The kiwi is New Zealand's most iconic bird. Round and fuzzy, the bird is flightless and has a long beak that makes it adorable or awkward, depending on who you ask. New Zealanders are even known as "kiwis."
Still, despite the kiwi's fame, many people in New Zealand have never seen one. Kiwi have become increasingly rare.
Over the last century, New Zealand's unique birds have disappeared at a rapid pace. Sixty-two native bird species are now extinct and more than 80 percent of the remaining birds that breed in New Zealand are at risk (New Zealand is also known by its Māori name, Aotearoa).
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The biggest cause of their decline is invasive species, animals brought to New Zealand by humans. Some, like rats, arrived as accidental hitchhikers on ships. Others were released on purpose, either for food or fur, or simply to remind European settlers of home.
Without their natural predators to keep them in check, invasive species populations exploded in New Zealand. Native birds became their unfortunate prey.
Now, the country has started one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the world to save its threatened species. New Zealand has committed to eliminating invasive predators by 2050, a project known as Predator Free 2050. In all, it will mean killing tens of millions of non-native animals.
There are small pockets where New Zealand has already succeeded. On some offshore islands, invasive predators have been eradicated using traps and poison. They've become strongholds for rare birds that have nowhere else to survive. Across the country, volunteers and community groups are pitching in, ridding backyards and parks of the invaders one animal at a time.
Still, eradicating invasive predators from all of New Zealand is equivalent to an environmental moonshot – it would be the largest invasive species removal in the world. To reach that goal, conservation experts say new technology would be needed, as well as widespread public buy-in, especially to prevent the animals from simply reinvading. Still, New Zealand's conservation community says there's no other choice.
"If we don't take action, we are killing our native wildlife by omission," says Brent Beaven, manager of the Predator Free 2050 program at New Zealand's Department of Conservation. "Choosing not to take an action is an action. So either way, something is going to die based on the decisions we make."
Searching for rare kiwi
In a dense jungle in Whakatāne, New Zealand, a conservation team spots the first signs of kiwi: a cluster of small puncture holes in the dirt. It's where a kiwi has been probing for worms and insects.
"They'll stick their beak in and sometimes swirl it around a little," says Keturah Bouchard, who volunteers with the Whakatāne Kiwi Trust, a group that protects kiwi. "They've got these wonderful whiskers so they can sense the movement underground."
The team is searching for a five-week-old chick that was just released into the wild. Kiwi are nocturnal, hidden in underground burrows during the day, so Bouchard is scanning for a signal from the radio transmitter on the kiwi's leg. The group has been working to save kiwi since 1999, when a small group was discovered after thought to have disappeared from the area.
Among the trees and giant ferns, the team finally locates the chick. They pull out a brown ball of fluff with large feet sticking out, which starts chirping insistently.
"It's got a lot of attitude, and it's like – once you see them, you just love them," says Claire Travers, kiwi operations manager for the Whakatāne Kiwi Trust. "It never gets old."
The team does a health check on the chick, noticing she's lost some weight. Still, the fact she's alive at all is an achievement. Only five percent of kiwi chicks survive here, and those poor odds are mostly due to one invasive species: the stoat.
Stoats are related to ferrets and weasels and were brought to New Zealand in the late 1800s to control rabbits, which were also introduced by European settlers. Stoats are only about a foot long, but when it comes to New Zealand's birds, they're basically the Terminator.
"They are very smart — very, very smart," Travers says. "A stoat can climb very well, get through very small holes, will take on a predator that's much much bigger than it is." Stoats are known to be fearless, killing even when they're not hungry.
Kiwi chicks are especially vulnerable. They evolved to be flightless over millions of years because New Zealand had no mammals, aside from bats and sea lions. The main predators for many native birds were raptors, so birds tend to freeze when threatened so they're not seen from the air and rely on camouflage to hide.
That strategy is futile against stoats. With their powerful noses, stoats stalk kiwi nests, snatching the chicks as soon as they emerge.
"You find a leg with a little transmitter attached where a stoat has dragged it and eaten the rest of it," Travers says. "That's the heart break for me."
