Two of New Zealand’s rarest birds have been picked for a new international conservation fund that has pledged $200 million to pull 100 species back from the edge of extinction.
The Department of Conservation confirmed on Thursday that the kākāpō and the Chatham Island tāiko are both on the list for the Phoenix Species Project, which launched earlier this week. The project is a joint effort by the conservation group Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund, with backing from the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, Age of Union and the Todd Graves Family Foundation. Its organisers describe it as the single largest philanthropic initiative aimed only at recovering critically endangered species.
The money is meant to reach the people already doing the work rather than sit with the funders. According to the launch announcement, the first group covers 100 species across 30 countries and includes mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, invertebrates and plants. Other species on the list include the night parrot in Australia, the golden-crowned sifaka in Madagascar and a green salamander found in a single gorge in North Carolina. More than 100 local and international partners are involved, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature species survival commission acting as the knowledge partner.
DOC deputy director general public affairs Sia Aston said the recognition of the two birds is an investment in the country’s nature more broadly.
“Support from the Phoenix Species Project will help make tangible gains for not just the kākāpō and tāiko, but the wider ecosystems they inhabit,” Aston said.
“Support for the individual species is an investment in nature; a species like kākāpō can only survive when the land, the forests and the wider ecosystem are thriving. Work to restore kākāpō lifts the health of every native species they live alongside.”
The two birds arrive at the fund from very different places. The kākāpō is among the most intensively managed birds anywhere in the world, with every individual named, microchipped and tracked. It has just come off its best season on record. DOC counted at least 256 eggs laid across 80 nests over the summer, of which at least 106 hatched, comfortably beating the previous record of 85 chicks set in 2019. Chicks are not added to the official population tally until they pass 150 days old and are properly independent, so the full effect of the season is still being counted through the back half of this year.
Even after that season, the adult population sits at roughly 235 birds. They live on three predator-free islands, one of them Whenua Hou near Stewart Island and two in Fiordland. The recovery programme, run by DOC with Ngāi Tahu, has been rebuilding the species since 1995, when the entire known population was 51 birds. Along the way the work has involved artificial incubation, hand rearing, foster mothers, supplementary feeding and, on occasion, veterinary care that would not look out of place in a human emergency department. Auckland Zoo vet Adam Naylor described giving one floppy purple chick what he called “some very tiny CPR” in an RNZ report from the season, and stitching a deep laceration on the neck of another with “pretty tiny sutures”. Both birds survived.
Ngāi Tahu kākāpō recovery group representative Tāne Davis welcomed the additional money.
“We know that the kākāpō has endeared itself to many people across the world so it is heartening to have this international initiative contributing to our efforts to restore and preserve the habitat, and strengthen the mauri (lifeforce) of this taonga (treasured) species,” Davis said.
The tāiko has none of that public profile and a good deal less margin. It is a seabird, one of the rarest in the world, and it breeds only in a stretch of rugged forest at the southern end of the main Chatham Island. DOC puts the total population at fewer than 200 birds and the number of known breeding pairs at about 15. The species was collected once in 1867, named the magenta petrel after the Italian ship whose crew took the specimen, and then not seen again for more than a century. Ornithologist David Crockett rediscovered it in 1978 by catching birds in flight under spotlights. The first burrow was not found until 1987.
Finding the birds remains most of the problem. Tāiko dig burrows up to five metres long in peaty soil under tall forest, scattered across roughly 2,500 hectares. Deep burrows block radio signals, so searchers have used light aircraft and trained dogs alongside ground work. Rats climb into unattended burrows and kill chicks while the parents are at sea. Cats take adults and fledglings on the forest floor, and feral pigs dig burrows up. DOC runs cat and rat control in the Tuku Nature Reserve every year, and the Chatham Island Taiko Trust built a predator-proof fence at Sweetwater in 2006, moving about 60 chicks inside it so they would imprint on the safe site and come back to it as adults. A sound system playing tāiko calls is used to lure prospecting birds in to inspect artificial burrows.
Aston said the country has more of these cases than almost anywhere.
“Nature is in trouble. Aotearoa has one of the highest rates of threatened species in the world – 4000 – and once they’re gone they’re gone forever,” she said.
Neither DOC nor the project has said how much of the $200 million will be spent in New Zealand, or over what period. The fund’s own material describes sustained multi-year support rather than one-off grants, and its organisers have been explicit that the goal is recovery rather than managed decline. That distinction matters more for the tāiko than the kākāpō. Kākāpō numbers move when a good mast year triggers breeding and the programme is ready for it. Tāiko numbers move when predator control holds over a long run of seasons in country that is difficult to reach and expensive to work in, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous, repetitive expense that is hardest to fund from year to year.
What do you think of overseas philanthropy paying for New Zealand conservation work? Have your say 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 🙂
Leave a Reply