New Zealand fights to save its national bird

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.