A black cat has wandered into the middle of New Zealand’s most closely watched seabird colony, appearing on the live camera trained on a royal albatross nest at Pukekura, or Taiaroa Head, on the tip of the Otago Peninsula. The footage, captured about midday on Wednesday, shows the cat picking its way past a nesting albatross, which lifts its head and squawks a warning before the intruder carries on down the slope.
The Department of Conservation runs the camera, known as the Royal Cam, so that people around the world can watch a single toroa chick grow up each season. Toroa is the northern royal albatross, a bird found nesting on the mainland nowhere else on the planet. The camera exists to show the gentler side of that story. This week it showed the risk instead.
Rangers went out to look for the animal but could not find it. Jim Watts, the department’s principal ranger for biodiversity, heritage and visitors, said it was most likely a feral cat rather than someone’s pet gone wandering. Cats turning up at the reserve is not a rare event, he said, and the headland has never been predator free.
Thirteen cats have been trapped at Pukekura since the start of this year. Watts said the one on the camera had either only just arrived or was, in his words, trap shy and not interacting with the traps already in place. Either way, it slipped through a network of traps that is set specifically to keep animals like it away from the birds.
For the albatross chicks, at least, the timing works in their favour. At this point in the breeding season the young toroa already weigh more than 6.5 kilograms, big enough that a cat is not a serious threat to them. Watts put the current risk to the chicks as low. The greater danger is to the smaller residents of the headland, and there are plenty of them. Red-billed gulls, tītī, little blue penguins, Otago shags and native skinks all share the reserve, and all are far easier prey than a chick the size of a large goose.
That mix of species is exactly why the trapping never stops. Pukekura sits at the entrance to Otago Harbour and holds one of the richest concentrations of seabirds anywhere on the New Zealand mainland, with thousands of birds crowded onto a single windswept headland. The reserve cannot be ringed with a predator-proof fence the way island sanctuaries often are, because the sea washes right up to its edges. The only defence is trapping, done constantly, by hand.
Taiaroa Head runs one of the longest continuous predator control programmes in the country, with lines of traps checked on a routine that has carried on for decades. Cats, stoats, ferrets and rats are all targets. Introduced predators of that kind are the single biggest threat to newborn albatross chicks, which sit alone and exposed on open nests for long stretches while their parents are away at sea feeding. A chick left unguarded in the early weeks, before it has any size to it, is defenceless against a cat.
The stakes are unusually high because there is nowhere else quite like it. Pukekura is the only mainland breeding colony of northern royal albatross in the world. The rest of the species nests on remote islands in the Chatham group, well out in the Pacific and closed to casual visitors. The Otago Peninsula colony is small by comparison, a fraction of the global total, but it is the one place ordinary people can stand on a clifftop and watch these enormous birds ride the wind a few metres overhead. Around 200 toroa make landfall at the headland each year to court and to nest, and the colony has been slowly building, with recent seasons carrying more than 80 breeding pairs.
Those numbers are hard won. Northern royal albatross are slow breeders even by seabird standards. A pair raises a single chick, and they do not attempt it every year, with successful parents usually taking a season off to recover before trying again. Birds do not start breeding until they are around eight or nine years old, and they can live for decades, forming long partnerships that return to the same patch of ground season after season. Every chick that fledges represents years of effort from the birds and the people minding them, which is why a single cat on a camera is enough to put rangers on alert.
The camera that caught the cat is the same one that has turned the colony into a quiet global following. Each summer a chick is chosen as the star of the Royal Cam and watched by tens of thousands of people online as it hatches, is fed, tests its wings and finally launches itself off the headland for a life spent almost entirely at sea. It is a piece of gentle, slow television, and it doubles as a window onto conservation work that usually happens out of sight.
For now the search continues. Rangers will keep an eye on the cameras and reset their traps, and the cat, wherever it has gone, will find the headland a much harder place to stay than it might expect. The albatross, unbothered, went back to sitting on its nest.
Have you watched the Royal Cam, or visited the albatross colony at Taiaroa Head? Share your thoughts 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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