Source: Radio New Zealand
North Island brown kiwi are hatched and reared at the facility. National Kiwi Hatchery Aotearoa
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A little bit of eggshell still clings to the slick feathers of the newly hatched brown kiwi chick.
Only a few hours old, it is already able to crouch on its small strong legs in the little heated chamber that will be home for its first two days of life at the National Kiwi Hatchery. Its round belly is full of the yolk that was part of the large egg – food to sustain it for the first few days while it learns to forage for bugs.
A safe start in life
Kiwi chicks are precocious, explains National Kiwi Hatchery manager Emma Bean. This means that, in contrast to human babies who need a lot of post-natal care, kiwi chicks tend to leave the nest, and warmth of their dad’s brood patch, within a week.
Emma says, “Whilst everything’s instinctive, they’ve essentially got chopsticks on their face that they need to just hone their skills, so they know what they’ve got to do… and they just need dad for a couple of days to keep them warm while their feathers dry off and fluff up and they learn to thermoregulate.”
In the hatchery this transition is facilitated by hutches with an angled heating plate, and food sources for the new chicks to search for.
Initially the chicks lose weight, as they use up that yolk. Once they have regained their hatch weight, they are microchipped and then graduate to crèche – either at a project site or at the onsite purpose-built facility at the hatchery.
At this stage, it’s a well-oiled machine.
Started in a shed at Rainbow Springs in 1995, the National Kiwi Hatchery celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, having moved to its new location and facilities in 2023. In total over 2600 North Island brown kiwi chicks have been hatched so far.
The hatchery is part of Operation Nest Egg, a conservation programme that takes kiwi eggs from the wild, then hatches and raises them during their vulnerable first few months of life, before returning them to where they came from.
The goal is to grow the chicks to a ‘stoat-proof’ weight of 1kg. Without this, or effective predator control, the survival rate of a kiwi chick in the wild is about 5 percent. Released at match-ready weight their chances increase to 65 percent.
Combining conservation and eco-tourism
A bus load of visitors pulls up and starts to unload in front of one of the small buildings that make up the hatchery, here for an hour-long tour. Inside they are greeted with information about the different kiwi species, the impact of predators, and facts about kiwi mating, eggs and embryo development.
A key attraction is the nocturnal house – where night and day have been switched and behind a pane of glass a pair of kiwi are up and about looking for food amongst the rotten logs and leaf litter that has been provided for them.
But it is the sight of the chicks that is often elicits the most emotion, says tour guide Rebeca Bothamley, “I’ve noticed when they see a chick or an egg they get really excited … I’ve had a few people cry when they’ve seen a couple chicks.”
The one-hour tour costs $75 per adult with a behind-the-scenes exclusive tour priced at $1250 for up to four people. If visitors want to sponsor a chick and name it, that’s $2787 – the estimate of how much it costs to hatch and rear a kiwi here.
Only a fraction of this is charged to the conservation projects, says Emma. As a Ngāi Tahu owned charitable trust, the idea is that conservation and eco-tourism go hand-in-hand, with the visitors’ contributions supporting the cost of the mahi.
‘The cherry on the top’
While the ultimate conservation goal is a future where Operation Nest Egg is no longer needed, that is not likely any time soon, says Emma. Plus, she sees the advocacy and education aspect of the hatchery as an important part of their work.
It is not the only captive kiwi rearing facility, with others spread across both the North and South Islands, some working with different kiwi species.
The National Kiwi Hatchery collaborates with about 15 different conservation projects around the North Island that monitor males to find nests and eggs, and control predators in their project areas to help kiwi survival after release.
Across their three decades they’ve learned a lot, says both Emma and long-time kiwi keeper Carole Dean. When Carole started in 1998 there was a lot of initial trial-and-error and learning on the job.
“We just had so much passion to learn and get better and obviously share that knowledge as we learnt it with other facilities.”
Today they know more about the development, physiology and embryology of kiwi, which enables them to make better decisions about things like when and how to assist a hatching chick. Plus, they have learned a lot about the husbandry, Carole says, in their onsite kiwi creche.
“What we do now compared to how we did it 15 or even 10 years ago, we’ve come in leaps and bounds with looking after our enclosures and keeping it really healthy up here to maintain healthy birds.”
When she started, there used to be a bit of sadness when a kiwi graduated back out to the forest because “they were such important little creatures to us” but these days, Carole celebrates when they are ready, “Get them out …they need to go home and be a real kiwi in a real forest.”
The ‘cherry on the top’ for her is the fact that chicks that have hatched with them are reproducing, and Carole has since been looking after second and third generations of hatchery chicks.
“That’s really cool … job done”.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand