The Bird Is The Word

Standing in the middle of a grass field with no lights at about 10 p.m. on a Tuesday evening seems like a strange thing to be doing on vacation but that's where we were. All seven of us. Standing dead still trying not to make any noise, although the morepork (think: owl) in the distance hooting away didn't seem to be understanding the rules of the game. It was just about five minutes earlier that we passed through the quarantine gate and into this particular field because we just weren't finding what we wanted outside the fence. Pretty creepy and sketchy stuff if you ask me.

Now, no lights isn't exactly accurate. There was a quarter moon shining somewhat brightly and there were what seemed like hundreds of stars in the sky including Orion blinking high up above us and the Southern Cross less visible but still there down towards the horizon. It was a similar picture to what played out the night before up at the airfield. No quarantine gate on Monday but we did just open up the airport's "no access" gate and drove on through like we had the right to be there and started poking around in the high grass with our red light flashlights (or torches, if you will). Pretty impossible to see without them after all although it's not all that bright with them.

Monday night the company for our mission was one larger, but the goal was the same: find a knee high (at most) ball of feathers weighing all of six pounds when fully grown. That's it. It's not a pest and it's not really threatening to us and we weren't out there to kill it or for sport or to gather food. All we wanted to do was get a look at one. And maybe follow it for a bit. Just one kiwi bird is all we wanted. Rare? Sure. But if they weren't rare this wouldn't be worth it. We'd come a long way and invested a good amount of money to get there so we were clearly serious about what we were doing. This had to pay off. Had to!

Quarantine sign: keeping rats out and away from kiwis and other birds not able to withstand an attack.

The where in this whole quest was Stewart Island, the third largest island of New Zealand and the only one other than the largest two that stands any sort of chance of showing up on an average sized map or globe. It's an island with a single town (Oban), 98% of the land devoted to a national park and about a 50 to 1 kiwi bird to kiwi human ratio. If there's any place in the country that you have a good chance of spotting one of these birds, Stewart Island or Rakiura (as it was called by the Māori) is it. 

Oh, and it's all sorts of out of the way of everything. We had multiple New Zealanders tell us that they had never been there when we told them we were going or had been. I feel lucky knowing that. But it took some effort to get there.

Stewart Island was the second to last stop of our trip. We'd landed in Auckland and bounced between Rotorua and Wellington and Queenstown and Fiordland National Park by plane, taxi, light rail, smaller plane, boat, bus, car and even smaller plane to get there. We'd placed all our expectations and the majority of our allocated trip funds into this one place. When I wrote earlier this had to pay off, I meant it. No way would we be happy coming all that way to strike out and not see New Zealand's most famous natural resident. No way could we go home without seeing a live, in the flesh kiwi.

Truth be told, we cheated a little bit here. Yes, we may have focused on Rakiura (it means glowing sky in Māori) as our great hope to see a kiwi bird, but we did have a safety net which we'll get to in a few paragraphs. You can call me overly cautious or accuse me of spoiling the excitement of searching for one under the stars (it didn't spoil the excitement for what it's worth) when we get down to that point in this post but we made darned sure we'd see a live kiwi earlier in the week. I don't like to be disappointed. What can I say?

Of all the largish reasonably habited land masses in the world, New Zealand perhaps remained isolated from human contact the longest. The first Māori settlers arrived from elsewhere in Polynesia in the second half of the thirteenth century and European explorers didn't "discover" the islands until 1642, almost 400 years later.

What the Māori found when they arrived in New Zealand (or Aotearoa as they called it) was likely a forested landscape filled with unique species of birds and zero mammals. Well, zero land mammals anyway; there were some bats. And because of the lack of mammals to prey on the native birds and particularly their eggs, the birdlife on the islands had evolved to be significantly flightless. After all, if there are no predators at all on the surface of the Earth, why bother flying any more? Several species of moa (now all extinct), the pukeko, the takahē and the kakapo were just some of the strange land-bound birds found by the Māori. Oh, and of course, the kiwi.

