A night listening for kiwi

There has been some interesting recent comment in the press regarding the treatment of a young kiwi hatched at Miami Zoo where visitors could pay $25 for an opportunity to ‘pet’ and feed worms to the chick, all under bright fluorescent lighting.

Zoo staff have apologised and stopped the activity, but it was surprising that a modern-day zoo should be so ignorant or unconcerned about appropriate behaviour for the welfare of their animals.

Apart from the welcome ceremony on their release into the park, in 2017, when the audience had a chance to see and touch the kiwi under closely controlled conditions, I’m happy to report that the little spotted kiwi (kiwi pukupuku) in Shakespear Regional Park suffer no such indignities.

However, their continuing presence in the park is regularly monitored and I recently volunteered to be part of the team.

The first task for our survey organiser was to circulate an online poll for who would be available on the chosen nights. Ideally, we would choose a dark sky with little or no moon and a dry, not too windy night. Date chosen, about 16 of us arrived at the ranger’s office at 5.30pm for a briefing and allocation to one of the eight monitoring sites spread around the park and neighbouring Defence Land.

In place by 6pm, we settled down to listen and record. Male kiwi make short highpitched whistles, often repeating them 10 to 20 times in quick succession. The female calls are similar, but lower pitched. Our job was to record the sex, time, direction, and distance of all the calls we could hear over a two-hour period.

Some lucky observers had plenty of kiwi calling but on my two survey nights we only had four calls per night and some of them were probably of one bird moving around a bit.

It wasn’t completely quiet though. While there are not many kiwi in the park, there do seem to be lots of ruru, which were noisily calling for at least the first hour. They have three commonly heard calls rendered as ‘morepork’, ‘creee’ and a yelping ‘EE-yo’. Only the ‘creee’ call is anything like a kiwi and they usually only repeat a few times so there was little chance of confusion.

Pukeko, ducks, gulls and spur-winged plover also call at night, but they sound completely different from kiwi.

Our first night’s survey was cut short by noise, but it was from a military helicopter on a night-time exercise which unfortunately took place immediately above a couple of the listening sites. Kiwi calls are very loud and can be heard at distances over 400 metres, but they cannot compete with helicopters.

And that’s as close as any of us got to the kiwi – no handling, feeding or lights - apart from the helicopter’s searchlight!