A bird that was down to five individuals in 1980 has won New Zealand’s best known popularity contest. The black robin was crowned Bird of the Year 2026 on Monday morning, taking the title for the first time after several near misses in earlier years.
Forest & Bird, which has run the election since 2005, announced the result live on TVNZ’s Breakfast at 7.55am. The kākāpō finished second. The New Zealand falcon, which won last year, came third, and the kea and takahē filled out the top five. The black robin campaigned under its Māori name, karure, which is the name Forest & Bird used throughout the election.
The bigger surprise was who voted. Forest & Bird’s Rebecca Hatch told RNZ the election drew 98,920 validated votes, the largest homegrown turnout the competition has recorded.
“People have really turned out for nature in record numbers this year – participation has soared,” Hatch said. “We’ve had 98,920 validated votes cast this year … 88 percent of those have come from right here in Aotearoa New Zealand.”
That is close to the exact reverse of the 2023 contest, when 85 percent of votes came from overseas. That year the competition was rebadged Bird of the Century for Forest & Bird’s centenary and pulled in more than 350,000 votes, nearly 300,000 of them for the Australasian crested grebe after US talk show host John Oliver ran an international campaign on its behalf, complete with billboards in Paris, London, Tokyo and Mumbai. Last year’s election attracted more than 75,000 voters across 123 countries. This year’s result suggests the competition has settled back into something closer to a domestic event, with a bigger local audience than it had before Oliver found it.
Voting opened at 9am on 4 September with 74 native birds standing across six parties and closed at 5pm on Sunday. Each voter got up to five votes, which Forest & Bird noted in its opening-day release was “four more than you get in that other election”, and every vote also counted towards the bird’s party. The lead changed hands during the fortnight. The kākāpō topped the first published leaderboard on 11 September, with the black robin second, and the two had swapped places by 18 September.
The winner is one of the most remarkable recovery stories in world conservation. Black robins live in the lowland coastal forest of the Chatham Islands, about 800km east of the South Island, and nowhere else. By 1980 there were five left, only one of them a breeding female. Every black robin alive today descends from that bird, known as Old Blue, and her mate Old Yellow. The population is now about 350.
Winning a bird election does not change the species’ status, and Hatch was careful to say the black robin remains critically endangered. The problem now is not predators so much as real estate.
“While the birds live on predator-free islands, those small islands are nearly at capacity in terms of good black robin territory,” she said. “For the population to keep growing, a third population needs to be established on another island.”
Department of Conservation monitoring published on 8 September backs that up. On Hokorereoro, also called Rangatira or South East Island, the population grew from an estimated 253 birds in 2011/12 to around 340 at the start of the 2025/26 breeding season. But new modelling found growth is slowing as the island approaches its carrying capacity, with fewer juveniles produced per breeding female than in earlier years. DOC said future increases “will possibly be constrained by available habitat and resources”, and that the findings highlight the importance of establishing additional populations on other islands.
The second population, on Maung’ Rē or Mangere Island, was in trouble a few years ago because it had far more males than females. In 2022 DOC moved ten female robins across from Rangatira. Five breeding seasons later Mangere held 39 adult birds, 21 males and 18 females, and fledged eight chicks last season. More than half the birds on the island now have Rangatira ancestry, and research led by Massey University’s Dr Liz Parlato and the University of Canterbury’s Dr Tammy Steeves found those birds survive and breed better than birds with Mangere ancestry alone.
Replying to a reader question on its own blog on 14 September, the Department of Conservation said it was “actively scoping new sites with our partners on the inhabited islands”, and that suitable habitat would need to be protected by predator-proof fences. That is a much harder job than managing an uninhabited island, because the inhabited Chathams still carry feral cats, and Hatch said cats were one of the biggest predators of black robins.
Work on that has already started. The Chatham Islands Landscape Restoration Trust is running a project to remove feral cats from Pitt Island, the second largest island in the group, under the Predator Free Chathams banner. In August the trust was awarded $1,169,900 from the DOC Community Fund, the single biggest grant in that round, for work expected to benefit at least 14 threatened bird species. Pitt Island has about 40 residents and community support for the eradication has been unanimous.
Forest & Bird uses the election to make a wider point about how much trouble native birds are in, and the black robin is a useful example in both directions. It shows what intensive management can achieve, and it shows how narrow the margin still is. In a release during the campaign, Hatch said “more than 80% of our native birds are in some or serious trouble”.
Past winners have tended to be either charismatic or endangered, and often both. The kea, kererū, kōkako, fairy tern, rock wren, yellow-eyed penguin and long-tailed bat, which is not a bird at all, have all taken the title. This is the first time the winner has been a species that was, within living memory, five birds away from disappearing entirely.
Did you vote in this year’s Bird of the Year, and did your bird get up? 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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