Man changed all that and quickly. The Māori hunted the moa to extinction. They also brought pigs and rats, as did European settlers after them. When rabbits introduced by white men started multiplying beyond reasonable numbers, they introduced stoats, ferrets and weasels to kill the rabbits. Pigs eat bird eggs. But then again pigs eat everything. They are also and fortunately not necessarily equipped to get into all sorts of birds' nests. Burrowing protects from pigs. But rats? Nope. Stoats, ferrets and weasels? For sure not. All of a sudden these predators found themselves with foods they love right on the ground level and a native population ill-equipped to fight them. 

Native bird populations started to decline. Fast. As of October 2017, there were an estimated 347 takahē in the world (this after they were already and accidentally declared extinct). The kakapo wasn't so lucky as that (although it hasn't been declared extinct yet); their numbers dwindled down to double digits and likely number between 100 and 200 today. There are way more kiwi than takahē or kakapo but that doesn't mean they are not endangered. About half of all kiwi eggs laid are hatched and chicks hatched in the wild have a 5% survival chance in the first six months they are alive.

Today, the kiwi are getting a helping hand. There are kiwi hatcheries spread around New Zealand including right across the road from our hotel in Rotorua (called, appropriately and simply enough, The National Kiwi Hatchery). So knowing we wanted to see a kiwi in our two weeks in country, we had to stop by this place. It was right next to our hotel, after all. 

I know, it's sort of cheating. But we HAD to see one.

Our first kiwi sighting. His name's Bennett. And, yes, he is in a box.

We try our very best not to visit zoos, aquariums or aviaries or anything like that sort of thing but we figured The National Kiwi Hatchery was likely doing some good to save a species, so we made an exception. We are glad we did, although seeing the mercifully small enclosure that their three permanent resident kiwi live in was admittedly very discouraging.

The National Kiwi Hatchery is located within the Rainbow Springs Nature Park. We didn't spend much time in the zoo-like part of the Park, opting to spend all our quality time within the Hatchery itself. This is definitely the place to spend your time. And if you are determined to take a picture of a live kiwi while you are there, you have to do it in the Hatchery. But only when you are told it's OK.

I mentioned earlier that 95% of the kiwi hatched in the wild won't make it six months out in the big bad world. When they hatch, they are pretty much left to themselves. They are genetically programmed to hunt for themselves as soon as they get out of the egg so dad leaves them alone to have at it. And fend for themselves. And yes, it's dad who sits on the egg or eggs; mom splits as soon as she's laid the egg. You might too if you'd just laid an egg which weighed 20% of your body weight. And if you laid two, you definitely would take off.

The Hatchery flips the script on the survival rate, turning the 5% survival rate into a 98% one. Pretty awesome, right? How do they do that, you ask? Well, quite simply they steal the eggs from dad as soon as mom does the deed and takes off. They can tell when dad is incubating based on his movements from the geotracking tags they've got on him so they swoop in before he can get too emotionally attached to the egg to give the kid a way better chance at life. And yes, the doing it before he gets too attached is for real. Dad will give up on a missing egg after about six days and go look for a lady kiwi to breed with again.

Bennett the kiwi, everyone!! No longer in his box.

Once the Hatchery poaches the egg from the nest (yes, pun intended) they make sure it hatches then they take care of it until the chick is ready to enter the wild and defend itself, although they do release them into predator free environments. Getting to the release process takes about four to six weeks after hatching. Generally speaking they wait until the kiwi reaches its birth weight before letting him or her go. Kiwis are born with part of the egg yolk still in their body; they absorb it for food while they are getting their feet under them which causes their weight to drop. Once they are confident finding insects to eat, their weight starts to go back up again.

The Kiwi Hatchery releases about 120 chicks back to the wild per year. If they were left to nature, about six of those 120 would survive. Using the Hatchery's numbers, that number goes up to about 117. A pretty significant difference, right?

