WELLINGTON: New Zea­land’s treasured kiwi birds are shuffling around Wellington’s verdant hills for the first time in a century, after a drive to eliminate invasive predators from the capital’s surrounds.

Visitors to New Zealand a millennium ago would have encountered a bona fide “birdtopia” — islands teeming with feathered creatures fluttering through life unaware that mammalian predators existed.

The arrival of Polynesian voyagers in the 1200s and Europeans a few hundred years later changed all that.

Rats picked off snipe-rails and petrels, mice chewed through all the seeds and berries they could find, leaving little for native birds to peck on.

Possums — introduced for fur — stripped trees bare. Rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, devouring mea­dows and paddocks alike. Heaping disaster upon disaster, stoats were introduced to kill the rabbits but instead killed wrens, thrushes, owls and quails.

The population of native flightless birds like the kakapo and kiwi plummeted.

The Department of Con­servation estimates there are only around 70,000 wild kiwi left in New Zealand. Despite the bird being a beloved national symbol, few New Zealanders have seen one in the wild.

However, numbers are rising again thanks to more than 90 community initiatives working nationwide to protect them. One such group is The Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust backed by millions of dollars from government grants and private donations. “Ever since people came to New Zealand, we have had a special connection to the kiwi,” founder and project leader Paul Ward said.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2023