interesting to learn about what they do and to find out how extraordinarily weird these creatures are.

That was our scheduled activity for the day. Rather than relaxing for the rest of it, Jane (of course) found Something Interesting To Do in the evening. That will be the subject of the next post. Heads-up – there will be a certain amount of photographic nerdery in it as well as some pretty pictures.