I feel pretty good about visiting the Rainbow Springs Nature Park even if it is a sort of zoo. The work they are doing to increase the kiwi population in Aotearoa is important and the education we got in the Hatchery portion of the Park was important to us. We learned a lot. The kiwi is a strange bird, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. It's almost a sort of missing link kind of species: they are the only birds that have marrow in their bones and umbilical cords, traits otherwise reserved on this planet for mammals. Strange stuff.

Scene from a night walk. What's that round thing? Could it be? Is it? It's got to be, doesn't it?

Speaking of strange stuff, let's get back to that night adventure we were on shall we?

So kiwi walks at night are a sort of a thing on Stewart Island. I know I didn't mention it but the kiwi is nocturnal, in case that wasn't reasonably inferable. Tuesday night, the one with the whole quarantine fence, was a bust. We struck out on our kiwi walk entirely. We spent about 90 minutes roaming around a beach being assaulted by thousands of sand hoppers (insects) and then tramping around some random fields in the pitch black with green and red flashlights and saw nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. We did see a few rats. Ironically. Although they were on the right side of the quarantine fence. I guess that's good. At least the fence works.

It's also not exactly true that we saw no kiwis that night either. We saw one on the drive home but I (and not our guide) spotted it. It was visible for maybe 20 seconds in the car headlights before our tour operator turned them off and broke out the flashlights. Poof! It was gone before that switchover happened.

But up at the airfield the night before? Yeah, we saw some. And it was pretty amazing.

There is an excitement about seeing a wild creature in its natural environment that seems to never get old for me. Whether it's coming across a bear or a bison somewhere in North America or a lion or elephant in Africa or a blue footed booby or shark in the Galapagos, there's a spark there each time it happens. I think it's knowing that this is not a concocted experience, that it's not guaranteed and there are no certain outcomes. Now I'm not going to sit here and write that the first time I saw a kiwi in the wild was as exciting or memorable as a whole herd of elephants but there was something special about this encounter because it was at night. Nope I wasn't going to get gored or eaten by a kiwi bird, but I was wholly not equipped to see them in the pitch black, flashlight or no flashlight.

Night photos by flashlight with an iPhone. This is about as good as it gets with the picture quality.

From the time we exited the van we were riding in (after passing through the "no access" airport gate; we apparently had permission...) it look us about 20 minutes to find our first kiwi and it literally looked like a fluffy ball. See the second photo above. While it's easy to believe that we could have walked right by this thing if it had stood still, that's really not true. First, there's no way our guide would have let us but second, it just didn't look like part of the landscape. It was clear it was not a plant.

Apparently we had spotted a three month old kiwi bird. Cool. Later on, we'd stumble across a larger bird, likely aged about 18 months. The second one was clearly bigger than the first but neither was full grown. It takes about three years for that to happen.

So what does a kiwi do when it's out in it's natural environment, you might ask? Well from the maybe an hour tops of checking these creatures out by flashlight I have two things. First, they poke around in the ground with their extremely long beaks. They are looking for insects and worms in the ground and really nothing more. They didn't seem skittish or concerned much about eight humans watching them because they don't really have any natural predators. So they did a lot of poking around while we watched dumbfounded about having found a bird looking for worms. 

I'm not downplaying this experience by saying this. It was awesome. But that's what they were doing.

Last red photo, I promise. Pretty much the same as the last one but further away so less grainy. Maybe.

Now if you get just a little bit too close, they will flee but they obviously don't fly away like most other birds that you get too close to. They don't even flap their wings, which have evolved to be so small as to be completely vestigial and actually non-visible. Instead, they run. This is the second thing. And let me tell you these animals are comedic runners. How nobody has ever made a successful cartoon about the kiwi bird running is beyond me. The roadrunner has nothing on these birds.

