Rare Bird

New Zealand’s plan to save the iconic oddball kiwi from extinction—one fluffy chick at a time

- Stephanie Verge

SHE SHOULD HAVE found the hatchling by now. With her right arm deep in the burrow, Bridget Palmer has been groping around for a few minutes already. Her colleague, John Black, hiking boots dug into the hillside to keep from sliding in the mud, searched the burrow, too, but came up empty. The pair, volunteers with the Whakata – ne Kiwi Trust on New Zealand’s North Island, are two of only six people in the organization trained to handle live kiwi. But as Palmer is about to discover on this overcast morning in November 2018, there’s nothing for them here.

A ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC), 44-yearold Palmer pulls clumps of humid leaves out of the nest, located in O – hope Scenic Reserve. She’s looking for eggshells, a sign that a bird has hatched. Soon, she finds a beak, feathers. Yet there’s no cause for joy—Palmer is cradling a chick’s corpse, flattened in a wad of leaves.

“Hatch death,” she murmurs.

Palmer buries the chick. After incubating for about 85 days, it became exhausted, then stuck, trying to chip its way out of the egg, which can take three to five days. The chick suffocated before being able to break free. Its sibling, Kikorangi, born two weeks earlier, and their father, equipped with a transmitter and given the name Pea, have fled the nest, probably due to the smell. Still, Palmer hopes Pea will use this burrow again. (It’s the female North Island brown kiwi that lays the eggs, but it’s the male that sits on them for three months.) At half a metre deep under sturdy tree roots, it’s a good nest.