Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 102
Actively
supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds
The Takahe is a flightless rail, one of our rarest birds and
very endearing. They are a big lumbering animal (amongst our NZ native birds) and,
having lived apart from mammals like most of our rarest birds, they appear tame
and approachable. This led to their dramatic decline especially after the
arrival of Europeans and they were thought to be extinct, until rediscovered in
South Island alpine tussocklands
in 1948. Even after their
rediscovery however they were poorly managed until the 1980’s when they began
to be placed in pest controlled areas like Kapiti Island. There are now around
260 birds. This is an increase of around 60 in 15 years so this is a long
term rehabilitation programme with a viable population thought to be around 500
birds.
Ideal takahe country is open grasslands.
And this is the reason they are doing well on Mana Island just south of here,
where a couple of years ago we encounted 11 youngsters. (Four were recently shot in a pukeko culling fiasco involving duckshooting volunteers on Motutapu Island in the Hauraki Gulf). But Kapiti is a reforested island and not ideal takahe
country, so a minimum number are kept here. These are three older birds, that live on the
flats around this DoC station.
It is still hoped they will breed so they
are fed a couple of times a week to keep them in breeding condition through the
spring. We only spotted one over
the first few days; hanging around the Red House and cawing for a feed, and
this raised our nesting hopes, but then all three came out one evening, so it’s
a little up in the air as to whether they’ll produce youngsters this year. It’s still
early in the season however so let's keep our fingers crossed.
We have put together a video clip of these
birds coming out into the open. It gives a good idea of how these birds move
and then their distinctive harsh cawing. Both kiwi and weka can match this
grating sound though you’ll
only hear kiwi at night and though you'll see weka through the day they are vocal mostly around dusk and dawn. We were
especially fortunate however in capturing one takahe on the run and here you
can see a rollicking movement that traces them right back to their dinosaur
ancestors.
Track we were listening to while posting this we are still knee deep in birdland with Charlie Parker at Carnegie Hall...
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