Ten little spotted kiwi, the smallest of the five kiwi species, have left Zealandia in Wellington and have been released into Cape Sanctuary on the Hawke’s Bay coast, in a translocation aimed at lifting the genetic diversity of a population that traces its entire mainland future back to five birds moved to Kapiti Island more than a century ago.
The ten kiwi pukupuku, as the species is known in te reo Maori, were packed into large wooden boxes lined with ferns and trucked north on Wednesday night, with known pairs kept together so they would not have to find each other again at the other end. They were released into Cape Sanctuary’s 130 hectare kiwi enclosure, where they will join birds that arrived a year earlier in the first transfer between the two sanctuaries.
Zealandia general manager of conservation and restoration Jo Ledington told RNZ that the population of little spotted kiwi inside the fenced Wellington sanctuary had grown from 40 founder birds in 2000 to roughly 250 today.
“These taonga have grown in numbers within the safety of our fence to the point where they can now bolster the populations of other sanctuaries,” Ledington said.
It is the second time Zealandia has sent kiwi pukupuku to Cape Sanctuary. Last year 15 birds made the same trip, and Cape Sanctuary general manager Rachel Ward said they had clearly settled in.
“Our team have enjoyed watching the new kiwi pukupuku settle in this past year. Their reflector bands make them very easy to identify on trail camera,” Ward said. “They have been seen mixing and mingling with the original population right across the 130ha enclosure.”
The little spotted kiwi was once the most common of the five kiwi species, ranging across both the North and South Islands. It is also the most vulnerable of the five to stoats, which can kill adult birds as well as chicks because of the kiwi’s small size. By the early twentieth century stoat predation had pushed it close to extinction. For nearly 50 years it was considered functionally extinct on the mainland.
The species owes its survival to a single act of foresight. In the early 1900s, five little spotted kiwi from the takiwa of Ngai Tahu were moved from Jackson Bay on the South Westland coast to Kapiti Island, which was already largely free of mammalian predators. That tiny founder group grew into the Kapiti population, and every little spotted kiwi alive in a sanctuary today is descended from those five birds.
That history has left the species with extremely low genetic diversity. The Department of Conservation lists the national population at about 2,100 birds, with a status of nationally increasing, but it warns that the narrow gene pool makes the population vulnerable to new diseases or environmental change. Moving birds between sanctuaries is one of the few tools available to widen that pool, by giving unrelated individuals a chance to meet and breed.
In June 2025 DNA testing confirmed that a kiwi found on the West Coast of the South Island was a little spotted kiwi, the first evidence in half a century that a relict mainland population had survived the stoat invasion. DOC is still investigating how many birds remain in that pocket of forest, and the discovery has raised the prospect that the genetic base of the species may turn out to be broader than the Kapiti founders alone.
Until that picture becomes clearer, the work of moving birds between fenced sanctuaries continues to do the heavy lifting. Successful translocations from Kapiti have established kiwi pukupuku at 11 other protected sites, including seven predator free offshore islands and four fenced mainland sanctuaries. Zealandia, which opened its 225 hectare valley to translocated species in 2000, has become one of the most productive of those sites, partly because of its size and partly because of decades of intensive monitoring.
Cape Sanctuary, on the headland between Cape Kidnappers and Ocean Beach south of Napier, is a different model. It is the country’s largest privately owned and funded mainland island, established in 2006 by the Lowe and Robertson families with a goal of rewriting the future of Hawke’s Bay’s declining birdlife. Its predator fence and predator control programmes have allowed translocations of takahe, tuatara, pateke, North Island brown kiwi and now little spotted kiwi to take hold on the peninsula.
Adult little spotted kiwi are small birds, weighing about a kilogram for males and a little more for females. They are independent very early in life. Chicks leave the nest burrow to feed themselves when they are just five to seven days old, although the male parent continues to return to the burrow with the chick at night for up to 60 days after hatching. That early independence is one of the reasons stoats have such a heavy impact on the species, since chicks are exposed in the open well before they can defend themselves.
The reflector bands fitted by Cape Sanctuary staff make the new arrivals trackable on trail cameras without the need to recapture them, and over the next breeding season rangers will watch for pairings between the newcomers and the resident birds. If the pattern from last year’s transfer holds, the ten new kiwi will spread out across the enclosure, find their own territories and start contributing chicks whose parents come from two different sanctuary lineages.
For a bird that was almost lost on the mainland within living memory, that is a quietly remarkable outcome, built on a hundred year chain of translocations that began with five birds in a wooden crate bound for Kapiti.
What do you think? Have you seen kiwi pukupuku at Zealandia or Cape Sanctuary, or do you support more translocations between fenced sanctuaries? Leave a comment 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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