Catching hardcore stoats
To give kiwi a fighting chance, the conservation team is working to clear the area of stoats. Around 800 traps have been set up in the nature reserves around Whakatāne. The traps are made of a wire mesh cage with a powerful bar that's designed to kill instantly and have been tested by New Zealand's animal welfare standards. The team captures several dozen stoats in a good year.
"Each stoat is a little victory," says Gaye Payze, predator control coordinator for the Whakatāne Kiwi Trust. "It's a huge victory really because they are such hard animals to capture. It's easy when you start, but when you get to this stage in the project, we've been going for over 20 years, you're really down to the hardcore."
Hardcore stoats are the ones that have learned to avoid traps and they teach their young to avoid traps, too. It's why eradicating them completely is a daunting task. For now, the team hopes suppressing their numbers will be enough to keep kiwi from disappearing.
"We just have to keep going," Travers says. "If we weren't doing what we're doing as a nation for kiwi, within the next two generations they'd be gone."
Trapping projects like this one are happening across New Zealand, as the country embarks on its goal of eliminating invasive predators by 2050. That includes stoats, ferrets, weasels, brushtail possums and three species of rats. It's estimated 25 million birds are killed each year in New Zealand by those predators, including rats, which eat baby birds in their nests. The cost is estimated to be more than $100 million per year.
In Whakatāne, the work is also done by the first indigenous-led project, Korehāhā Whakahau, which is run by the Māori tribe Ngāti Awa. Their goal is to eradicate brushtail possums, an Australian marsupial that was released in New Zealand for the fur trade.
Possums devour native tree foliage, harming the food supply and habitat for birds. The team uses traps that send alerts to their phones, even thermal heat-sensing drones to find where possums are hiding. Suppressing possums has helped native bird life return, they've found.
"It used to be all you hear is the wind, but now, all you hear is birds everywhere," says Thomas Monaghan, team leader at Korehāhā Whakahau. "You just look out and you go: this is how it should be, this is how it should look."
New Zealand's environmental moonshot
Much of New Zealand's work to eradicate invasive species is being done by the government, which conducts trapping and aerial poison drops across large areas. But around the country, community groups and volunteers are joining in, either clearing their backyards or green spaces in and around cities. So far, predators have been eliminated on more than 100 islands and in wildlife sanctuaries that are surrounded by fences.
Still, eradicating millions of invasive animals on mainland New Zealand is another question. The country is more than 100,000 square miles.
"It's bold and ambitious, but I believe that's what we need to do in the world," says Beaven of New Zealand's Department of Conservation. "That's what's going to stretch us and create the change we need if we want nature around us."
Some conservation experts say, with its limited resources, New Zealand should be focusing on prioritizing biodiversity hotspots and building more fenced ecosanctuaries, instead of a country-wide approach.
"The perfect has become the enemy of the good, I think," says John Innes, a conservation expert at the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science, a national research lab. "I think the research has been fabulous, and some of the site-based approaches have been valuable. But the large scale of expenditure on something that is so unrealistic, I think, has come at a huge opportunity cost to other possible biodiversity approaches."
Questions of conservation ethics
New Zealand's goal also comes with high body count, raising the question of whether saving animals from extinction justifies killing so many others.
"There's this standard, mainstream animal ethics view which is: maybe we shouldn't ever harm cute, sentient, charismatic mammals," says Emily Parke, who works on the ethics of conservation at the University of Auckland and who convened a bioethics report on the topic.
Parke says there hasn't been strong pushback against eradicating predators in New Zealand, given the high awareness in the country about the threats facing native birds. Birds are even printed on New Zealand's money.
"Here, there's a focus on animal welfare in a lot of these discussions: how do we kill predators in a way that respects that they're living things?" she says. "Even if we all agree with the aim of a predator-free New Zealand, we might disagree about ways of achieving that aim."
The SPCA in New Zealand, an animal rights group, supports developing non-lethal methods of controlling invasive species, but still acknowledges that it may be necessary to control invasive species. There's also a debate about whether controlling feral cats should be part of New Zealand's efforts, given the toll that cats also take on native birds.
For some conservationists, there isn't a question about whether humans should intervene. The problem stems from human invention – bringing animals to New Zealand from thousands of miles away – and humans now have a responsibility to fix it.
"Something's going to die regardless," Beaven says. "I would rather preserve that global biodiversity and preserve these unique species that don't occur anywhere."
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