About 465 kilometres south of Bluff, tucked into the northeast corner of the Auckland Islands and almost touching the bigger Enderby Island, sits a 60 hectare wedge of land called Ewing Island. It has never been touched by introduced mammals. It hosts what may be the most diverse community of burrowing seabirds in the northern part of the Auckland group. And it has barely been studied in detail since a Department of Conservation expedition went ashore in 1989.
Ewing Island is small enough that it does not appear on most New Zealand maps and quiet enough that its main scientific record is a single survey report. Despite that, its existence sits at the heart of a question the country is currently trying to answer with the largest island restoration project in its history. What would the rest of the Auckland Islands look like if it were like this?
Where it is
Ewing Island lies just inside the mouth of Port Ross, the sheltered harbour at the north end of the main Auckland Island. It is immediately south of Enderby Island, which is itself the most visited of the Auckland Islands group thanks to a permitted landing area for cruise expeditions. Ewing is a different proposition. It has no landing site, no track, no shelter and effectively no human presence.
The island is shaped roughly like a comma and rises to about 100 metres at its summit. Around 80 percent of its surface is covered by a closed-canopy forest of the tree daisy Olearia lyallii, the same species that dominates the much smaller Snares Islands further north. Beneath that canopy, the ground is honeycombed with seabird burrows.
What lives there
The Auckland Islands group is home to four endemic land birds that exist nowhere else. The Auckland Island shag, the Auckland Island teal, the Auckland Island rail and the Auckland Island snipe. All four have been driven from large parts of their original range by introduced predators. All four still occur on Ewing.
The two largest colonies of Auckland Island shags in the group sit at either end of East Bay, on Ewing’s eastern coast. The Auckland Island teal, a small flightless duck that took to the rocks and shoreline when its forest habitat became unsafe, persists here as it does on Adams Island, Enderby Island and Disappointment Island, all of which share Ewing’s lack of introduced predators. The Auckland Island snipe was once thought to live only on Ewing and Adams, and continues to use Ewing as one of its strongholds.
The seabird picture is broader. Forty species of seabird breed or visit somewhere in the Auckland Islands, and the lack of predators on Ewing makes it a likely centre of gravity for the burrowing species in particular. Diving petrels, white-headed petrels, mottled petrels and white-chinned petrels all use sites like this. Up to nine pre-breeding Southern royal albatrosses have been recorded near the island’s summit, where the open ridge gives them the wind they need to land.
Two species of parakeet make Ewing the second-most southerly home of any parrot in the world. Red-crowned and yellow-crowned parakeets coexist on the island and, unusually, hybridise. The proportion of hybrids documented on Ewing is higher than anywhere else in the country.
Why the predator-free status matters
The main Auckland Island, 46,000 hectares, is a different story. Pigs were released by sealers in the early 19th century and have been there ever since, rooting up tussock and ground-nesting birds. Feral cats, introduced from a sealing or whaling vessel at some point in the same era, prey on chicks and adult seabirds. House mice arrived more recently. Between them, those three species have removed the Auckland Island shag, teal, rail and snipe from huge parts of the main island where they would otherwise be common.
Ewing has none of those. It has never had a rat ashore. The water between Ewing and Enderby and between Ewing and the main island has been just wide enough, and the weather just rough enough, that no land mammal has crossed. The result is that the small island next door preserves, in miniature, the bird community that the much larger island has lost.
That contrast is what makes Ewing valuable. Researchers do not need to model what an unmodified Auckland Island ecosystem would look like. They can sail past Ewing and watch one.
The Maukahuka project
The Department of Conservation, alongside Ngāi Tahu, the New Zealand Nature Fund and the Island-Ocean Connection Challenge, is preparing the country’s largest island restoration project around exactly that question. Maukahuka, the Pest Free Auckland Island Project, aims to eradicate pigs, feral cats and mice from the main Auckland Island in an eight-year programme. The official cost estimate is $78 million.
The government has committed $54 million to the broader subantarctic restoration package, and around $11.5 million has been raised in private donations. In February 2025, a private donor pledged a further $100,000, and New Zealand joined the international Island-Ocean Connection Challenge as a contributing country. A small DOC team is currently based on the main Auckland Island doing preparatory work, but the full eradication operation has not yet begun, because the project is still waiting on the remainder of its funding.
If Maukahuka succeeds, the main Auckland Island would become the largest predator-free island in New Zealand by a wide margin, and the most ambitious single-island restoration ever attempted in the country. The bird communities that have survived on Ewing and on the other small predator-free islets in the group would, in time, have a chance to recolonise the much larger landmass next door.
The understudied bit
For an island this important, Ewing has been the subject of remarkably little focused research. The main scientific record is a Department of Conservation expedition report from November 1989, published in the Science and Research Internal Report series as SRIR93. The earliest photographs of the island’s vegetation come from a 1907 New Zealand subantarctic expedition led by zoologist Charles Chilton. The photograph at the top of this article, of the Olearia lyallii canopy on Ewing, is one of those.
Between those two reference points, there has been very little detailed survey work. The reasons are practical. Ewing has no permitted landing site for casual visitors, no shelter for researchers, and biosecurity protocols that are deliberately onerous because the value of the place is precisely its predator-free status. Putting a research team ashore for a fortnight is not a routine operation.
What it represents
Ewing Island is not famous. It is unlikely to ever become a destination, because making it one would defeat the point. What it is, instead, is a small, quiet, unrushed argument for the much larger project happening next door. Sixty hectares of New Zealand soil, untouched by introduced mammals, holding the bird community the country has spent the last two centuries removing from elsewhere. The case for finishing the Maukahuka project is partly that Ewing exists.
If you want to see where Ewing sits in the wider subantarctic conservation picture, Newswire’s Conservation Areas Explorer maps every DOC-managed reserve in the country, and the NZ Bird Map includes records of the Auckland Island shag, teal and snipe that depend on places like it.
Should the Maukahuka project be fully funded and pushed to completion this decade, or are there other conservation priorities the country should reach for first? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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