I don't know how to put this delicately so I won't. It's a like a butt with bird feet (no legs; just feet) and a spherical head with a beak at least 1.5 times as long as the head is round. Don't get me wrong, they can move. Fast. But the way they do it is hilarious. It's like a bobbing scamper. I've never seen any other creature move quite this way.

So does a trip about to the other side of the world and then traveling right to the north end to the south end (like right to the south) of a country to spend like an hour watching a bird eat and run sound like a worthwhile effort to you? If it doesn't I don't particularly care. It was worth it to us. There is literally nowhere else on Earth that you can check out a kiwi in the wild other than in New Zealand. And there's a better chance of doing it on Stewart Island than anywhere else in the country. It's also not like this is the only thing we did on our trip; it was just a component of the journey. Live dreams, even if they are small ones.

All told, we saw five kiwi in New Zealand: one in the National Kiwi Hatchery; one in the nocturnal part of Rainbow Springs Nature Park right next to the Hatchery; and three on Stewart Island. We placed a lot of faith in Stewart Island to pay off as the centerpiece of our New Zealand trip. It delivered, for the kiwis and everything else we hoped it would be.

Inevitably in a lot of these guided tours we take there is a "let's find out where everyone is from" moment at the beginning. What ensues is a country naming exercise by everyone in the group. We had one of these on our National Kiwi Hatchery visit and when our guide found out we were from Washington, D.C. she told us there is a kiwi in Washington. Who knew? It's apparently at the National Zoo. We won't be visiting. We no longer go to zoos and it won't be like Stewart Island anyway. And that's the whole point of actually being there.

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How We Did It
Rainbow Springs Nature Park is located in Rotorua about two miles north of downtown. Drive or take a taxi (for about $20 NZ) or take the number 1 bus (super easy!) and get off at Skyline near the Volcanic Hills Winery. There's a bus stop about across the street from Rainbow Springs. I would recommend the Kiwi Behind the Scenes tour when you get to the Park. The menu of pricing is confusing but we said we only wanted the Kiwi tour and somehow we got ours for $20 NZ each. I'm not sure we were supposed to get admission to the Park for this price but we were told we could walk around anyway.

Getting to Stewart Island is not the easiest trip in the world but we found it so worth it. Fly or drive or bus down to Invercargill airport (where you can get on the pilot-plus-eight-passengers three times daily Stewart Island Flights) or to Bluff (where you can take the Stewart Island Ferry) to make your way down there. We took the plane there and the ferry back (keeping it fresh...) and both worked well although the flight is faster and way more fun, although I'm not sure I'd want to be on that plane in windy weather. I would highly recommend a trip to Stewart Island.

All told, we spent three nights on the Island. We went kiwi spotting on two of those three nights: once with Ange from Beaks and Feathers and once with somebody else. Ange was recommended by our hotel and we got good words from everyone we met on the island when we mentioned we were going kiwi spotting with her. We (or should I say she) found kiwis pretty quickly and she clearly knows these animals both in general and the specific individuals we found that night. I'd highly recommend calling or emailing her as soon as you decide that seeking out kiwis on Stewart Island is for you. Click on Beaks and Feathers earlier in this paragraph for the website.

I will not mention the "somebody else" we went with on the second night we were on the Island. We spent about two hours for 20 seconds of kiwi time and as I mentioned that was based on spotting one on the drive home. We were disappointed but then again we may have just picked the wrong night. The tricky thing about nature tours is sometimes nature doesn't cooperate.

If you decide to spent a night or more on Stewart Island, I'd recommend looking and booking early. We started looking for hotels a little more than five months ahead of our visit and found extremely limited availability. And by that I mean some backpacking places, a couple of Air B&Bs and one hotel. We ended up price comparing between the hotel and the Air B&Bs and decided that there wasn't much difference in cost between the two. We ended staying at Church Hill Lodge which was expensive but way worth it for us. I'd recommend looking for a hotel as soon as you know you will be traveling to Stewart Island.

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